Chapter 22 - Misha
The safe room is a crime scene.
I stand in the doorway, taking in the destruction. The reinforced door, buckled inward by breaching charges. The monitors, shattered, their screens dark. Overturned furniture, scattered debris, the acrid smell of explosives still hanging in the air.
And Anna—my sister—slumped against the far wall, blood matting her hair, her face pale in the dim emergency lighting.
I cross to her in three strides, my heart pounding. She's breathing. Unconscious but breathing. I check her pulse, her pupils, the wound on her head. Concussion, probably. Maybe worse. But alive.
"Anna." I tap her cheek gently. "Anna, wake up."
Her eyelids flutter. She groans, her hand reaching up to touch her head.
"Misha?" Her voice is slurred, confused. "What—where—"
"What happened? Where's Bianca?"
The question cuts through her confusion like a blade. Her eyes snap open, clarity flooding back along with something else. Horror. Grief.
"They took her." Her voice breaks on the words.
"They blew the door—Petrov tried to stop them—I heard the gunfire, and then the explosion, and they were inside before we could—" She clutches my arm, her nails digging into my skin.
"She fought, Misha. She fought so hard. But there were too many of them, and one of them hit me, and I—"
Tears stream down her face.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I couldn't stop them."
I stare at her, processing what she's saying. Bianca is gone. Sergei has her.
The entire assault—the coordinated strikes, the men dying on both sides, the desperate defense of the perimeter—all of it was a distraction. A diversion to keep me occupied while Sergei's real team slipped through the chaos and took her.
"How many?" I ask. My voice sounds strange to my own ears. Flat. Controlled. The voice of a man who has locked everything human away in a box and thrown away the key.
"Four. Maybe five. I couldn't—it was so fast, Misha. They knew exactly what they were doing."
"Did they say anything? Names, locations, anything?"
Anna shakes her head, then winces at the movement. "One of them called her by name. Said Sergei would be pleased. That's all I heard before—" She touches the wound on her head. "Before everything went dark."
I help her sit up more fully, propping her against the wall. She's shaking—shock, probably, combined with the head injury. She needs medical attention.
I key my radio. "Alexei. I need a medical team in the basement. Now. Anna is injured."
"On the way. What's the situation?"
"Bianca is gone. Sergei took her during the assault." I pause, forcing the next words out. "And start a full security review. Someone told Sergei exactly how to get to the safe room. Someone inside."
A long silence. Then: "Understood."
Anna grips my arm. "Find her, Misha. Please. Whatever it takes."
"I will."
The medical team arrives within minutes. I watch as they check Anna's vitals, shine lights in her eyes, prepare to move her. She protests weakly—she wants to help, wants to be part of the hunt—but she's in no condition to do anything except rest.
"Take care of her," I tell the medics. "And keep me informed of her condition."
They lift her onto a stretcher and carry her away. I remain in the ruined corridor, standing over Petrov's body, over the two attackers he took with him.
Petrov fought well. He did his duty to the last breath. I'll make sure his family is taken care of. It's the least I can do for a man who gave his life protecting what mattered most to me.
Alexei appears at the top of the stairs, his face grim.
"The security review," he says. "I've already started pulling data."
"And?"
"You're not going to like what I found."
We convene in my study—one of the few rooms untouched by the battle.
I stand at the window, staring out at the grounds where bodies are still being collected. Dawn is breaking, painting the carnage in shades of gold and pink. Beautiful. Obscene. The contrast makes my stomach turn.
"Tell me," I say without turning around.
Alexei pulls up data on his tablet. "The team that took Bianca—they didn't come through the main assault. They used an old service entrance on the east side of the house, one that connects to the basement via a back stairway."
"That entrance has been sealed for years."
"It was. Until three days ago, when someone reactivated the access codes."
I turn to face him. "Who?"
"Only a handful of people have the authority to modify those codes. You. Me." He pauses. "And Lenkov."
Yevgeni Lenkov. Head of internal security. Twenty-two years with my family. The man who was in the command center tonight, monitoring the internal feeds, calmly reporting that no one had breached the main house while Sergei's team was moving through corridors he'd opened for them.
"That's not proof," I say, though something cold is settling in my gut.
"There's more." Alexei swipes to another screen.
"I pulled his communication records. Encrypted calls to an unidentified number over the past three months.
The calls correspond with key moments in Sergei's planning—the surveillance increase we detected, the reconnaissance flights, the timing of tonight's assault. "
"How did we miss this?"
"He's good. Twenty-two years of learning our systems, our protocols, our blind spots. He knew exactly how to hide his tracks." Alexei's jaw tightens. "And he knew we trusted him enough not to look too closely."
I stare at the data, my mind working through the implications. Lenkov has been with us since before I was born. He watched me grow up. He was here when my parents died, helped me rebuild the security systems afterward. He knows this estate better than anyone.
Which is exactly why he was able to betray us so effectively.
"Where is he now?"
"Still in the command center. Acting like nothing happened. Coordinating the post-battle cleanup like he's the loyal soldier he's pretended to be for years."
"Bring him to the east basement. Armed escort. Don't tell him why."
Alexei nods and leaves.
I turn back to the window, my hands clenched at my sides. The rage is building—cold, controlled, deadly. The kind of rage that has fueled me since I was seventeen years old, standing over my parents' bodies and swearing vengeance.
Lenkov. A man I trusted. A man who sat in my command center tonight and watched while Sergei's team took Bianca.
I'm going to find out why. And then I'm going to kill him.
***
The interrogation room is in the basement of the east wing—a different basement from the safe room, older, more primitive. Concrete walls, a drain in the floor, hooks in the ceiling that have seen more use than I care to remember.
This is where we bring people who need to answer questions. The kind of questions that don't get answered any other way.
Lenkov is already there when I arrive, seated in a metal chair, his hands cuffed in front of him. He looks up as I enter, his weathered face showing confusion that might be genuine or might be a very good act.
"Misha." He straightens in the chair. "What's going on? Your men wouldn't tell me anything."
I don't answer. I remove my jacket, hang it on a hook by the door, and roll up my sleeves. Lenkov's eyes follow my movements, and I watch the confusion shift to something else. Wariness. The first flicker of fear.
"The service entrance on the east side of the house," I say, circling him slowly. "You reactivated the access codes three days ago."
"What? No, I—"
"Don't." The word cuts through the air like a blade. "I've seen the logs. Your authorization code. Your fingerprint on the security panel."
Lenkov's face goes pale. "Someone must have—"
I hit him. A sharp, brutal blow to the side of his face that snaps his head back and splits his lip open. Blood wells up immediately, dark against his weathered skin.
"Try again," I say.
He spits blood onto the concrete floor, his eyes wild now. "Misha, please—"
"The encrypted calls. Three months of them. Feeding Sergei information about our defenses, our protocols, our vulnerabilities." I grab his hair, forcing his head back. "You told him exactly how to get to Bianca. You opened the door and let his men walk right in."
"I didn't have a choice!"
The admission hangs in the air between us. Part of me was still hoping—still believing—that there might be another explanation. That the evidence was fabricated, that someone had framed him, that the man I'd trusted for twenty-two years wasn't capable of this betrayal.
But he just confessed.
I release his hair and step back, my knuckles throbbing. "Explain."
Lenkov takes a shaky breath, blood dripping from his split lip onto his shirt.
"Sergei approached me six months ago. He knew things—things about my past, things I thought were buried forever.
A debt I owed to people who don't forgive debts.
" He looks up at me, his eyes pleading. "He said if I didn't cooperate, he'd expose me.
Destroy me. But if I helped him, he'd make the debt disappear and pay me enough to vanish somewhere warm when it was over. "
"So you sold us out. For money. For a clean slate."
"I didn't think anyone would get hurt. He said he just wanted information. Intelligence. He never told me he was planning—"
I hit him again. Harder this time. His head rocks back and he nearly topples from the chair, catching himself at the last moment. When he straightens, his left eye is already swelling shut.
"He took her," I say quietly. "He took her, and you helped him, and you have the audacity to tell me you didn't think anyone would get hurt?"
"I'm sorry." The words come out slurred, distorted by his swelling lip. "God, Misha, I'm sorry. I never meant for it to go this far. I thought I could control it, limit the damage, but once I was in—"
"Where is she?"
"I don't know. Sergei never told me where he was taking her. He compartmentalized everything—I only knew what I needed to know to do my part."