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“I trusted you around my food. Around my staff. Around her.” Something in my chest winds tighter with every word instead of loosening. “And you’re standing here telling me you’d do it again.”

“Artem, please⁠—”

“I’m not finished.” I take another step. She’s flat against the counter now, nowhere left to go, both hands raised. “The Sokolovs know a woman’s under my protection. You’re going to tell me if that’s you too.”

“I didn’t tell anyone about her. I only messed with her food.” Her eyes are wet, darting between my face and the gun. “That’s the truth. I swear it.”

I hold the gun there for three full seconds, watching her face, her breathing, the way her pulse is visibly jumping in her throat.

I lower it. Don’t holster it.

“Yuri will search everything before you leave. Phone, bag, car.” I gesture toward the door with my chin, gun still in hand. “If he finds one thing connecting you to them, you don’t make it off this property.”

She nods so fast her whole head shakes.

“Ten minutes.” I finally holster the gun. “He will watch you while you do it.”

“Okay.” Barely audible.

I turn and walk out without another word.

Yuri’s in the hallway. I hand him the search instructions in four sentences, no room for follow-up questions, and walk past him toward the study.

I sit down at the desk. The folder’s still open where I left it, Yuri’s handwritten notes facing up. I pick up the pen sitting on top of it and cross out Nadia’s name where he’d written it at the top of the page, one hard line through the letters, then set the pen down and don’t touch it again.

Two knocks come at the door around thirty minutes later. It’s Yuri, and he’s alone.

“She’s clean. We didn’t find anything connecting her to the Sokolovs, and she’s already off the property.”

I nod once, and he leaves.

The kitchen below sits dark when I finally go check it myself an hour later, standing in the doorway, looking at a counter that’s already spotless, a radio that’s off for the first time in years. I don’t turn on the light. I stand there for a minute, then walk back upstairs.

20

HARPER

I’m pregnant with my captor’s child. I thought about ending it. I want to be honest about that too, at least here, alone in my own head where nobody’s listening.

The kitchen feels wrong the first time I walk through it after getting home from the hospital, and it takes me a second to place why.

No radio playing against the far wall anymore. No sharp voice cutting through the quiet the moment Artem’s out of earshot. A different woman I don’t recognize is chopping vegetables at the counter, younger and quieter, glancing up at me with nothing but polite disinterest before going back to her work without another word.

Nadia’s absence isn’t just a fact I was told in a hospital room. It’s a physical gap in the house now, one I keep noticing in small ways all afternoon. I catch myself glancing toward the doorway more than once, half expecting her to appear there the way she always used to, before remembering all over again each time, that she won’t.

I spend the rest of the day turning something over in my head before I take it anywhere near Artem. The person who tried to kill me is gone. Fired, removed, whatever consequences that carries for her happening somewhere outside this house now, none of it is my problem to track anymore.

Whatever danger justified keeping me contained in the first place has narrowed down to exactly nothing I can point to anymore, at least nothing he’s ever actually named to me directly. I walk the property twice that afternoon, retracing the same paths I mapped out weeks ago, letting the argument build itself into something I can stand behind by the time evening finally comes.

I even rehearse the whole thing under my breath at one point, catching myself mid-sentence and feeling faintly ridiculous, though I don’t stop.

I find him in the study that evening, and for once I don’t launch straight into it the way I usually do. I sit down across from him first, calmly, giving myself a full minute to organize the argument I’ve been building all day before I let any of it out, watching him finish reading whatever’s in front of him without rushing him toward the conversation.

The room feels different than usual too, quieter somehow.

“I want to talk about letting me go.”

He doesn’t look up right away, finishing whatever he’s reading before setting it aside, giving me his full attention. “Harper.”