Watching her now, I’m not sure I believed it even then.
Hannah has her mother’s mouth. The same way of talking with her whole face, every thought visible before it becomes a word.
But her eyes are unmistakably mine.
I’ve found myself grateful for that, in a way that borders on selfish. That small proof I existed in their lives even when I wasn’t there.
I think about what I wanted this to be, once. Not the empire, not the power—I mean this. What it meant to sit at a table with people who were yours. I spent years being taught that family meant theBratva—loyalty sworn in blood, preserved through violence. And there was a time that felt like enough.
It doesn’t anymore.
It hasn’t for a long fucking time.
Lauren laughs quietly at something Hannah says, and the sound travels across the room and does something to my chest I don’t have a name for. I want to be sitting at that table. I want Hannah to look up and see a father, not a stranger. I want Lauren to laugh like that because of something I said, not despite everything I’ve done.
But she’s right. She was right in the cabin kitchen, and she’s right now, even if she hasn’t said it since. Danger doesn’t stay behind when I leave. It follows. It has always fucking followed. And if staying near them makes them a target, then the most protective thing I can do is finish this—take Aslanov down,remove the threat permanently, and give them back the life they built without me.
Even if I’m not in it.
I stand on the staircase a moment longer, watching them.
Governing an empire had never felt like this. Brutal decisions made in cold rooms, violence as currency, survival as the only metric that mattered. I told myself it was necessary. For years, I believed it.
Blyad.
Maybe this is what reckoning looks like. Not a bullet. Not a blade. Just this: standing at the edge of a life that should have been mine, watching it happen without me, understanding with complete clarity that I have no one to blame for the distance but myself.
A death by a thousand small mercies.
Hannah holds up her apple slice, showing it to Lauren like it’s a discovery.
I turn and head back upstairs.
Chapter Twelve
Lauren
I kiss Hannah goodnight and ease her bedroom door shut behind me.
The penthouse feels too small suddenly, the silence pressing in from all sides. I slip out onto the balcony and let the night air hit me—Chicago wind, colder than Atlanta, carrying the smell of the lake somewhere in the distance. I close my eyes and breathe.
The door slides open behind me.
I don’t have to turn around to know it’s him. I’ve always been able to sense him in a room. Four years didn’t change that, apparently.
“Couldn’t sleep?” he asks.
“I needed air.” I keep my eyes on the skyline.
He comes to stand beside me, not too close, resting his forearms on the railing. For a moment, neither of us says anything. The city hums below us, indifferent to our complicated history.
“You seem tense,” he says.
“I tend to be, lately.”
“You can talk to me, Lauren.”
Something about the quiet certainty in his voice makes my chest ache.Can I?I want to ask.Or will you disappear again the moment things get complicated?I hold the thought behind my teeth.
