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I decline as politely as I can manage given how little patience I have left for anything that isn’t Harper right now, and I don’t move from the chair I’ve pulled up beside her bed.

Yuri calls twice over the next few hours, updates me on the cleanup at the warehouse, and confirms that Viktor’s operation has taken losses significant enough to set him back months, if not longer.

I take both calls without leaving the room, keeping my voice low, my eyes never straying far from Harper’s face even while I’m handling everything else this night still demands of me. Marek’s expected to make a full recovery too, Yuri tells me on the second call, a small piece of good news I hold onto alongside everything else tonight has given me to carry.

She drifts in and out of sleep as the hours pass, IV fluids working slowly to undo some of what two days of captivity did to her body, and every time she stirs I’m already there, already reaching for her hand before she’s even fully awake enough to look for it.

“You’re still here,” she murmurs once, somewhere past midnight, eyes barely open.

“I told you I would be.”

“Everyone says that.” Her voice slurs slightly with exhaustion and whatever they’ve given her for the pain. “Not everyone means it.”

“I mean it.” I brush a strand of hair back from her face, watching her eyes flutter shut again almost immediately, the fight finally draining out of her now that there’s nothing left demanding her vigilance. “I’m not going anywhere, Harper. Not tonight. Not any night after this one either.”

She’s asleep again before I finish the sentence, and I sit there in the quiet, watching the steady rise and fall of her breathing, the monitor beside her bed tracking a heartbeat that’s finally settling into something closer to rest.

I don’t sleep myself, not for hours yet, content to watch her breathe, to know she’s here, safe, healing, exactly where I intend to keep her for as long as it takes, long after the sun eventually comes up on a day neither of us fully expected to see together.

40

ARTEM

The week after Harper comes home, I return to work in a register I haven’t needed in years, methodical rather than driven, cold calculation replacing the fear that carried me through the warehouse that night.

The desk in my study fills up with reports and maps again, the same tools I’ve used for fifteen years, though the purpose behind them feels different this time in a way I don’t examine too closely, a shift I’m not entirely ready to name out loud yet.

This isn’t rescue anymore. Rescue is finished. What’s left is business, and business requires a different kind of focus than fear ever did.

I start with the shipping routes Viktor’s been running through the corridor his father originally ceded, the same routes at the root of this entire conflict since before either of us inherited it.

Within three days, my people have seized control of two of his primary distribution points, cutting off supply lines he’s relied on for over a year without him ever fully understanding how exposed those lines actually were.

“He’s scrambling,” Yuri reports, laying out the latest intelligence across my desk the way he has every evening this week. “Lost contact with two of his lieutenants in the last forty-eight hours. One’s gone quiet entirely. The other reached out to a rival contact trying to broker protection.”

“Which contact?”

“Someone who already owes me a favor from three years back.” Yuri’s mouth twists into something that isn’t quite a smile. “He’s going to find out exactly how much loyalty that protection is actually worth.”

I nod, satisfied, and move to the next item on the list Yuri’s compiled, a warehouse complex on the east side that’s been laundering money through a shell company almost identical to the one that led us to Harper in the first place.

We seize it within the week, the operation running clean, efficient, none of the chaos that marked the assault on that first building. There’s a strange satisfaction in how cleanly it all comes together, everything unfolding exactly according to plan for once, nothing left to improvisation or luck.

Viktor himself proves harder to locate, moving between properties with a frequency that suggests he’s finally understood exactly how much danger he’s actually in.

It takes two more weeks of patient, methodical work, Yuri’s contacts narrowing the search the same careful way they narrowed it before, until we finally have a location solid enough to act on with confidence.

I recognize the pattern of it now, the same slow, deliberate process that eventually led us to Harper, and there’s a grim symmetry in using the exact same methods against the man responsible for taking her from me in the first place.

What happens after that, I don’t discuss in detail with anyone, including Yuri, or even with myself, more than I have to. Viktor’s organization stops functioning within days of that final piece falling into place.

His remaining lieutenants scatter in every direction, some fleeing the city entirely, others reaching out through intermediaries to negotiate terms of surrender I have no interest in granting. The Sokolov name, once a rival family with real territory and real leverage, dissolves into something considerably smaller than it’s been in decades, a legacy two generations in the making unraveling in the space of a single month, faster than either of us likely expected when this all started.

By the end of the month, word travels the way it always does in our world, quietly and faster than any announcement. Pakhans from three other cities send letters through Yuri, each one polite, none of them congratulating me.

“They’re telling you they understand,” Yuri says, setting the last letter on my desk. “And that they have no quarrel with the Leonov Bratva.”

“Good.” I don’t pick the letter up. “They watched what it costs to take something that belongs to me. I don’t need to say it twice.”