I keep coming back to the same point. She built everything she has on her own because she couldn’t stand the idea of owing any of it to her name.
She came from the same world I did and made something entirely different out of herself. That’s the thing about her I can’t get over. She chose differently, and somehow she made it stick. I never did.
Then I showed up on her operating table and dragged her back into the center of everything she spent a decade trying to escape. Now she’s somewhere in this compound answering for it while I sit in a concrete room.
Alexei comes in without knocking. He plants his feet and looks at me like he hasn’t decided how to handle me yet, which is directly and without blinking.
“Do you know what happens to men who touch my family without permission?” he asks.
“I didn’t come here for permission.” I hold his gaze as I add, “Your cousin’s safety matters more to me than my pride, my position, or my life. If this were about leverage, you wouldn’t have seen me coming.”
Something shifts across his face, but he locks it down before I can read it. He stays where he is. I let the silence sit. AlexeiKozlov has a reputation as the more ruthless of the brothers, and I’m not dumb enough to make this worse.
He looks at me for a long, unblinking moment, then uncrosses his arms and walks out without another word.
It’s not a verdict. There’s a difference between a man who’s decided and a man who’s still watching. Alexei is still watching. That’s the best I can expect tonight, and I’ll take it.
My eyes go to the camera in the corner, then to the tray outside the door holding my phone, my watch, and my mother’s ring. I’ve worn that ring on my right hand for fourteen years, and never explained it to anyone except Ruslan. He found me in a stairwell, at sixteen, with blood on my knuckles the night I saw the order in my father’s private files. He sat down beside me and stayed there until I was ready to stand.
It was the closest thing to grace I’d ever been offered.
Until Polina.
Dmitri walks in last, alone.
He closes the door behind him and stands with his back against it. No folder. No Boris. Just him.
“Before you decide anything,” I begin, but he cuts me off with a raised hand.
“What I need to know is why I should trust a single word out of your mouth.”
I pinch my brows together. “I just gave you six hours of verified intelligence.”
“That benefits you. A man who turns on his own family turns on everyone eventually. Why would your loyalty to my cousin be any different from your loyalty to your father?”
“It isn’t even close to the same thing,” I say. “What I gave you today wasn’t a defection from something I believed in. I stopped believing in my family a long time before I walked through your gates.”
“That’s not an explanation. That’s a position statement.” He steps to the table and plants both palms on the surface. “Why?”
I don’t answer right away. This is the most private thing I own, and I’ve never given it to anyone. Men like me don’t trade in this kind of truth. We trade in leverage. In fear. Handing Dmitri Kozlov the one wound that never healed isn’t strategy.
It isn’t even smart.
I look at him and think about what it means that I walked through his gates at all. Not the intelligence. Not the operational value. Not what it cost me to turn on my father’s name. Just the fact of it.
I made that choice because of one person.
If I want him to believe that, I have to give him something that proves it—something I can’t take back once it leaves this room.
“My father killed my mother when I was sixteen,” I say at last, dropping my eyes to the floor. “He suspected her of an affair with one of his lieutenants and had her killed over it. The affair never happened. He killed her over a suspicion he never bothered to confirm, then stood me in front of her coffin and told me to hold myself together. I did what he told me. ThenI kept being useful to him for fourteen years, because staying useful was the only currency my family recognized.”
When I look up again, Dmitri has straightened and taken a step back from the table. He looks at me with neither sympathy nor contempt, only with the cold calculation of a man checking whether the last piece fits.
“If you’ve lied about anything,” Dmitri says quietly, “I’ll kill you. Slowly. If you’ve told the truth?—”
The pause carries more weight than the interrogation. “We’ll discuss what comes next.”
