Chapter 34
ROLAN
“What do you mean, she’s gone?”
My voice fractures the silence of the office, sharp enough to split marble.
Mikhail stands behind the desk with his hands clasped. Two other men flank him: Savin, rigid as a pillar, and the guard personally assigned to the bunker. The one whose sole purpose on this earth, whose singular directive for as long as he keeps breathing, is to remain posted at that steel door.
He has no business standing in this room. His presence alone carves through my patience.
The words refuse to settle. They ricochet inside my skull, colliding with every instinct, every calculation I failed to make tonight. I grip the edge of the desk and feel the wood groan under my fingers.
Two hours ago, Alexei’s intel placed Dushku at the southeastern docks — Pier Fourteen, the receiving warehouse we’d flagged for weeks.
The report was clean: product on site, armed personnel, minimal resistance anticipated.
Alexei swore the bastard would be there.
I wanted him to be right. I needed him to be right .
I drove there myself, a hundred and ten on the expressway, knuckles blanched against the steering wheel, the hunger for confrontation pulsing in my temples.
And I arrived to find what the intelligence promised — product, men, a warehouse ripe for the taking.
Zero resistance worth mentioning. A gift wrapped in a perfect ribbon.
Too perfect.
I realized within four minutes that Dushku wasn’t coming.
His fingerprints were absent. No encrypted radios, no reinforced exits, no contingency measures.
The warehouse had been staged — dressed to receive me and designed to keep me occupied.
But even knowing that, I stayed. I killed every man I could reach, as if the violence itself might fill the gap widening in my chest.
Then Mikhail’s call shattered what remained of the illusion.
“Rolan, the house.”
Two words. I didn’t answer. I didn’t ask for details. I dropped the phone, crossed the warehouse floor with blood still drying on my forearms, and seized the nearest vehicle — a black sedan with the keys already in the ignition. I pulled out before the engine had fully turned over.
The expressway stretched before me, a vein of asphalt splitting the city apart. I drove through every shortcut I knew, every back road carved into muscle memory from years of navigating this territory at dangerous speeds. I used them all.
Traffic signals bled together. Lane dividers ceased to exist.
My house. My family. Under attack, and I was twelve miles away playing a role in someone else’s script.
The gate was still open when I arrived. Guards flanked the perimeter, weapons lowered, and the estate basked in the cold, white glare of the security floodlights. Men moved in organized patterns — sweeping, documenting, securing. The aftermath of an assault being processed with efficient calm.
Too contained. Too orderly .
I took the stairs three at a time, my blood-streaked hands leaving smudges on the banister. The hallway toward my office felt interminable, each step echoing against the realization crystallizing in my mind.
And now I’m standing here, staring at the guard who let her walk through that door.
“Rolan, you need to stay calm,” Mikhail cautions.
Calm . The word tastes foreign on my tongue, absurd in this context, insulting in its inadequacy.
“Don’t.” I raise one hand, palm out, trembling with the effort of restraint. “Don’t fucking tell me to stay calm.”
I round on the guard. He has the decency to stare at the floor, which is the only reason I haven’t crossed the distance between us.
“She said she needed?—”
“You. Let. Her. Go.” Each syllable drops from my mouth like venom. “During an active threat. You abandoned your post, and you let her walk out of the only secure room in this house.”
The guard swallows. His jaw clenches. He offers nothing further.
I turn away from all of them and face the window. Outside, the grounds stretch in orderly lines beneath those merciless floodlights. Everything appears restored. Controlled. Normal.
But it isn’t. None of this is normal.
The assault tonight was coordinated enough to drag me to the docks, yet thin enough to be repelled in twenty minutes.
They saw our defenses during the last incursion.
They mapped our response times. If Dushku had committed a genuine force, we would still be fighting. Bodies would line the corridors.
He didn’t send everything he had. He sent enough. Enough to pull me away. Enough to occupy the perimeter guards. Enough to create a window.
A window for what?
The rage surging through me has no clean outlet and nowhere to discharge. I flatten both palms against the desk and force air through my lungs — or try to. The room contracts around me. The walls press inward. Every surface feels inadequate to contain what is building behind my ribs.
How did they let this happen?
How did I let this happen?
I called her a mistake. I shoved those words into the narrow space between us and watched her face collapse.
I haven’t seen the security tapes yet, but Mikhail told me what happened in the ones that survived the attack.
She ran.
The first explosion hit, and she didn’t go back to Anya, to the safety of the bunker. She fled in the opposite direction, away from my house, from my daughter, from me , until she was out of sight.
Fuck!
She ran because I gave her a reason to run.
I handed her the blade and told her to cut herself free.
The thought lodges in my chest — a burning coal, persistent, glowing, eating through every barrier I constructed to keep it at a safe distance.
I rake both hands through my hair, pacing the length of the office, my boots marking a restless circuit across the hardwood. Mikhail watches in silence. Savin hasn’t moved. The useless guard stares at the floor as if hoping it might open and swallow him whole.
And then a small creature appears in the doorway.
Anya stands at the threshold in her pajamas, Mr. Whiskers clutched against her chest, dark hair cascading around her face. She surveys the room, eyes moving from Mikhail to Savin to the guard to me. Cataloging. Weighing.
Every man in the room holds his breath simultaneously.
“Papa.” Her voice is small. Unwavering. “Where’s Ellie? ”
The question lands in the center of my chest, and with it comes the clarity I should have reached minutes ago.
Elizabeth might have fled from me. She might have decided she’d had enough of my cruelty, enough of my contradictions, enough of the cage I built around her and called protection. As much as that possibility ignites fury in my veins, I can comprehend the logic behind it.
But she would never leave Anya. Not without a word. Not without pressing her lips to that small forehead and promising to come back. And certainly not in the middle of gunfire and shattered glass.
But then why do the security cameras show her running?
Shit. Maybe I’m missing information. Context. Was someone else in her ear? I should have tapped her fucking phone.
What if…
The idea rearranges every assumption. The too-easy assault, the calculated distraction, the surgical precision of the timing — what if none of it was designed to test our defenses?
They came for her. They breached, they seized what they wanted, and they vanished before anyone understood what had truly been lost.
Someone must have told her to run away when the first bomb went off. For her own good… and maybe for Anya’s safety as well.
It’s the only explanation I can think of.
But who?
I cross the room to my daughter. I lower myself to one knee, bringing my eyes level with hers. Her cheeks carry the faint, dried traces of tears. The sight temporarily drains the fury from me. What remains is heavier, colder, infinitely more difficult to carry.
“I don’t know where she is right now,” I say. The truth, delivered in the voice I preserve only for this child — stripped of authority, carrying nothing but the raw, unbearable honesty she deserves.
Anya’s face does what it always does when she is processing things she desperately wishes weren’t real. The small frown. The tightening around her mouth. The monumental effort of containment. Then her chin trembles, and the dam fractures.
“I want Ellie back.” The words emerge fractured at their edges, the sob beneath them barely restrained. “Papa, I want her back. Bring her back.”
A wave of agony tears open inside my chest as I gather her into my arms. Her small hands grip the fabric of my shirt, and she presses her face into my shoulder, crying.
I hold her as she trembles against me, and my mind floods with an image I cannot silence: Elizabeth’s hands pressed over Anya’s ears in the foyer, positioning her own body between my daughter and the chaos.
I pull back enough to frame her face in my hands. The blood crusted across my knuckles has dried to a dark rust, and I notice the contradiction with a detachment that is its own kind of wound — the hands that killed tonight are now holding the most delicate thing in my world.
“Listen to me, malaya .” I hold her gaze. “I am going to bring her home. Do you hear me? She is coming back to this house, and she is never leaving again.”
Anya searches my face with the same scrutiny she always performs — the weighing, the measuring, the unspoken demand for proof that I mean every syllable.
“Promise?”
“Yes.” No hesitation. No caveat. No room left for uncertainty. “I will bring her back to us.”
Anya nods once and presses her face back into my shoulder. Her grip tightens, and I feel the exact moment her breathing begins to steady, the trust settling into her small frame.
I hold her, and over her head, I meet Mikhail’s gaze. Whatever he reads in my expression straightens his spine by several degrees.
“Every resource,” I say. My voice has gone perfectly level. “Every contact. Every surveillance feed, every intercepted frequency, every informant we’ve ever turned. I want a location in two hours.”
Mikhail nods once.
“And, Mikhail.” He pauses at the door. Anya’s fingers curl tighter around my collar, and I lower my voice to a register meant only for him. “When I find Dushku, he doesn’t go quickly.”
Mikhail departs without another word. The door closes behind him with a soft, definitive click.
I remain on my knee with my daughter folded against my chest, and I promise that she will sleep in my room tonight and that I will stay beside her until she falls asleep. She accepts both with a nod and a tighter grip on Mr. Whiskers.
At least one of those promises is already true.
The others I will make true even if it costs me everything I have left to give.