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The penthouse door bursts inward—and it’s mine, it’s Malakhov with a shotgun and three of the floor team flooding in low, fanning across the living room like water finding its level. Nine years this man has been one of my soldiers, and he doesn’t have a spare second to look at me first. His focus is on the terrace, at the rappel lines swaying in the blown-out frame, at the stairwell access spitting men in matte black, and he makes the same arithmetic I’m making.

Somebody gave them my fucking floor plan.

“Boss, go!” Malakhov roars, and his shotgun starts buying us the hallway one deafening syllable at a time. Vetrov slides in beside him. Drozdov takes the kitchen corner. They are outnumbered and they know it and not one of them takes a single step backward, because every second they hold this room is a second I’m spending on her.

I haul Meera up by the waist and we run.

The hallway strobes with muzzle flash behind us. Something hits the wall a foot ahead and the drywall coughs dust across her braid. Through the bedroom. The closet. The false back swings on the hinges I oiled myself for a night I prayed would never come—steel door behind it, independent air, a phone line that doesn’t route through anything they could have cut.

“The code is Zina’s birthday.” The date the day before we met. Before she became mine. I shove her through the opening, and have to talk over the gunfire, over Mara’s snarling, over the sound of my penthouse being obliterated around me. “There’s a gun on the shelf. I’ve shown you how to use it. This door opens for no one. Not for screaming, not for silence, not for my fucking voice. If it’s one of us, there will be two knocks and then four. Anything else, you start shooting and you don’t stop—”

“Leo,” Meera pleads. Her hands are fisted in my shirt. Her mouth opens, and whatever’s in it dies on her tongue. Tears stream down her cheeks.

I grab that beautiful face between my hands, and kiss her. I kiss her like I’ll never kiss her again, because I might not. You never know. And still, all I’ve got for her is this kiss with teeth in it, because I don’t have the lingering moments for tenderness and she deserves a lifetime of it.

She pants when the kiss breaks, “Not without—”

“Meera, go. I can’t fucking focus if you’re—Baby, please. Go.”

I press her backward over the threshold, palm flat on her sternum, her heart going like a hummingbird’s wings against my hand. The steel seals her away. My heart, locked away.

Good. There’s no room for one in a war.

***

The living room is an abattoir of glass and smoke. Vetrov is down by the windows and not moving, and I file the grief somewhere I’ll never find it again. Drozdov’s holding the kitchen with a forearm laid open to the bone. Malakhov’s grin has blood in it. I add my gun to the arithmetic and for maybe forty seconds, folded behind the island in a choreography we’ve drilled in three different buildings, it’s almost a fair fight.

Then Div hits their point man at a dead run.

I shout, helpless, because my boy is eighty pounds of absolute faith and might, and he closes his jaws on the man’s wrist like vengeance itself. The pistol claps once.

Div howls. The sound rends my heart in two. Dogs aren’t supposed to make that sound. He spins off the man’s arm and goes down on the marble, and he’s moving—he’s crying and scrabbling, hind legs working, a dark slick spreading from his shoulder, shoulder, my brain files, high, like mine, survivable—and Mara is over him in a heartbeat. Growling, shielding him with her body. Like a fucking Yuri, she stands across her brother’s body with her ruff up and her teeth bared at the entire armed world.

And the man who shot my dog steps around them.

That’s when I finally understand, three minutes too late for it to matter. The angles have been wrong since the glass went. Center mass on Vetrov, on Drozdov, on my men—but every round that’s come near me has come near me. High. Wide. Herding. You don’t rehearse a man’s home, jam his comms, and bleed his soldiers just to miss him this many times.

They aren’t here to kill me. They’re here to take me.

“Malakhov, fall back—” and the flashbang I should have been watching for lands at my feet, and the world becomes a white bell.

Sound returns in installments. Marble against my cheek. Mara snarling herself hoarse somewhere behind me, still standing her post. My arms wrenched back, plastic biting into my wrists—zip ties, and some far-off cell of me thinks of raw skin on a leather couch, of twin lavender bruises, of symmetry.

A voice, accented out of Boston by way of somewhere colder, snarls, “He’s down. Confirm and load him.”

Hands haul me up. I let my head loll and make it loll worse, buying one last sweep of my home through my eyelashes: Malakhov down by the island and breathing, breathing. Drozdov pressed into the corner, alive. Mara unmoved over Div, and Div’s tail thumps once against the bloody marble—even now, that fucking tail—and past them the bedroom hangs open, the closet hangs open, and the wall is a wall is a wall.

No one is looking at the wall.

Someone’s boot finds my ribs with punishing force. The breath leaves me in one ugly cry. I fold, and they let me drop, and the rifle stock that comes down across the back of my skull is why.

The universe dots with darkness and warmth spreads down the back of my neck. My last thought is, She’s safe. At least she’s safe.

Chapter 18 - Meera

The gun is heavier in my hand than a similar one was at the range last week. I close my eyes, and I can still feel his arms around me from behind and flirting at my ear.

I can hear the husky murmur of his voice, teasing, “You’re as good a student as you are a teacher, beautiful.”