“What do you want?”
“You. Tomorrow night. Pullman Yard. Use the side entrance off Roger Street. Ten PM. You come alone and you come clean.” A brief silence, almost courteous. “Understood?”
“Da.”I grit my teeth. “And Hannah?”
“Walks out the moment you walk in.” He lets that sit for a second. “I’m a reasonable man, Niko. You know that.”
“If anything happens to her—”
“It already has happened.” His voice drops, quiet and precise. “I had a four-year-old child taken out of her bed while her parents were fucking each other. That happened and it’s your fault. The question now is whether anything else happens. Your call,mudak.”
The line clicks dead.
I stand there with the phone in my hand and let the silence settle.
There is nothing to do with the next sixty seconds except survive them without putting my fist through the wall—which would wake Lauren, and Lauren waking up to this without any warning is not something I can manage right now.
Yobany Urod!
I pace the office, back and forth. Three steps to the window, turn, three steps back.
The city below is doing what it always does—indifferent, continuous, entirely unaware that a four-year-old girl,myfour-year-old daughter, who sleeps with a stuffed bear and laughs at bad drawings of cats is somewhere out there, alone and frightened and asking for her mother.
Pizdets!
This is what powerlessness feels like. I’d almost forgotten. In twenty years of the Bratva—through my father’s syndicate, through building my own empire from the ground up, through everything Aslanov took from me the first time—I was never fully out of options.
This is something entirely different.
Themudakhas my daughter.
I grind my teeth so hard I taste blood. I’m a man on a leash, and there is nothing I can do about it until tomorrow night. All while Hannah’s out there, alone and scared without her parents to protect her.
Chert voz’mi!
The rage is eating me from the inside out. I’m going to tear Aslanov’s head off if it’s the last fucking thing I do.
I look at Lauren on the couch. Her color is coming back—slowly, but it’s there. I should wake her. She needs to know what Aslanov said, needs to know the terms, needs to be part of whatever comes next.
But the moment she opens her eyes, whatever fragile steadiness she’s stored up over the last two weeks is gone. She’ll want to come with me. She’ll fight me on going alone.
I let her sleep another minute.
Pullman Yard.
Tomorrow at ten.
Alone.
It’s clear what he wants. He expects me to walk in and hand myself over, banking on the fact that Hannah is the one thing he can hold over me that I cannot negotiate around. He’s right about that. He’s always been smart enough to find the exact point where a man’s leverage ends.
But smart men make the mistake of thinking they’ve thought of everything.
And I haven’t survived this long by walking into rooms without a plan.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Lauren
