Page 130 of Cruel Submission

Her hands aren’t shaking. That’s what I notice first. This woman, whose body trembles when a door closes too loudly, who flinches at shadows—her hands are steady. Rock-solid.

“Debra—” Yanis starts, moving toward her, but she doesn’t look at him. She’s looking at Gavriil. Only at Gavriil.

Gavriil has staggered back against the desk, one hand pressed to his chest where the blood is coming through his fingers. His face holds an expression I’ve never seen on him before—not pain, not fear, but recognition. The sudden, nauseating understanding that the thing you owned and used and broke has just stood up and bitten back.

“You—” he manages.

Debra fires again.

The second round takes him in the stomach, and he doubles over, catching himself on the desk with both hands, blood splattering across the paperwork and the crystal tumbler and the polished mahogany that witnessed thirty years of his empire.

“That’s for every night,” Debra says. Her voice is the most frightening thing in the room—flat, toneless, stripped of everything human except intent. “Every single night you came to my room.”

Gavriil slides to his knees. The motion is graceless, the body surrendering to physics while the mind fights to maintain its last fragments of control. He looks up at her from the floor, blood on his lips, and in that final glance between them, I see the entire arc of their history—the captor and the captive, the monster and the girl he kept in captivity.

“Princess—” The word comes out wet, drowning.

“Don’t—” Her voice breaks on the word, the first crack in that terrible composure. “Don’t fucking call me princess.”

She pulls the trigger a third time.

Gavriil Laurov falls forward onto his own Persian rug, next to the guards who died in his service, and doesn’t get up.

The room holds its breath.

Nobody moves. Nobody speaks. The gunshot echoes fade into the plaster and the wood and the silk curtains, absorbed by the house that held so many secrets that one more barely registers.

Debra lowers the gun. Slowly. Carefully. Setting down something impossibly heavy that she’s been carrying for too long. The Beretta dangles at her side, her index finger slipping off the trigger and onto the guard, and then Yanis is there, crossing the room in three strides, his weapon abandoned, his hands reaching for her, catching her as her legs give in.

She doesn’t scream. She doesn’t cry. She just folds into him—small, shaking now, the tremors finally arriving as her body acknowledges what she’s done—and Yanis wraps himself around her completely, desperately, as if the pressure of his body can hold together what’s threatening to come apart.

“I’ve got you,” he says into her hair. “I’ve got you, Debra. It’s over.”

I watch them. I watch Yanis holding the woman who just killed our father, his face buried in her hair, his shoulders heaving with something he’ll never admit to later. I watch Debra’s hands—empty now, the gun on the carpet, her fingers twisted into the front of Yanis’s tactical vest like she’s trying to climb inside him and hide.

Then I turn and look at Gavriil.

He lies on his side, one arm beneath him, the other reaching toward something—the desk, maybe, or the chair, or some phantom version of the power he wielded for decades. His eyes are open and glassy. The dove-gray suit is ruined—blood, carpet fibers, and other body fluids. The final indignity of a man who believed he was untouchable, discovering that he wasn’t.

I feel nothing.

That’s the strangest part. I expected rage, or satisfaction, or grief, or the complicated tangle of all three that defines most of my life. Instead, there’s just—absence. A blank space where the fear of him used to live, now vacant, waiting for something else to move in.

“Stefan.” My voice sounds almost normal. “Secure the house. Find the rest of his men. Nobody leaves.”

Stefan is already moving, one hand to his earpiece, relaying orders without hesitation. “Leo, east wing clear? Copy. Hold position. Andrei, report.”

The earpiece crackles. Andrei’s voice, clipped and professional: “We have her. South sitting room. She’s conscious, minor facial injuries. Asking for Arkady.”

My chest seizes.

Mirabel.

“Stay with her,” I say into the mic. “I’m coming.”

I holster the Makarov. Step over Gavriil’s body without looking down. Cross the room in four strides, driven by the desperate need to reach her before another second passes.

At the doorway, I stop. Turn back.