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And some part of me already knew it wouldn’t be the last time I stood at this glass thinking exactly that.

Chapter Nine

Camila

My apartment looked like a war room by midnight—laptop open on the kitchen counter, printouts fanned across the coffee table, five separate browser tabs open to nothing but numbered accounts I’d spent four months chasing. I sat cross-legged on the floor with my back against the couch, reading the exposé through one more time before sending it, checking every figure against the photograph I’d taken in Nikolai’s home nights ago. My phone buzzed around eleven—Bianca, asking if I wanted to grab breakfast tomorrow—and I typed back a quick yes without looking up from the screen, too deep in the numbers to say more than that.

It was good. It was better than good. Laundering routes traced clean through accounts, betting structures laid out with dates and names, shell companies connected directly to fighters who’d disappeared and never resurfaced. Enough to trigger federal investigations. Enough to cost the Golovins millions and shake the foundation of an empire that had been quietly destroying lives for years.

I should have felt something close to real triumph, at least.

Instead, I kept catching myself staring at the same paragraph without reading it, my mind sliding sideways to his hand at my jaw, the way he’d said my name and touched me like it meant something. I hated that my body remembered him better than my brain wanted to admit. I hated more that some small part of me had spent the last two days replaying that night instead of celebrating the fact that I finally had everything I needed.

I made myself stop. I thought of Mateo instead—his laugh, the missing persons flyer with his photo, the eventual silence from the police department that had never once returned my calls. Mateo was still dead. The Golovins were still exactly what I’d spent years believing them to be. Whatever my body remembered about one night in a penthouse didn’t change a single fact sitting on my screen.

Attraction changed nothing. I needed it to change nothing.

I encrypted the files, attached them to the message I’d drafted a dozen times over the last week, and hit send before I could talk myself into reading it through a thirteenth time. The upload bar crawled forward, then vanished entirely, the message gone the way four months of work deserved to be gone—sent, irreversible, out of my control now in the best possible sense.

Relief hit first. Then, right behind it, a cold weight I hadn’t expected. It was like the dread of having finally done the thing I could never undo. There was no version of tomorrow where this hadn’t happened anymore. My editor would have it by morning. The wheels I’d spent months setting in motion were already turning without me, and no amount of doubt would slow them down even if I wanted it to.

I sat there a long moment with my laptop still open in front of me, letting the reality settle in. A knock at my door broke through my tired thoughts, sharp and unexpected at that hour.

I opened it without checking the peephole, too tired to think clearly, and every ounce of composure I’d held onto over the last two days shattered the second I saw him standing in my hallway.

Nikolai looked exactly the way he always did—immaculate despite the hour, jacket buttoned, not a single hair out of place—except that his eyes carried something darker than I’d seen from him before. Something possessive and unguarded that undid the careful distance I’d spent all week constructing.

He didn’t wait for an invitation. He stepped inside, closed the door behind him with the same quiet finality he’d used in his office the night everything started, and kissed me.

I told myself to push him away. I’d spent two days building the distance required to protect what I’d just sent out into the world, and every rational part of me screamed that letting him back into my space now was reckless in ways I couldn’t afford.

None of that mattered the second his hand found my waist. I kissed him back as if the last two days of careful avoidance had never happened at all, and some furious part of me stopped caring why.

We stumbled backward through my apartment, his mouth never leaving mine, his hands moving with certainty. I lost track of everything except the immediate, consuming fact of his presence. I forgot the exposé sitting in my publisher’s inbox. I forgot the risk of him standing in my apartment at all. I forgot, entirely, what still sat open on my kitchen counter three feet behind us, my laptop screen throwing a faint blue light across the dark.

And then he noticed it.

I felt it happen rather than saw it. I felt the exact moment his hands stilled against my skin, the warmth draining out of him so completely and so fast that I actually opened my eyes to check what had happened.

Shit.

He was looking past me, over my shoulder, at the laptop screen glowing quietly in the dark kitchen, my notes still open to exactly where I’d left them. Account numbers. Betting logs. A paragraph naming his fight club.

“Nikolai—”

He stepped back from me without a word, and the silence that followed was worse than anything he could have shouted. I stood there in the middle of my living room, my nightdress still half off one shoulder, watching him cross the room like a man walking toward a fire he already knew he couldn’t put out.

I watched him cross to the counter, terrifyingly calm, and look down at the screen the way he must have looked at that newspaper article weeks ago—reading, understanding, assembling every piece at once. I saw the exact moment it all clicked into place behind his eyes. The office. The seduction. The convenient distance the moment I’d gotten what I needed from him. Every lie I’d told him folded together into one clean fact. I watched him read it all off my screen in real time, his finger scrolling once, slow, deliberate, like he needed to see every last line before he let himself believe it.

“Let me explain,” I said, though I had no idea what explanation I actually meant to give.

He didn’t answer. He kept reading, his jaw tightening by degrees I could see even from across the room. His hands, usually so still, gripped the edge of the counter hard enough that his knuckles paled. When he finally looked up at me, whatever heat or warmth had existed in his eyes minutes ago was gone completely, replaced by something colder and far more frightening than anger would have been— a controlled and absolute fury that didn’t need volume to make itself understood.

“Nikolai, please—”

“Don’t.” He said the word the way he must have said it to men who’d disappeared afterward, and my whole body went cold hearing it. I took a step toward him anyway, some instinct telling me if I could just touch his arm, just get close enough, I might be able to salvage some version of an explanation. He didn’t move. He simply watched me approach with an expression that made me stop three feet short of him.

I’d spent months preparing for the possibility of discovery. I’d rehearsed excuses, built contingencies, told myself I could handle whatever came if he ever found out what I really was. Nothing I’d prepared accounted for the horror of watching every trace of desire drain out of his face and leave nothing behind but absolute and icy control.