Lauren is already asleep when I look in on her—curled on her side, one hand open on the pillow beside her. I pull the door ajar and make one more stop before I turn in.
Hannah’s room.
She’s on her back, covers tucked up to her chin, Mr. Brummy pressed to her chest with both arms. She kept the name. I wasn’t sure she would. The thought does something I don’t have a word for—opens something up and then closes it again, leaving a pressure behind.
I crouch beside her bed, careful, and brush a loose strand of hair back from her forehead.
Her lips part.
“Daddy died protecting me and Mommy.”
I go still.
She doesn’t wake. Her eyes stay closed, face slack, already somewhere deeper than this room. But the words sit in the air between us, and I stay crouched beside her bed long after they’ve gone quiet.
Daddy died protecting me and Mommy.
So that’s what Lauren told her. The version that was kind and true at the same time—true enough, anyway, for a four-year-old who deserved an answer she could carry without it crushing her. I can’t find fault with it. I understand why. It doesn’t stop the feeling of it, a clean cut somewhere below the ribs.
She shouldn’t have to carry that. She’s four years old and she already knows something about loss.
I look at her face—Lauren’s features, my eyes, something entirely her own in the set of her mouth—and let myself sit with the question I’ve been trying to avoid but couldn’t.
What happens when she finds out?
Not if. When. Whether I survive Aslanov or not, this secret has a shelf life. One day Hannah will know who I am to her, and I have no way of knowing what that will look like—whether she’ll have years of memory to build on, or only weeks, or nothing at all.
Lauren is right to be cautious. I know that. Giving Hannah a father only to take him away again would be its own cruelty.
But I think about Aslanov—about everything he’s taken from me, my mother among the rest, a bullet and no ceremony—and something settles in my chest that isn’t fear. It’s closer to certainty. Quiet and cold and absolute.
I have survived too much to die before she knows.
I stand, take one last look at her—small and certain under her covers, Mr. Brummy guarding her chest—and step back into the hallway. I pull the door to and engage the lock with both hands, soft as I can manage.
Then I stand there in the dark for a moment, listening to the silence of the penthouse hold.
The office pulls at me. I could set up camp in there, run the feeds through the night, catch anything the diagnostic misses.
But I need sleep more than I need to watch empty hallways, and I need Lauren beside me more than I need either. Four years of absence earns me no apologies on that front.
I go to bed.
Timur is meeting with Popov’s men tomorrow—gathering what he can, taking stock of what Popov is actually bringing to this. I want that report before I commit to anything. Popov is useful the way a loaded weapon with a faulty safety is useful—pointed in the right direction, handled carefully, never fully trusted. The fact that he killed Lauren’s mother is something I carry in a sealed room and do not open.
Not yet.
When this is over, that door will have to be dealt with. For now, it stays shut.
I peel back the covers and ease into bed beside Lauren.
She stirs. One eye opens—slow, barely—and finds me in the dark. Then she shifts closer, her back settling against my chest, one hand finding my arm and pulling it around her without fully waking.
I lie still and let my body adjust to wanting her and not acting on it. A familiar exercise by now, and not an easy one. But she needs the rest more than I need anything else tonight.
The question comes anyway, the way it always does in the quiet.
What if this is our last night?
