“Yes, Hannah,” he says. His voice is low and even, but I can hear what it costs him. “I’m sorry you didn’t hear it from me. Youshould have.” He brushes his thumb across her knuckles. “I am your daddy.”
Hannah considers this with the gravity of a child processing something enormous. She looks down at their hands. Then back up at his face.
Then she leans forward and puts her head against his chest. His eyes close, and his arms come around her, and I watch Nikolai Rogov—a man I have seen face down a room full of armed men without flinching—hold his daughter for what is only technically the first time.
I press the back of my hand to my mouth.
Four years. Four long years of a grave I visited and a name I couldn’t say in front of her and a blue-eyed child who deserved better than the story I had to tell her. Four years of carrying the shape of this moment around like something I’d never get to put down.
And now, here it is.
Not the way I imagined it. Nothing about any of this is the way I imagined it.
But it’s real, and it’s ours. They’re both in front of me and we are all still breathing.
That’s enough.
Right now, that is everything.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Lauren
Three days.
That’s how long it’s been since Pullman Yard.
We drove back before the morning had fully arrived—Nikolai, Hannah, Timur, and I—back through the pale early light to the mansion on the outskirts of the city.
His mansion.
The basement of it, which is where we’ve been, existing in the particular quiet of people who have been through something together and are still finding their way back to ordinary language.
The first thing we did when we arrived was get Nikolai a specialist medic—one of his, a man who came without being asked and worked without asking questions. The wounds were serious. The thigh especially. He’s been off his feet more than he’d like, which means he’s been difficult in the particular way he gets when his body won’t cooperate with his intentions. But he’s healing. Slowly, and under protest, but healing.
It doesn’t feel like we’re hiding anymore. That’s the difference I keep noticing. This is something else—slower, more deliberate. The beginning of something that hasn’t been named yet.
Today is not slow.
Nikolai’s men found Claire two days ago. She didn’t run, which surprised me—apparently she made it easy for them, almost as though she’d been waiting to be collected. She’s been in the basement since last night, and this morning Nikolai told me she was ready to be questioned.
He wanted to be there.
I told him no.
There’s something I need to understand about what she did—not just the mechanics of it, the corrupted footage and the questions she filtered through Hannah, but the reason underneath all of it. Why she did it. And I think if Nikolai is in the room, whatever fragile thread of honesty Claire might still have access to will close off entirely. He doesn’t have to do anything. He simply has that effect on people.
So I’m doing this alone.
I push open the door.
She’s tied to the chair—Timur’s work, I assume, efficient and without ceremony. The room is plain: bare walls, a single overhead light, nothing on the table between us. Claire looks smaller than I remember. The composure she always carried, that particular ease of a woman entirely at home in any room she entered, is gone. What’s left is something diminished and frightened and very, very still.
Her eyes find mine the moment I step in.
The apology is already on her face. She’s been rehearsing it, I can tell—the expression worn in at the edges, like she’s been sitting here arranging it since they brought her down.
She glances at the space behind me as I enter.
