Page 178 of Mafia King’s Dangerous Vow

It was preserved.

The empty space above the fireplace waits for the Kandinsky. The conservator has it now. Stabilized. Repairable, but not untouched.

Nothing that matters is untouched.

I find Tamara in the study.

She is sitting at my desk with one leg tucked beneath her, laptop open, phone beside her hand, but she is not working. The screen has gone dark. Her hair is down, falling over one shoulder, and she wears one of my shirts beneath a soft gray cardigan.

The lamp casts warm light across her face.

Exhausted. Alive.

Her eyes lift when I stop in the doorway.

“Are they settled?” she asks.

“Two floors down. Anna has her own key, her own lawyer, and enough control over the guards to make Yuri rethink his career.”

A faint flicker moves across her mouth. “Ivan?”

“Negotiated the security perimeter by using the hallway plants as visual markers.”

Her smile starts but doesn’t survive. “That sounds like him.”

She says it carefully. As if she is testing how much she is allowed to know about her own child.

I step into the room. “He asked for waffles.”

Her eyes close briefly. One small, painful breath.

“Anna says it’s his favorite breakfast.” I stop on the other side of the desk.

Tamara nods slowly. “And my father?”

“Contained.”

“That sounds like a word you would use when you mean not dead.”

“He’s not dead.”

“Did you consider it?”

“Yes.”

The honesty doesn’t shock her. I think she knows exactly what kind of man she married. That is part of what makes the next thing harder.

Tamara looks down at her hands. I let the silence do what it wants.

Somewhere two floors below, a boy who should’ve been sleeping in his own room is maybe eating pasta or arguing with Anna about brushing his teeth in a strange bathroom. Somewhere in Manhattan, David Kalinin sits in an empty room learning the shape of irrelevance one unanswered call at a time.

And here, in the middle of all the wreckage, is the only decision I cannot make safer by making it myself.

“Tamara.”

Her attention comes back to me.

“The threat is not gone,” I say. “I won’t lie to you about that. Your father is wounded, not harmless. The Colombians are contained, not erased. There will be legal steps for Ivan. Hard ones. Anna will fight for him. You may want to fight back. Some days all of you may hate each other.”