I hitDelete.
The confirmation screen appears, asking if I'm sure. My thumb hovers over the button, and I think about all the reasons this is a mistake. All the ways this decision could come back to haunt me. All the complications I'm creating by choosing to do this alone.
But I also think about the fierce independence I've fought so hard to maintain, the life I've built entirely on my own terms, the strength it took to survive everything that's tried to break me.
I pressConfirm.
Nikolai's number disappears from my phone, erased as if it never existed. The decision settles in my bones with grim finality, heavy and irreversible. I won't tell him. Won't reach out. Won't give him the chance to reject this child or try to control how I raise them.
I'll do this alone, the way I've done everything else.
18
NIKOLAI
The courier arrives during the weekly meeting with my captains, his knock on The Golden Lion's private entrance interrupting the report on the docks. I watch through the security monitor as the man shifts his weight from foot to foot, a plain manila envelope clutched in his hands. Something about his nervous energy sets off alarms in my brain, screaming that whatever's in that package will change everything.
"We're done here," I say with finality. The captains exchange glances but know better than to question me. They file out with practiced efficiency, their footsteps echoing against the hardwood floors.
Cyril lingers by the door, his pale blond hair catching the afternoon light streaming through the windows. His gray eyes track the courier's approach with the same clinical assessment he uses for everything, cataloging threats and calculating responses before most people even recognize danger exists.
The envelope feels heavier than it should when I take it from the courier's trembling hands. I dismiss him with a curt nod and a hundred-dollar bill that makes his eyes widen with gratitude he's too smart to voice. The moment the door closes behind him, I tear open the seal.
Photographs spill across the polished mahogany table like accusations.
My breath stops in my chest.
The first image shows Aria sleeping in our makeshift shelter, her dark hair fanned across the sand, one hand resting on my bare chest. The angle is intimate, invasive, capturing the way her body curves against mine. My face in the photograph is relaxed in a way I haven't allowed myself to be in twenty years, the hard edges softened by sleep and something that looks dangerously close to contentment.
"Blyat," Cyril breathes, moving closer to examine the images. His expression remains neutral, but I hear the tension in that single curse.
I force myself to look at the next photograph. The two of us in the shallows, water streaming down our bodies, her back pressed against my chest. My mouth is at her throat, and even in the grainy quality of the telephoto lens, the hunger in my posture is unmistakable. My hands span her waist with possessive certainty, and the way she's arching into my touch makes heat flood through my veins despite the ice spreading through my chest.
Someone was there. Someone watched us.
The realization hits like a physical blow, stealing what little air remains in my lungs. We weren't alone. Every moment I thoughtbelonged only to us, every touch and whispered promise, was being documented by a stranger with a camera and enough intelligence to recognize opportunity when it presented itself.
My hands shake slightly as I spread the remaining photographs across the table. There are at least a dozen, each one more damning than the last. The two of us weaving palm fronds, my fingers threading through her wet hair as she laughs at something I said. The expression on my face in that moment makes me look like a stranger, open and unguarded, the Pakhan’s mask completely absent. Another shows us sitting by the fire, her head on my shoulder, my arm wrapped around her waist with a tenderness that contradicts everything my reputation is built on.
"How many people have seen these?" Cyril's voice is carefully neutral, but I hear the calculation beneath. He's already thinking three steps ahead, cataloging damage and planning countermeasures.
"I don't know." The admission tastes like failure. "Yet."
The last photograph makes my vision blur at the edges. Aria and I are tangled together on the sand, our bodies intertwined in a way that leaves nothing to imagination. Her face is buried against my neck, and my expression is devastated with tenderness, with something that looks too much like love for a man who's spent two decades ensuring he needs no one.
The Pakhan doesn't show weakness. The Pakhan doesn't fall in love. The Pakhan certainly doesn't let himself be photographed looking like a man drooling like an idiot after a woman.
Yet here's the evidence, captured in brutal clarity.
My mind catalogs the implications with the cold efficiency that's kept me alive in a world where sentiment gets you killed. These photographs in the wrong hands could undermine my authority, make me look soft to rivals already circling like sharks scenting blood in the water. Matvey Ignatyev would use them to argue that I've lost my edge. That attachment has made me weak and the great Nikolai Alekseev has been reduced to a lovesick fool by a caterer with dark eyes and a stubborn streak.
Worse, they put Aria in danger, mark her as the woman who made the untouchable Pakhan human. Every enemy I've made in twenty years will see her as leverage, a weakness to exploit, a target to eliminate. The thought makes rage build in my chest like a storm gathering strength, cold and lethal and absolutely focused.
"We need to find out who took these," I say, my voice dropping to the tone that makes grown men flinch. "And we need to know who else has copies."
Cyril nods once, sharp and final. "I'll start with the yacht's manifest. Anyone who might have survived the storm and made it to that island."
"It has to be someone with resources." I tap the photograph showing Aria laughing, the quality too good for a disposable camera. "Professional equipment. Telephoto lens. Someone who knew what they were looking at when they saw me."
