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“Maybe.” Her voice doesn’t waver. “Probably. I can’t explain it and I don’t care. Here’s what I know. There’s a two year old that needs to get home to her parents in thirty days, and the only thing it costs is me. That math isn’t hard, Kolya.”

“He said she comes home regardless,” Nikolai argues, pouncing on what his cousin just said. “Those were his exact words, right? Seraphina’s safety was never the variable, which means she comes home whether you go or not. So don’t go, Katerina. Don’t hand yourself to him for a debt he already promised to pay.”

On my monitor, I watch her go still. Her free hand stops its restless clenching against her thigh.

There it is. I set the wine glass down.

“And if he’s lying?” she snaps back. “If I take that gamble and he’s lying, Kolya—if I stay home in my fortified house and decide to trust the word of this man I don’t know—then what? Then I’ve bet a toddler’s life on the honor of the man who took her.” She shakes her head, strands of hair flying in the air. “I can’t do it. You know I can’t. Don’t ask me to be the kind of person who could.”

Nikolai’s growl comes through my feed. “You are not a currency⁠—”

“Tonight I am.” There’s pure resolve in her voice.

On my screen she’s standing straight-spined in her kitchen, hair loose, eyes burning, generations of Sokolov iron dressed in a gray shirt, and I have never wanted anything in forty-two years the way I want this woman. “Leo, tell Emma that Seraphina is coming home. I’m doing this. I need you all to let me, because I’m doing it either way.” She scowls at her phone. “And if you follow that car, if you put a tracker on me, if any of you cost that little girl her ride home, I will never forgive you. Do you hear me? Never.”

The argument rages another six minutes, but I pay it no attention. It was over before it began.

Every point they make, she neatly refutes it with logic or sheer stubbornness.

Nikolai threatens to physically remove her from her home and she tells him, sweetly, that he’s always told her to keep her word and it’s far too late to complain about the results.

One by one, the kings go quiet.

There’s nothing else they can do. I dismantled every alternative months ago so that when this moment came, her conscience would have one road and I would be standing at the end of it.

She hangs up and places both hands on the edge of her island as she stares at her blank phone, her body impossibly still.

I’m not even sure if she’s breathing and I lean in closer to make sure she’s still alive.

But then she snaps to attention and what she does takes my breath away.

She squares her shoulders the way she did before answering my call, pushes her hair back from her face with both hands, and walks upstairs to pack.

There’s no tears. She doesn’t even collapse.

My beautiful, brilliant girl walks toward the wolf with her chin up because a child needs her to, exactly as I knew she would, and the satisfaction spreading through my chest is so vast it feels almost like peace.

I drain the wine and pull up the route to the estate. Two years of watching. Fifty-four minutes left.

Then, Katerina Sokolov, you are finally, finally mine⁠—

—for thirty days. To start.

3

KATERINA

The car is exactly on time and if I wasn’t so freaked out, I would roll my eyes at the punctuality.

I’ve been watching the street through my front window for twelve minutes, and the black sedan slides to the curb at the sixty-minute mark precisely, headlights sweeping my stoop.

This strange man is clearly not a foreigner because my family—except Maksim and Nikolai but they’re weirdos—treats proposed times as a suggestion. 2:30 start?

Nah. We’ll show at 3.

You need to be somewhere in 15 minutes?

More like you’ll start getting ready in 15 minutes.