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But I didn’t. I thought instead of Nikolai’s face the night he’d promised nothing would ever touch me.

He would come. I held onto that certainty the way I’d once held onto four years of misdirected grief.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Nikolai

Sebastian confirmed the compound’s location three hours before dawn, with satellite imagery cross-referenced against thermal signatures that showed exactly the kind of activity we’d been hunting for weeks. Federal tactical teams assembled on the east perimeter while my own soldiers moved into position on the west, forming the strangest coalition I’d ever assembled.

Hayes stood beside me in the staging area, going over the compound blueprints one final time. His voice was calm despite the absurdity of coordinating an operation with a man he’d spent months investigating.

Yuri checked his weapon beside me, the silence between us carrying everything neither of us needed to say aloud about what tonight meant if it went wrong.

I cared about one thing only. It wasn’t Graham’s arrest, the trafficking charges federal prosecutors were already drafting, or even the eventual dismantling of his empire.

Camila was somewhere inside that compound; everything else was noise.

The assault began at the exact second Hayes’s team breached the eastern gate, explosions and gunfire erupting across the desert facility in chaos. I moved through the compound with my men clearing rooms methodically, though ‘methodical’ barely described the violence with which I dispatched anyone standing between me and finding her. Smoke drifted through the corridors, mixing with dust kicked up from the explosions. More than once, I lost sight of my own men entirely, tracking only the sound of gunfire and the shape of doors still unopened ahead of me.

Graham’s men fought back initially, caught entirely off guard by an alliance none of them could have anticipated. I heard shouting in the chaos and Graham’s voice somewhere across the compound, fury evident even through gunfire and distance.

“You brought the federal government into my house?” His voice carried across the compound. “You’d rather burn everything down than let me win a single point?”

I didn’t answer him. I had no interest in conversation, only in the rooms still ahead of me. The doors I hadn’t yet opened and the desperate hope that every single one might finally reveal her.

I found the cell block deep beneath the main facility, with concrete corridors lined with metal doors that made my stomach turn even before I understood what each one had contained. Federal agents moved through parallel hallways, shouting ‘clear’ as they cleared rooms, while my men fanned out, checking every door in a search that felt longer than the actual minutes it consumed.

I threw open three empty cells before the fourth, my heart hammering harder with each one that revealed nothing.

Then I opened the fourth cell. And there she was.

She was curled against the far wall, knees drawn to her chest. For one horrifying second before she looked up, I feared the absolute worst. Then her head lifted, those dark eyes found mine, and something in her face broke open entirely.

“Nikolai.”

I crossed the cell in two steps and pulled her against me, careful of her stomach even in the desperate urgency of the moment. I felt her entire body shake as the composure she’d clearly been holding on to finally collapsed completely.

“You came,” she said against my chest, her voice cracking on every word. “I knew you’d come, I told him you’d come, but I didn’t—”

“I’m here.” I held her tighter, my own voice rougher than I’d heard it in longer than I could remember. “I’m here. You’re safe. I have you.”

She cried into my shirt the way I’d never once seen her cry before, not even the night everything between us had first fallen apart. I held her, my hand tracing slow circles against her back, murmuring reassurances I wasn’t entirely certain I believed myself, given how close I’d come to losing her tonight.

Somewhere in the periphery, I registered gunfire still echoing above us, and I didn’t care at all whether the compound had been fully secured yet. Let Yuri and the federal teams finish what remained. I had already found the only thing that mattered.

“Are you hurt?” I asked her, pulling back enough to study her face and her wrists.

“I’m okay. Scared. Exhausted.” She pressed a hand to her stomach. “The baby’s okay. I think. I don’t know for certain, but nothing’s felt wrong.”

“You’re never out of my sight again after tonight. I mean that absolutely.”

She didn’t argue but just chuckled. She simply let me lead without a single word of protest, her hand gripping mine.

We emerged from the cell block into chaos still settling into order, federal agents securing rooms while my men stood down from positions they’d held throughout the assault. Somewhere further inside, medics were already working on two rescued fighters, a sign that tonight had accomplished more than simply recovering my wife.

Yuri joined us near the main corridor, blood on his knuckles and relief plain across his face at the sight of Camila. He simply nodded once as Camila whispered, “Thank you.”

“Graham,” I said, the single word carrying every ounce of what I still needed to see through to its end tonight.