Chapter 12 - Misha
The security reports blur on my screen.
I've read the same paragraph four times and I still couldn't tell you what it says. Something about perimeter sensors, motion detection upgrades, threat assessment protocols. Important things. Things that could mean the difference between life and death if Sergei makes his move.
But my mind isn't on Sergei.
It's on the greenhouse. On the way Bianca looked at me in the golden afternoon light, dirt smudged on her cheek, her dark hair escaping its braid. On the way her hand felt under mine—warm and calloused now, roughened by work, trembling slightly even though her voice stayed steady.
On the way she didn't pull away.
I push back from my desk and stand, pacing to the window. The grounds are dark, the guards moving in their careful rotations, everything exactly as it should be. Secure. Controlled.
I am not controlled. I am anything but controlled.
I've faced down enemies who wanted me dead.
I've survived an ambush that killed my parents, crawled through their blood, played dead while their murderers walked away laughing.
I've built walls around myself so thick that nothing could penetrate them—not grief, not loneliness, not the desperate wanting that I buried along with everything else from my former life.
And one accidental touch from Bianca has undone me more thoroughly than any bullet ever could.
My phone buzzes. Alexei.
"Talk to me," I say, grateful for the distraction.
"I've completed the assessment on Howard Crane's ranch." Alexei's voice is clipped, professional. "It's worse than we thought."
"How much worse?"
"He's holding at least eight women on the property. Maybe more—our surveillance couldn't get a complete count. The conditions are..." He pauses. "Brutal. He's not just keeping them. He's breaking them."
I think about Bianca on that stage, bathed in white light, her chin raised in defiance even as her world collapsed around her. She could have ended up somewhere like Crane's ranch. Could have been one of those women, broken and hollowed out, if I hadn't been there.
The thought makes my jaw clench.
"Security?"
"A dozen men, give or take. Well-armed but not well-trained.
The property is isolated—nearest neighbor is ten miles away.
Local law enforcement is either corrupt or oblivious.
" I hear papers shuffling on his end. "The weak point is the northern perimeter.
A drainage ditch runs under the fence line—big enough for a small team to access without triggering the main sensors. "
"Extraction time?"
"Fifteen minutes from breach to exit, if everything goes smoothly. Thirty if there are complications."
I close my eyes, running the variables through my mind.
A small team, surgical strike, in and out before anyone knows what happened.
It's risky—Crane has connections, and an attack on his property could draw attention we don't need.
But the plan is solid. The weaknesses are exploitable. It could work.
"What do you want me to do with this information?" Alexei asks. The same question he asked before, when I first requested the intelligence.
I think about Bianca in the greenhouse, her hands in the dirt, asking about the other women from the auction. Is there anything I can do? The way she pushed past her own terror to think about someone else's suffering.
She asked. And I want to be the kind of man who can answer yes.
"Assemble a team," I say. "Six men—our best. I want the operation planned by tomorrow night, execution within forty-eight hours."
Silence on the line. Then: "You're serious."
"Did I stutter?"
"No, but—" Alexei chooses his words carefully. "This isn't our fight. We don’t know if Crane is really connected to Sergei or the Morozovs. If we hit his operation and word gets out, it could complicate things. Draw attention at a time when we need to be invisible."
"Then make sure word doesn't get out."
"Misha—"
"This isn't a discussion, Alexei. Assemble the team. Plan the operation. We extract those women, and we do it cleanly. Understood?"
Another pause. Then: "Understood."
I end the call and stand in the darkness, the weight of the decision settling over me. It's not strategic. It's not rational. It's the opposite of everything I've built my life around—cold calculation, careful planning, never acting on emotion.
But Bianca asked.
And apparently that's enough now.
***
Mrs. Novak finds me an hour later, still staring at security reports I haven't read.
"Miss Bianca has requested to take dinner in the dining room tonight," she says from the doorway. "Rather than her room."
I look up. "Has she."
"Yes. She asked if you would be joining her."
The words hang in the air between us. Mrs. Novak's expression is carefully neutral, but I've known her for twenty years. I can see the curiosity she's trying to hide.
I should say no. Should maintain distance, keep things professional, remember that she's here because she has no other options, not because she wants to be. Eating dinner together in the candlelit dining room is not maintaining distance.
"Tell her I'll be there in twenty minutes," I say.
Mrs. Novak nods, and if she's surprised, she doesn't show it. "I'll have the table set for two."
She withdraws, and I'm left alone with the realization that I've just agreed to something I'm almost certainly going to regret.
***
The dining room is oppressive in its grandeur.
A long mahogany table that could seat twenty, lit by candelabras that cast dancing shadows on the dark walls. Oil paintings of Kashkin ancestors stare down with disapproving eyes. The ceiling is vaulted, lost in shadow, like a cathedral designed by someone with a taste for the macabre.
Bianca is already seated when I arrive, a glass of wine in her hand. She's changed from her work clothes into something simpler—a soft green sweater that brings out the gold flecks in her eyes, her hair loose around her shoulders. The candlelight catches the planes of her face, softening her edges.
She looks beautiful. She looks like she belongs in a different world entirely.
"This room is terrifying," she says by way of greeting.
"The shipping magnate who built this house had a flair for the dramatic." I take the seat across from her—close enough to talk, far enough to maintain the illusion of propriety. "He wanted his guests to feel small."
"It's working."
Mrs. Novak appears with the first course—soup, something with butternut squash—and disappears again with practiced invisibility. The silence that follows is awkward, weighted with everything we're not saying.
I take a sip of wine. So does she. Our eyes meet over the rims of our glasses.
"Tell me about this house," she says finally. "Its history. I've been living in it for days and I don't know anything about it."
"What do you want to know?"
"Anything." She sets down her glass. "I'm tired of silence and my own thoughts."
So I tell her.
I tell her about the shipping magnate—a man named Cornelius Blackwood, who made his fortune in the China trade and spent it building a monument to his own ego.
I tell her about the scandals that followed him, the rumors of smuggling and worse, the mysterious circumstances of his death in the tower room that no one uses anymore.
I tell her about my grandfather, who won the house in a card game in 1962 from Blackwood's bankrupt grandson. Who saw in its gothic bones something that suited our family's temperament—all shadows and sharp edges, built to intimidate.
I tell her about my parents, who tried to make it a home despite everything. Who filled the rooms with children's laughter and my mother's piano playing and, for a brief few years, something that almost resembled normalcy.
She listens without interrupting, her soup growing cold as I speak. When I finally stop, she's quiet for a long moment.
"And then they died," she says. "Your parents."
"Yes."
"How?"
I've told this story before, in clinical terms, stripped of emotion. The ambush. The roadside. The bullets. But something about the way she's looking at me—not with pity, but with a kind of cautious understanding—makes me want to give her more than the bare facts.
"They were coming home from a business dinner," I say slowly. "My father, my mother and Dmitri. Anna and me, we were at home with Mrs. Novak."
The candles flicker. Shadows dance on the walls.
"The Ivanovs hit them on a deserted stretch of road. Shot out the tires, then opened fire on the car. My father tried to shield my mother—" I stop, the memory rising like bile in my throat. "It didn't matter. They were both dead within seconds."
"But Dmitri survived."
"He played dead. Lay in their blood until the shooters left, then crawled to the road and flagged down help." I meet her eyes. "He was seventeen. By morning, he was the man of the house. By nightfall, we'd both sworn to destroy everyone responsible."
"And did you?"
"Eventually. It took years. But yes."
She absorbs this in silence. I wait for the judgment, the horror, the realization that she's sitting across from a man who's dedicated his life to vengeance and violence.
"I'm sorry," she says finally. "That you went through that."
"Don't feel sorry for me. I made my choices."
"Choices made at fifteen, after your parents died." She shakes her head. "That's not the same as choosing freely."
I don't have a response to that. No one has ever framed it that way before—as something done to me rather than something I became.
The main course comes and goes—lamb, roasted vegetables, food I barely taste. We talk about other things now. Lighter things, though nothing between us feels truly light.
She tells me about medical school. About the first time she held a human heart—removed from a cadaver, still and silent, but miraculous in its complexity. About how she cried afterward, not from horror but from awe.