He returns a short while later with a bowl between his hands. Steam rises from it in gentle curls. He places it in my lap. The scent reaches me first. Bone broth that has simmered for hours. Fresh ginger. Garlic softened in butter. A hint of white pepper. Something bright, maybe a squeeze of lemon, and something richer, like toasted rice. “Eat,” he says.
His voice is calm again. It almost undoes me.
I take the first spoonful. The broth coats my tongue with warmth that travels down my chest and settles deep in my stomach. Theginger clears the tightness in my throat. The butter softens the heat. My body unclenches for the first time in years.
“This is perfect,” I say quietly.
He watches every sip. His eyes stay on my face as if measuring the parts of me that are still shaking and the parts that are returning. When the bowl is empty, he takes it from my hands and sets it on the nightstand. He reaches into his pocket and places my phone beside me.
“You can check on her,” he says.
My breath catches and my fingers tremble as I unlock the screen and download a chat application. I text Vera, who responds minutes later with photos. Nadia in her tiny sweater with the mismatched buttons. Nadia crouched on the kitchen floor with her paints scattered around her. Nadia holding her knitted bear with a smile that could light a room.
My throat burns. I look at Sergei. He has moved closer without realizing it. His eyes rest on the picture of the little girl holding the bear.
“She smiles like you,” he says, and the look in his eyes is wistful.
“She has your eyes,” I whisper.
His entire face changes at that. The hardness shifts. The lines around his mouth soften. Something unguarded rises to the surface, something that should not exist in a man who commands armies from the shadows. His hand reaches for the edge of the mattress but hesitates. For a moment, he looks almost lost.
I place my hand on his. His fingers close around mine.
He sits beside me. The room grows very still. I rest my head on his shoulder. His breath stirs my hair. When I slip under the blanket, he lies beside me, fully dressed, one arm around my waist. His chest presses warmly and solidly against my back. “Sleep,” he murmurs. “I am here.”
I want to believe him. I want to close my eyes and forget the years between us. I try. I really try.
He falls asleep first. His breathing grows slow and deep. His arm stays around me, steady and protective. I turn into him and feel the rise and fall of his chest under my palm. For a little while, it is easy to imagine a world where this is normal. A world where he makes broth for me and I lie beside him without fear.
But sleep doesn’t come.
The truth curls under my ribs like a live wire. The Courier has already done what he wanted. He has forced us back into the same breath, the same heat, the same danger. He has tied our fates together again, and either of us could shatter under the weight of it.
When Sergei’s grip finally loosens, I slide out from beneath his arm. I pull on his shirt because it is the closest thing to armor I have. His scent lingers on the fabric, warm and dark. My legs feel steadier as I cross the room.
The mansion is quiet now. The alarms are silent. Only the low lamps along the baseboards guide me down the west corridor. I reach the surveillance room and close the door behind me. Rows of monitors glow in the dim light. I sit at the console and pull up the feeds. My fingers move by instinct, the old habits returning with painful ease.
It takes less than a minute to find the gap.
An hour is missing from the archive. A clean extraction. No timestamp. No trace. No noise. But the code underneath it is familiar. It is the same structure I once taught to Mikhail when he wanted to understand silent deletions. He’s Sergei’s most trusted systems man. He shouldn’t be doing this.
My stomach tightens.
I reach for the radio to wake Sergei.
Before I can touch it, every monitor flickers. Lines ripple across each screen. Then a notification blooms on all of them at once. A single red square pulses in the center of every feed. A delivery has already been made. The tag beneath it reads,
For Raina. Its a pleasure to know you’re back home, darling. The stakes are finally high enough.
6
SERGEI
Iwake up and reach for the other side of the bed, only to find it’s cold.
The sheet holds her shape, the faint scent of her skin, but her body is gone. The space where she slept feels like a missing tooth my tongue keeps finding. My stomach tightens in a slow coil. There’s no alarm, no siren ripping through the house, no guard shouting in my ear over the comms. The calm tells me more clearly than noise that something is very wrong.
I sit up, bare feet on the floor, every nerve awake now. The old wounds in my side ache as I reach for my pistol on the nightstand. I take it and my phone, pull on the pants I dropped hours ago, and cross to the door. The blue glow leaks under it, stronger now. Control room light. Monitors.
