He’s quiet for several seconds. In that silence, I hear every version of Adrian I’ve known collapse into one. The man who sat beside me in an ultrasound room holding my hand, the man who left a note on my nightstand, the man who killed Dominic in a corridor and looked at me over the body, and the man who told me there’s no limit to what he’ll do. They’re all the same person, and right now, that person is deciding what happens next.
“Drive straight home.” His voice drops, telling me everything his words don’t. “Don’t stop for anything. I’m calling Fedor now.”
He hangs up, and I hold the phone against my knee as Fedor accelerates onto the highway after a brief conversation with Adrian. The convoy tightens around us, and the SUV behind moves closer.
I look in the side mirror and watch the restaurant disappear. I’m scared of the man who was watching me, but I’m more frightened by what Adrian will do when he finds out who senthim. I don’t want him to do anything that drives him deeper into the criminal side of his life, but I also understand his choices now in a way I couldn’t before, because I’d also kill to protect our babies, him, and what we’re building together.
20
ADRIAN
I’m standing at the kitchen counter when Fedor’s vehicle pulls through the gate. I’ve been standing here watching the security feed on my phone and tracking the convoy’s position through Grigor’s GPS relay. The espresso I made when Aurora called has gone cold in my hand. I set it in the sink and walk to the door.
She comes through it looking composed, which tells me she held herself together for the drive. The composure is a lid. I can see what’s underneath it. Fedor follows three steps behind her and gives me a nod that says the route was clean after they left the restaurant.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m okay.” She sets her purse on the counter and turns to face me. “I’m sure it was the same man, Adrian. He had the same build, same jacket, same way of standing. He was watching me, and he left when he realized I’d spotted him.”
I pull her toward me and hold her. She lets me, which tells me how rattled she actually is. I keep my arms around her until her breathing settles and she stops gripping my shirt.
Viktor arrives shortly after. He walks in carrying his tablet and a folder, and he looks grim.
“Low-level surveillance has been detected near two recent locations connected to Aurora.” He opens the folder on the kitchen table. “The college campus and today’s restaurant. Grigor pulled security footage from both venues. The man Aurora described appears in the campus footage well before her arrival and leaves after she does. Today, he was positioned across the street from the restaurant long before Aurora sat down.”
“He’s not following her. He’s arriving first.”
“Correct. He’s anticipating her movements, which means someone is feeding him location information in advance or he’s monitoring communications we haven’t detected yet.”
Aurora sits at the table. “Could Eric be giving him information?”
Viktor looks at me. I nod for him to answer honestly. “Combined with Hayes’s off-book contact with Yevgeny Melnyk in Karpov’s shipping operation, the possibility is real. Hayes has the investigative skills to track Aurora’s patterns and the motive to find her. Karpov has the manpower to deploy surveillance. If they’re sharing resources, we have a coordinated threat instead of two separate ones.”
“There’s something else.” Viktor pulls up a notification on his tablet. “Internal affairs has formally suspended Hayes from the Echelon case pending review. He no longer has even a pretense of official access to Aurora’s whereabouts.”
Aurora frowns. “Shouldn’t that make things better?”
“A working detective has rules, oversight, and a chain of command that limits what he can do.” I sit across from her. “A suspended detective with Karpov contacts and a personal obsession has none of those constraints. He’s more dangerous now, not less.”
She looks at me for a long moment. “You knew this might happen. You knew Eric was meeting with Karpov’s people, and you still let me believe I had room to breathe?”
“I was trying to buy you time before the walls closed in again.” I hold her gaze. “I misjudged the risk because I wanted to be wrong about how fast this would escalate.”
She’s glaring at me. “You decided what I needed to know and gave me just enough to feel like I was making my own decisions. An illusion of choice is still control, Adrian.”
I understand where I went wrong in trying to protect her, and I want her to believe I truly do. “I know. The reasons were to keep you and the babies safe, but I should have told you what I was seeing instead of deciding how much you needed to know.”
She closes her eyelids for a second. “Part of this is on me too. I process things through a filter that makes every protective gesture look like Eric, and that isn’t fair to you. I’m working on it.”
“You don’t have to work on it alone.”
She opens her eyes and looks at me, acknowledging we’re both fighting patterns older than this relationship. “I’m going to take a nap. I’ve been running on adrenaline for three hours, and the babies are making me pay for it.”
She walks down the hall and closes the bedroom door, and the lock clicks. She’s not locking me out. She’s locking out the world. I’ve learned the difference.
Viktor is already pulling up files on his tablet. “We need her to sit with a sketch artist. The surveillance footage gives us angles but the resolution isn’t good enough for facial recognition.”
“Can we identify him from Karpov’s known associates?”
