I say nothing. I’m not here for the preamble.
“Where is she.”
It isn’t a question. He hears that and his smile doesn’t waver—if anything it settles deeper, like I’ve confirmed something he already knew about me. He turns his head slightlyand looks at one of his men. A silent instruction. The man moves to a door at the back of the room without a word.
The door opens.
She is led out of the shadows and the sight of her hits me like something physical.
Hannah.
Her hands are bound behind her back, tape across her mouth, her eyes scanning the room with a terror that has clearly been running for hours. She’s still in the clothes she was wearing when she fell asleep. She must have been in this building since yesterday afternoon.
My hands close into fists at my sides.
Then her eyes find me.
The fear doesn’t leave her face entirely, but something shifts underneath it—recognition, and relief, and the particular trust of a child who believes that the adult in front of her can fix things. She draws a breath through her nose and her small shoulders lift.
She trusts me. She thinks I’ve come to make this right.
That costs me more than anything else in this room.
I pull my eyes back to Aslanov before the feeling can surface on my face. He’s watching me with the expression of a man who has just seen exactly what he came to see. He rises from behind the desk, crosses to where the guard is holding Hannah, and lifts her with a deliberateness that is designed entirely for my benefit—settling her against his side, one hand on her back, performing a tenderness that turns my stomach.
He looks down at her.
Then he looks at me, and the smile reaches something colder underneath.
“Look,malen’kiy,” he says to her, almost gently. “Your daddy’s here.”
The worddaddyhangs in the air between us.
Hannah goes still. Then her eyes find mine—really find them, the way they haven’t before, searching for something she doesn’t yet have a name for—and I watch the understanding move across her face slowly, the way it does with children, piece by piece.
Her eyes fill.
Blyad.
She’s only four, but already sharp enough to understand. I hold her gaze and keep my voice as steady as I can make it. “It’s going to be okay, Hannah. I promise.”
She gives me the smallest nod, tears spilling over, and she looks so much like Lauren in this moment that it physically costs me.
Aslanov watches the exchange with the satisfaction of a man who choreographed it. “I thought someone should tell her the truth,” he says pleasantly, “since her parents couldn’t manage it. Tell me, Niko—what kind of father lies to his own child?”
“Don’t touch her again,mudak.” The words come out low, precise. “It’s me you wanted. I’m here. Let her go.”
He ignores that entirely, the way he ignores everything that doesn’t serve him. “You broke our agreement. You lied, you hid, you built your little coalition—and you did it all assuming I wouldn’t find out.” He tilts his head slightly. “Did you really believe I don’t have eyes everywhere? Inside your operation? Outside of it?” A pause, weighted. “Inside your pretty little penthouse in Chicago?”
Claire. The corrupted footage. The questions through Hannah. It all resolves into a single clear line.
Of course.
I keep my face still.
“You tried to make a fool of me, Niko.” He closes the distance between us until there’s almost nothing left of it. His voice drops. “That is one thing I do not forgive.”
Then he puts two fingers to his lips and whistles.
