My face is still buried in his neck, breathing him in for this final moment of connection. Because I don’t know what comes after this.
When he finally speaks, his voice is rough. “Did I hurt you?”
I shake my head. “I wanted that as much as you.”
He shifts carefully, settling me against his chest, my legs tucked between his. His arm stays firm around my waist, grounding me there, like he’s afraid that if he loosens his hold I’ll disappear.
He reaches for the closest throw blanket and wraps it around my shoulders.
We sit in silence for a while, his fingers tracing lazy patterns on my hip. The city glows outside the windows, oblivious to everything that happened today. To the blood spilled, the lives taken, the fear that still sits heavy in my chest.
“I almost got you killed today.” His voice is quiet, raw. “Rosa. Carlos. You. All because of me.”
I pull back to look at his face. “That wasn’t your fault. The Ghost…”
“Is coming after me. And everyone close to me is collateral damage.” His jaw clenches. “I brought you into this. Married you, made you a target. Today proved that.”
I touch his face, forcing him to meet my eyes. “This is my world too, Kirill. Violence, danger, people trying to kill us, that’s not new to me. I grew up in the Syndicate. Pavel trained me for this.”
“Training isn’t the same as living it.”
“No, but I chose this. I chose to help you hunt the Ghost. I chose to stay.” I chose you. I don’t say, because that truth is too raw to speak out loud.
His thumb brushes across my cheekbone. “There’s nothing normal about my life. “
I lean into his touch. “I don’t want normal.”
He draws away, his expression shifting to something more serious. “It’s better if you step back from the operation. It’s going to be dangerous, Dinara. Much more dangerous than today.”
My spine stiffens. “You’re benching me?” I pull away from him, creating space between us. “I have skin in the game now. The Ghost tried to kill me today too. And we have a deal.”
“Fuck the deal. I’ll help you anyway,” he says quietly.
“I’m not a mafia princess you need to protect,” I remind him. “I proved that to you.”
A shadow passes over his face. “You’re going to be the death of me, you know that?”
A reluctant smile tugs at his mouth before he kisses me, soft this time, gentle. So different from the brutal claiming earlier. This kiss is tender, like something that could break both of us.
When he pulls away, I rest my head on his shoulder, listening to his heartbeat. Strong and steady. I stare at the ring on my finger. His mother’s ring. A symbol of something that’s supposed to be temporary, a strategic move, except it doesn’t feel temporary anymore.
It feels way too fucking real.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-NINE
DINARA
The screens glowin the small office tucked at the far end of the penthouse’s east wing, lines of code cascading down in bright green against black backgrounds. My command center is finally operational.
It took most of the morning to set up. The equipment Maurice delivered is top-tier and I’ve configured the dual Xeon processors to run parallel pattern recognition algorithms, set up the RAID arrays for redundancy, and initialized the GPUs to handle the heavy computational lifting.
Now I’m running a deep packet analysis script, reconstructing the Ghost’s intrusion into the Baronov communication systems. The code scrolls across my screens, parsing through terabytes of network traffic, looking for the signature of whoever hijacked their encrypted channels during their last operation.
The script will take at least three hours to complete its first pass, which means I have time to call my father, something I’ve been avoiding, not wanting to lie to him as I’ll have to.
Down the hall, Kirill’s voice filters through his office door. His tone is clipped as he strategizes with his brothers, dissecting the hit at Rosa’s.
