Page 121 of Cruel Submission

But the sidewalk is packed. Crowds swelling around us, bodies pressing into bodies, a river of strangers flowing in every direction. The three of them steer me along, using the crowd as camouflage, keeping me boxed in so tightly that no one outside our four-person formation could see my face.

Shit.

They know what they’re doing. This isn’t improvised. This is rehearsed, the route mapped, the timing coordinated, the crowd factored into the plan like another variable on a spreadsheet.

My eyes sweep left, right, searching for anyone who looks like they might be watching. A man with an earpiece. A woman moving against the foot traffic. Anyone.

Nothing.

They turn onto a side street, away from the main road, away from Yanis and the armored sedan, away from everything safe. A dark SUV idles at the curb, engine running, rear door already open. The man behind me puts his hand flat between my shoulder blades and pushes. Not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to make the message clear.

Get in.

I climb into the backseat. The woman slides in beside me. One man takes the passenger seat, the other drives. The doors lock with a soft mechanical thud that sounds terrifyingly final.

No one speaks.

I press both palms flat against my stomach, feeling for Sara’s movement. There… a kick, small and furious, like she knows something is wrong. I close my eyes and hold onto that anger. Her anger. Tiny and fierce and alive.

I’m here, I tell her silently. I’m here, baby. I’m not going anywhere without you.

The drive takes twenty minutes. Maybe thirty. I lose track because I’m counting Sara’s kicks and watching the streets through tinted windows, trying to lock the route in my head the way Stefan taught me—landmarks, turns, distances, anything I can use later. If there is a later.

We stop outside a house. Massive. Set back from the road behind walls and iron gates that swing open as the SUV approaches, then close behind us with the finality of a mouth swallowing its prey. The grounds are manicured, the driveway long and curved, the house itself a sprawling stone structure that screams old money and older secrets.

The woman opens my door. “Out.”

I step onto gravel. The crunch under my shoes is the loudest thing I’ve heard since the fitting room. Around me, the property is immaculate and empty—no gardeners, no staff visible, no sign of ordinary life. Just the house, the gates, and the guards stationed at intervals, watching me with the detached interest of men guarding an object.

They walk me through the front door, through a marble foyer, down a hallway lined with oil paintings and the kind of furniture that belongs in museums. The house smells like wood polish and cigar smoke and something sour underneath—power, maybe. Or greed. The scent of a man who’s been running empires long enough that the walls have absorbed his ego.

A door opens.

A sitting room. Dark wood, heavy curtains, a leather chair positioned like a throne at the room’s center. And in that chair—

My stomach drops.

Gavriil Laurov.

He’s older than the photos I’ve seen. Heavier. His hair is iron-gray, cropped close to a skull that looks like it was carved from the same stone as the house. His eyes are the same ice-blue as Arkady’s, but where Arkady’s carry contradiction—violence and tenderness waging war behind them—Gavriil’s are flat. Absent. The eyes of a man who stopped seeing people as people a long time ago and never found a reason to start again.

“Here she is, sir,” the woman says. Professional. Transactional. Delivering goods.

Gavriil doesn’t stand. He looks at me the way a butcher inspects a hanging carcass, without emotion, assessing weight and value and use. His eyes stop at my belly. Stay there.

“What the fuck is this?” The question comes out in a tone that promises damage regardless of the answer. “Whose kid is that?”

My throat locks. Every instinct tells me to lie, to deflect, to give him nothing. But the fear is enormous, filling my chest, pressing against my lungs, stealing the oxygen I need to think.

“Arkady’s,” I whisper.

The slap is fast. Open-handed, full force, the crack of it echoing off the wood-paneled walls. My head snaps sideways, and I stagger, catching myself on the arm of a nearby chair. My cheek burns. My ear rings. The taste of copper fills my mouth; I’ve bitten the inside of my lip.

“When did my son fuck you?” Gavriil is on his feet now, looming. “How can you be this pregnant? Couple of months. You’ve been gone for a couple of months, and you come back carrying his—”

He stops.

I watch the realization struggle to land. He’s looking at my face—Debra’s face, our face—and seeing the woman he kept as a sex toy.