Svetlana looked at me. There was something in her expression that might have been an apology, or maybe just honesty, the acknowledgment that she asked and she got her answer, and there was nothing more she could do tonight.
Viktor moved to the middle of the room. “Leave, Luca.”
“Viktor—”
“I’ve let you say what you came to say. She’s heard it. Now leave my house.”
I looked at Anna one more time. She met my eyes and held them. No anger. No satisfaction. Just the same steady blue that has been making me feel like I’m losing ground since the first night she walked into that wedding venue, and I had no idea who she was to me.
“I’ll call tomorrow about the twins,” I said.
She nodded once.
I walked out.
As I step outside, Pavel is parked at the curb. He doesn’t ask how it went. He can see how it went. He gets out of the car when he sees me and stands with his hands in his pockets while I stop on the pavement and look back at the house.
Porch light on. Curtain shifting in the front window. No gate. No perimeter. One lock on the front door and a neighborhood that backs onto an open street on three sides.
Four months. For four months, Anna and the twins have been inside my estate with twelve men on rotation, cameras on everyentrance, reinforced doors, and panic protocols that Pavel tests quarterly. I never thought about what it looked like from outside that bubble. Never had to.
Now they’re here.
“I need security on this house,” I tell Pavel.
“How many?”
“Enough. I want the perimeter covered. Every entry point, front and back. I want someone on the street and someone in the alley.” I pause. “They don’t know anything about protecting themselves out here. Viktor has nothing. No contacts, no team, no backup. If something moves against this family tonight, there’s no one between them and it.”
Pavel nods slowly. “You think something’s going to move?”
“I think we’ve had too many loose ends since the Kozlov situation. I think Maxim made noise before he backed down, and noise travels.” I look at him. “I think my wife and children and her parents are sitting in an undefended house in an ordinary neighborhood, and I’m not willing to leave that to chance.”
“I’ll have men here within the hour.”
“Do it quietly. I don’t want Viktor calling me to complain about strangers on his doorstep. I just want them there.”
“Understood.”
I get in the car. Pavel gets back behind the wheel but doesn’t start the engine yet.
“And if she still won’t come back?” he asks.
“Then the security stays regardless.” I look out the window at the house. The curtain has stopped moving. “She doesn’t have to trust me for me to make sure she’s safe.”
Pavel starts the car.
I watch the house until we turn the corner, and it disappears from view.
Then I face forward and say nothing the rest of the way home.
30
ANNA
On the fourth day,Mila asks if Papa is sad.
We’re in my mother’s kitchen. Mila is sitting on the counter the way I used to when I was her age, swinging her legs while my mother makes tea, and the question comes out of nowhere, the way her questions always do, slipped between two completely unrelated thoughts like it’s been sitting in her chest waiting for the right gap.
