I glance back at Nikolai. He’s leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed over his chest, making no move tocome further into the room. His expression gives away nothing. His left eyebrow lifts a fraction when he meets my eyes.
I turn back to Claire.
“Aslanov’s men—do you know where they’re holding your sister? Your niece?”
Claire shakes her head, the movement rapid and desperate. “I don't know. They never told me—I only ever had a number to call, and it’s been disconnected since—” She stops. Presses the tissue to her mouth. “I don't know where they are.”
The room settles into a heavy quiet.
Even now, Ronan Aslanov’s reach extends into this basement, into this woman’s face, into a sister and a child somewhere we can’t locate. Even in his death, the man is still finding ways to damage people.
I look at Claire—her red eyes, her bound hands, the specific exhaustion of someone who has been carrying an impossible thing alone for too long—and feel the last of my anger lose its shape.
This is not what I imagined this conversation would be. I came in here wanting answers and instead I’ve inherited another problem, another person pulled under by the same current that almost took all of us. I’m out of my depth and I know it, and the interrogation I thought I was conducting has quietly become something else entirely.
I glance up and find Nikolai watching me from the doorway. His expression gives nothing away. He holds my gaze for a moment, then tips his head almost imperceptibly toward the corridor.
I push back my chair and follow him out, pulling the door closed behind me.
The hallway is dim and quiet. He stands with his back against the wall, arms folded, the corridor light catching the bruising still visible along his jaw. Three days out from PullmanYard and the damage is still written all over him—the careful way he distributes his weight, the arm he hasn’t lifted above the shoulder since we got back.
“I have news,” he says.
“Me too.” I lean against the opposite wall. “You first.”
“Timur called this morning. He and two of our men found Claire’s sister and her daughter.” He pauses. “They’ve been handed over to the police. They’re safe.”
Something loosens in my chest.
“So she was telling the truth.”
“Da.”His jaw tightens. “Does that change what she did, and what it nearly cost us? Not at all.”
I nod. I know it doesn’t. But I’ve been sitting across from her for the last twenty minutes knowing exactly what it nearly cost us, and feeling two entirely contradictory things at once.
“Her fate is in your hands,” he says. “Whatever you decide, I’ll stand behind it.”
I look at him. There’s no performance in it—no angle, no preferred outcome he’s steering me toward. He means it.
I think about Hannah in that room, bound and terrified. I think about Claire at the table, her hands shaking around a mug of coffee she’d loaded with sugar because her nerves had already given her away. I think about what it would take to make a woman like that—careful, warm, someone Hannah loved—into a liability. What kind of pressure would have to be applied, and for how long.
“Let her go,” I say. “No harm done to her. She was being blackmailed, Niko. If the situation were reversed, I can’t say either of us would have done differently.”
Nikolai looks at me for a long moment.
Then he gives a single nod.
We go back into the room together. Claire looks up at both of us, her face beyond bracing for something—she’s past thatnow, just waiting, whatever composure she arrived with long since spent.
“You’re free to go,” I tell her. “Your sister and your niece are safe.”
The sound that comes out of Claire is involuntary and entirely undone. She presses the tissue to her mouth and squeezes her eyes shut, her shoulders shaking with something that has clearly been held at enormous cost for a long time.
I watch her and feel the last of my anger dissolve into something quieter and considerably sadder.
“I meant what I said in there,” I tell Nikolai, once Claire has been escorted out by one of his men and the hallway has gone quiet again. “I don’t blame her.”
“I know.”
