The expressway stretched before me, a vein of asphalt splitting the city apart. I drove through every shortcut I knew, every back road carved into muscle memory from years of navigating this territory at dangerous speeds. I used them all.
Traffic signals bled together. Lane dividers ceased to exist.
My house. My family. Under attack, and I was twelve miles away playing a role in someone else’s script.
The gate was still open when I arrived. Guards flanked the perimeter, weapons lowered, and the estate basked in the cold, white glare of the security floodlights. Men moved in organized patterns — sweeping, documenting, securing. The aftermath of an assault being processed with efficient calm.
Too contained. Too orderly.
I took the stairs three at a time, my blood-streaked hands leaving smudges on the banister. The hallway toward my office felt interminable, each step echoing against the realization crystallizing in my mind.
And now I’m standing here, staring at the guard who let her walk through that door.
“Rolan, you need to stay calm,” Mikhail cautions.
Calm. The word tastes foreign on my tongue, absurd in this context, insulting in its inadequacy.
“Don’t.” I raise one hand, palm out, trembling with the effort of restraint. “Don’t fucking tell me to stay calm.”
I round on the guard. He has the decency to stare at the floor, which is the only reason I haven’t crossed the distance between us.
“She said she needed?—”
“You. Let. Her. Go.” Each syllable drops from my mouth like venom. “During an active threat. You abandoned your post, and you let her walk out of the only secure room in this house.”
The guard swallows. His jaw clenches. He offers nothing further.
I turn away from all of them and face the window. Outside, the grounds stretch in orderly lines beneath those merciless floodlights. Everything appears restored. Controlled. Normal.
But it isn’t. None of this is normal.
The assault tonight was coordinated enough to drag me to the docks, yet thin enough to be repelled in twenty minutes. They saw our defenses during the last incursion. They mapped our response times. If Dushku had committed a genuine force, we would still be fighting. Bodies would line the corridors.
He didn’t send everything he had. He sent enough. Enough to pull me away. Enough to occupy the perimeter guards. Enough to create a window.
A window for what?
The rage surging through me has no clean outlet andnowhere to discharge. I flatten both palms against the desk and force air through my lungs — or try to. The room contracts around me. The walls press inward. Every surface feels inadequate to contain what is building behind my ribs.
How did they let this happen?
How did I let this happen?
I called her a mistake. I shoved those words into the narrow space between us and watched her face collapse.
I haven’t seen the security tapes yet, but Mikhail told me what happened in the ones that survived the attack.
She ran.
The first explosion hit, and she didn’t go back to Anya, to the safety of the bunker. She fled in the opposite direction, away from my house, from my daughter, fromme, until she was out of sight.
Fuck!
She ran because I gave her a reason to run.
I handed her the blade and told her to cut herself free.
The thought lodges in my chest — a burning coal, persistent, glowing, eating through every barrier I constructed to keep it at a safe distance.
