I rake both hands through my hair, pacing the length of the office, my boots marking a restless circuit across the hardwood. Mikhail watches in silence. Savin hasn’t moved. The useless guard stares at the floor as if hoping it might open and swallow him whole.
And then a small creature appears in the doorway.
Anya stands at the threshold in her pajamas, Mr. Whiskers clutched against her chest, dark hair cascading around her face. She surveys the room, eyes moving from Mikhail to Savin to the guard to me. Cataloging. Weighing.
Every man in the room holds his breath simultaneously.
“Papa.” Her voice is small. Unwavering. “Where’s Ellie?”
The question lands in the center of my chest, and with it comes the clarity I should have reached minutes ago.
Elizabeth might have fled from me. She might have decided she’d had enough of my cruelty, enough of my contradictions, enough of the cage I built around her and called protection. As much as that possibility ignites fury in my veins, I can comprehend the logic behind it.
But she would never leave Anya. Not without a word. Not without pressing her lips to that small forehead and promising to come back. And certainly not in the middle of gunfire and shattered glass.
But then why do the security cameras show her running?
Shit. Maybe I’m missing information. Context. Was someone else in her ear? I should have tapped her fucking phone.
What if…
The idea rearranges every assumption. The too-easy assault, the calculated distraction, the surgical precision of the timing — what if none of it was designed to test our defenses?
They came for her. They breached, they seized what they wanted, and they vanished before anyone understood what had truly been lost.
Someone must have told her to run away when the first bomb went off. For her own good… and maybe for Anya’s safety as well.
It’s the only explanation I can think of.
But who?
I cross the room to my daughter. I lower myself to one knee, bringing my eyes level with hers. Her cheeks carry the faint, dried traces of tears. The sight temporarily drains the fury from me. What remains is heavier, colder, infinitely more difficult to carry.
“I don’t know where she is right now,” I say. The truth, delivered in the voice I preserve only for this child — stripped ofauthority, carrying nothing but the raw, unbearable honesty she deserves.
Anya’s face does what it always does when she is processing things she desperately wishes weren’t real. The small frown. The tightening around her mouth. The monumental effort of containment. Then her chin trembles, and the dam fractures.
“I want Ellie back.” The words emerge fractured at their edges, the sob beneath them barely restrained. “Papa, I want her back. Bring her back.”
A wave of agony tears open inside my chest as I gather her into my arms. Her small hands grip the fabric of my shirt, and she presses her face into my shoulder, crying.
I hold her as she trembles against me, and my mind floods with an image I cannot silence: Elizabeth’s hands pressed over Anya’s ears in the foyer, positioning her own body between my daughter and the chaos.
I pull back enough to frame her face in my hands. The blood crusted across my knuckles has dried to a dark rust, and I notice the contradiction with a detachment that is its own kind of wound — the hands that killed tonight are now holding the most delicate thing in my world.
“Listen to me,malaya.” I hold her gaze. “I am going to bring her home. Do you hear me? She is coming back to this house, and she is never leaving again.”
Anya searches my face with the same scrutiny she always performs — the weighing, the measuring, the unspoken demand for proof that I mean every syllable.
“Promise?”
“Yes.” No hesitation. No caveat. No room left for uncertainty. “I will bring her back to us.”
Anya nods once and presses her face back into my shoulder. Her grip tightens, and I feel the exact moment her breathing begins to steady, the trust settling into her small frame.
I hold her, and over her head, I meet Mikhail’s gaze.Whatever he reads in my expression straightens his spine by several degrees.
“Every resource,” I say. My voice has gone perfectly level. “Every contact. Every surveillance feed, every intercepted frequency, every informant we’ve ever turned. I want a location in two hours.”
