Chapter 13
ROLAN
My blood turns to ice, locking inside my veins and making my entire body go still. Every muscle, every nerve, every synapse is firing the same message: danger .
Elizabeth Calloway is standing in the archway of my dining room.
She’s in socks. That’s the first thing I register — absurdly, irrationally, as if the absence of shoes is the problem and not the fact that the most dangerous men in Chicago are currently looking at her.
She’s in jeans and a sweater, and her hair is loose.
She’s staring at me knowing full well she made a mistake.
But she doesn’t understand the magnitude.
She can’t understand the magnitude. Because she thinks this is a business dinner. She thinks the man at the other end of my table is a client, a partner, a contact in the import business.
She doesn’t know who Besnik Dushku is, or that Marku, the man to Dushku’s left, runs a trafficking operation through the Balkans that moves human beings like livestock, or that the guards flanking them have done things that would make her unable to sleep for the rest of her life.
And that every person in this room is currently assessing her, cataloging her face, her build, her relationship to me, her potential utility as leverage.
She is standing in a room full of wolves in socks and a sweater, and she has no fucking idea.
I stand. The motion is controlled because if I move the way my body wants to move, I will flip this table and put a bullet in every man who turned his head to look at her.
Every. Single. One.
The urge is so acute that I have to press my fingers against the wood to keep them from reaching for the gun holstered beneath my jacket. It’s not rational. It’s primal.
They’re looking at her.
Dushku turns in his chair with languid ease. His eyes travel over Elizabeth with an unhurried thoroughness that makes my vision narrow to a single, bright point.
“Well,” he says. “Who is this?”
I’ll kill him. The thought is clean and certain. I want to walk around this table and put my hands on his throat and squeeze until the smile stops.
I don’t.
I can’t act on impulse in front of my enemies. Not when every twitch of my body is being cataloged for weakness. Not when weakness is the one currency I cannot spend.
Elizabeth speaks first. Her voice is shaky but present, explaining about Anya, the fever, and the medicine.
She’s apologizing for interrupting dinner to help my sick daughter, and the apology hits me like a blade.
“Go,” I command. Mikhail moves to guide her through the archway.
She disappears.
I sit.
The conversation resumes. Dushku is studying me. He hasn’t stopped since she appeared. His features are pleasant. Neutral. But his eyes are filing, assigning value to what he witnessed.
He says nothing about her. That’s worse than if he had. Dushku’s silence is never empty — it’s storage. He’ll use what he saw when the time is right, and not a moment before.
But his associate has no such discipline.
Marku, who is not a bodyguard but a business partner, and who has spent the entire evening talking about women like commodities and cocaine like cuisine, leans back in his chair with a grin that shows too many teeth.
“Now that ,” Marku says, “is something I wouldn’t mind seeing at the negotiating table.”
The table goes quiet.
Marku doesn’t register it. He’s too drunk on wine and his own voice, too impressed with himself, too fundamentally stupid to read the temperature of a room that has dropped twenty degrees.
“Did you see her ass in those jeans?” He turns to one of Dushku’s guards, soliciting agreement like a comedian working a crowd. “I’d close the deal right now if she comes back and serves dessert. Hell, she can be the dessert?—”
“Marku.” Dushku’s voice comes with a warning. But it’s too late and too mild. It doesn’t matter because the words are already in the air, and the air is already poisoned.
I look at Marku. I don’t speak. I don’t need to.
I memorize his face. The exact distance from where I’m sitting to where he’s sitting, the shape of his filthy mouth that forms words about a woman he will never touch, will never speak to, and will never see again.
“The woman,” I say, and my voice is steady in the way that a wire is steady before it snaps, “is not available for discussion.”
The room recalibrates. Marku’s grin falters. He gazes at Dushku, but his face reveals nothing.
We spent two hours building the negotiation tonight. Territory lines, revenue splits, mutual non-interference. The framework of a détente that would have saved both sides blood and money. Reasonable terms.
None of it matters now.
The meal continues, and I remain seated at the head of my table and speak when required and agree to nothing. I stall everything and count the minutes until I can end this and do what needs to be done.
After thirty more minutes of pointless conversation, I walk them out personally.
It’s protocol. The host escorts his guests to the gate in a show of respect. A final gesture, the civilized veneer that men in our world apply to the surface of things so we can pretend we’re not what we are.
The night is cold, turning my breath to smoke. My men line the path from the front door to the gate, positioned at intervals, visible and armed.
Dushku’s four men walk in formation around him, compact, alert. Marku trails behind them, adjusting his collar against the cold, already reaching for his phone.
I bet he’s composing a message to whatever woman he’ll purchase for the evening, already forgetting the room he left and the line he crossed.
At the gate, I shake Dushku’s hand. His grip is firm, and his eyes are steady. Whatever he’s thinking about what happened tonight, he keeps it behind the mask.
“A productive evening,” he says. “We’ll finalize the details.”
“We will,” I say. I don’t mean it. He probably knows I don’t mean it. That’s the game.
He steps through the gate. His men follow. Marku follows last.
They are no longer under my roof.
I draw the gun from beneath my jacket. The SIG Sauer is cold against my palm. The motion is smooth, the muscle memory of a thousand repetitions. I raise it, sight aligned, and in the fraction of a second between aim and trigger, I wish I had more time.
I wish I could take this man to the warehouse on Loomis. I wish I could make him say her name — say it respectfully, say it the way it should be said, with every syllable — and then make him apologize.
But I don’t have time, and even if I did, the ending would be the same. Some debts can only be paid in full and in one installment.
I fire one shot directly to the back of Marku’s head, and he drops to the gravel without a sound.
The world detonates.
Guns appear. Dushku’s guards spin, and my men are already positioned, barrels up, sights locked. The air fills with the metallic chorus of slides racking and safeties disengaging.
Dushku turns. His face is unmasked for the first time tonight.
“What the fuck,” he says, the accent sharpening his consonants into blades, “was that?”
I lower the gun. Not away but down at my side, still in my hand.
“Your man should have learned to behave in someone else’s house.”
“You gave your word.” His voice is shaking with rage. The certain, incandescent fury of a man who has been publicly humiliated and is calculating the cost in real time. “You promised safety?—”
“Under my roof.” I gesture toward the gate with the barrel. “He’s not under my roof anymore.”
Dushku stares at me. Ten seconds. Fifteen. The guards on both sides are frozen — a single movement, a single twitch, and this becomes a massacre on both sides.
“You’ll regret this,” he says, his fury compressed into a quietness far more dangerous than any scream. “Belov. You will fucking regret this.”
“Take your dead,” I say. “And go.”
He holds my gaze for three more seconds. Then he turns to his men, speaking Albanian. Two guards holster their weapons and move to the body. They lift it between them and carry it to the SUV idling down the drive.
Dushku walks to the vehicle without looking back. The door opens and closes. The engine revs.
The convoy pulls away. Taillights shrink into the dark.
I stand at the gate with my gun at my side and the cold biting my face. I feel nothing except the weight of what I’ve done and the absolute certainty that I would do it again.
“Rolan.”
Alexei. Beside me. Close enough that I can hear the controlled tension in his breathing.
“Tell me you didn’t do that.” His voice is stripped of its usual flatness. Raw. “Tell me you did not execute an Albanian envoy outside your own gate after a peace negotiation.”
I holster the gun.
“You know what you started,” he says. Not a question.
“I know.”
“This is a war. Not territory games anymore. Dushku will come for blood.”
“I know.”
“Then why?—”
“Do not mistake our partnership for permission to question my decisions.”
The words land. Alexei takes the hit. He’s silent for a long moment, and I see the moment he understands. Not the full picture. But enough.
He doesn’t say her name. He doesn’t need to.
“Clean up the gravel,” I say. “Double the perimeter guard. Overnight. Until further notice. ”
I turn and walk back toward the house.
With the staff dismissed, the house is even quieter than usual.
Alexei is handling the aftermath, calls to the brigadiers, security briefings, the rapid, efficient machinery of a Bratva preparing for war. Dmitri is coordinating the external response. Every mechanism is now in motion.
I take the stairs in the dark. My footsteps are silent on the carpet. The gun is still warm against my ribs.
I’m three steps from Anya’s door when it opens and Elizabeth steps into the hall.
She nearly collides with my chest. A sharp intake of breath, one hand flying up. Then she registers who I am, and the startle dissolves into a different kind of tension. Her cheeks flush.
“Mr. Belov.” She takes a step back, creating distance. “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you coming.”
Nobody does.
“How is she?” I ask.
“Better. The fever broke. I gave her another dose of ibuprofen at nine, and she’s been resting well since.
” Her gaze drops to the floor. “I owe you an apology. For tonight. For the dinner. I never should have come downstairs. I know you told me to stay out of sight, but Anya’s temperature spiked and I panicked, and I?—”
“When did the fever start?”
She blinks at the interruption. “Yesterday evening. It was low. It broke overnight, and she seemed fine this morning, so I didn’t?—”
“You didn’t tell me.”
The words come out quieter than I intend, which makes them land harder. She hears the difference. Her shoulders draw back.
“The fever was mild,” she says carefully. Choosing each word. “It resolved on its own. You had an important dinner to prepare for, and I didn’t want to add unnecessary worry when the situation seemed under control. If I’d had any indication it would return that quickly, I would have?—”
“Elizabeth.” Her name stops her mid-sentence.
“If my daughter has a fever, any temperature above normal, at any hour of the day or night, I need to know. Immediately. Not after it resolves. Not after you’ve managed it on your own.
Not after you’ve decided whether it warrants my attention. Immediately.”
She swallows. Nods.
I can see it clearly now. She is a woman who has spent her entire life handling crises alone.
“You don’t have to manage everything on your own,” I say. “Not here. Not with her.”
The words surprise me. They surprise her more. I watch the shift in her expression, the brief crack in the composure she maintains so carefully. She recovers quickly, pressing her lips together and straightening.
“It won’t happen again,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
I turn toward Anya’s door. Through the gap Elizabeth left, I can see the crescent moon nightlight casting pale light across the floor. There’s a damp cloth folded neatly on the nightstand beside the bottle of children’s ibuprofen.
“Is she still awake?” I ask.
“She fell asleep about ten minutes ago. She fought it for a while, saying she wanted to wait up for you, but the medicine made her drowsy.”
I rest my hand on the door frame while watching a small body curled around Mr. Whiskers, breathing slowly and steadily, cheeks still carrying the faintest blush of the fever’s aftermath.
I could go in, but I know how lightly she sleeps when she’s been ill, and waking her now would undo the rest Elizabeth worked hard to give her. I’ll see her in the morning.
I turn back to Elizabeth and remember what she did tonight.
She doesn’t know what I am. Not yet.
Standing here, I find myself considering whether the time has come for that to change. If she deserves to understand the precise nature of the man who employs her.
Or whether knowing would be the thing that finally makes her leave.
But then I think about Katarina. She knew exactly who I was, and she exploited it to her advantage. Would Elizabeth do the same?
I’m not ready to find out.
“Goodnight, Elizabeth,” I nod.
“Goodnight, Mr. Belov.”
She moves past me toward her room. She doesn’t look back. Her door closes with a soft, definitive click, and the hallway returns to silence. I’m left with the dense weight of the evening settling across my shoulders.
I started a war tonight because of her.
She doesn’t know it. She may never know it.
But I do.
And I don’t forget debts.