One by one, brigadiers fell. Some quietly, others with a fight. The purge had taken years, every calculated move bought with lives lost.
By the time mysovetcrushed the last of Anton’s loyalists, his son was already grown.
Seven years ago, I never factored in that boy becoming a threat. He had been twelve then—awkward, quiet, still hiding behind his father’s shadow with wide eyes and a tongue too timid to speak. Completely harmless in the face of his father’s mess.
But children never stay that way.
Time has hardened him, molded him into something dangerous. The grief of losing Anton has curdled into rage. The whispers from Moscow, from Matvey’s network, say Mikhail is not just biding his time. He is building something massive. A faction of his own. If he shares even half of his father’s cunning nature, he will stop at nothing to see me stripped bare and broken.
He will see Ivy and Leo as leverage. A weakness.
And he would be right.
A sharp taste of iron burns on my tongue, and it takes me a moment to realize I’ve bitten the inside of my cheek. “I want you all here with me in the States, aside from Lev. We need to squash whatever progress Mikhail has made in the time we’ve been busy.”
They all know better than to argue.
“Understood,” Lev replies.
The call ends after that, and I slide my phone back into my jacket pocket. For the first time in years, I have something to lose again.
And that means I will burn the world twice over to keep it safe.
30
IVY
The bell over the diner door jingles, the sound as ordinary as the hum of the coffee pot behind me or the scratch of forks on plates throughout the small space.
It’s mid-afternoon, the lull between the lunch rush and the dinner crowd. The sun slants in through the blinds, painting warm stripes across the faded linoleum. I’ve been pouring the same pot of coffee for the past hour, topping off mugs that are already half-cold.
The monotony is a comfort despite it being boring as hell. At least here, I know what’s coming. At least here, I’m not waiting for a bomb to detonate my entire life.
“Refill?” I ask a man in a ballcap at the counter.
He nods, barely looking up from his newspaper. I pour, smile, then replace the pot back onto its burner behind me.
Turning, I head toward the back to grab another stack of napkins from the shelf. My hands shake as I line them up into neat little piles. I hate it. Hate how no matter what I do, no matter howsteady I force my breathing to be, Maksim still creeps into my thoughts.
Where did he get off dropping into my world like this? With barely any explanations and no answers. He says he stayed away to keep me safe. A noble story, but one that doesn’t wash the bitterness from my heart.
Because if that’s true, then what is this? Him showing up here, in my town, in the middle of my carefully rebuilt life?
Convenient, that’s what it feels like. Convenient forhim.
I want to give Maksim the benefit of the doubt. I always did back then, when I was young and foolish and too easily swayed by his charm. I loved him, but love doesn’t erase the fact that he let me believe he was gone. That he left me to raise our child alone, let me walk through hell while he played hero in another country.
Now he thinks he can waltz back in and lay claim to both me and Leo?
The thought boils my blood.
What if I had moved on since his supposed “death”? What if someone else had stepped in and filled the place he’d left behind? Would he have stormed into my life then too, dragging me back and demanding I bend to his will?
He has no idea what my life is now. No idea what it took to claw myself out of the pit his absence dug, or the bridges I built back to survive, the ones I mended to come home again. He has no idea what it cost me to raise Leo without him.
The cruelest part is some traitorous corner of me still aches when I think of him, still wants me to forgive the damage he’s inflicted.
I slam the stack of napkins onto the counter harder than I meant to. The sound draws a curious glance from one of the truckers in a booth, but I ignore him, forcing my hands still. The bell above the diner door jingles, and I don’t think anything of it until the air shifts.
