Chapter 13 Ivan
IVAN
He sleeps like a man who has forgotten how to be afraid.
It shouldn't be possible. Not after the week we've had. Not after gunfire and blood, after the file, after the gym, after the way he looked at me when he had me pinned and then retreated back into that polished emptiness, like slamming a vault door.
But here he is—breathing deep and steady, his mouth slightly parted in a way I've never seen when he's awake.
His eyelashes cast faint, curved shadows on his cheeks in the thin morning light.
His hands are loose, fingers resting open against the sheets.
One is tucked under the pillow, the other resting on the mattress as if he forgot to keep it close to a weapon.
My bed fits him.
That fact irritates me. It should look wrong. It should feel like a violation of the space I've kept sterile for years. Instead, it seems like he's been here longer than twelve hours. It feels like he belongs here.
I've been in the chair by the door since he fell asleep.
Not guarding the room—guarding him. The moment he finally let himself drop, the fear that he would simply stop breathing crawled into my throat and refused to leave.
He'd gone too long without sleep, too long without food, too long running on nothing but spite and discipline.
When his body finally gave in, it didn't drift; it crashed. A total systems failure.
He looks younger like this. Not twenty-three—he isn't twenty-three and hasn't been in years—but younger in the way a face changes when it isn't held in place by constant, grinding control.
The hard lines at the corners of his mouth aren't as severe.
His jaw isn't locked against a threat I can't see. His brow isn't waging a war of its own.
I remember the first time I saw him.
A sterile room in the facility. Fifteen candidates lined up like products on a shelf. Men trying too hard. Men trying to sell themselves with posture and aggression.
Maksim stood at the back and didn't sell anything. He watched. He waited. He didn't flinch when my gaze landed on him, didn't look away, didn't smile. He existed in a stillness that the other men couldn't replicate.
He feels like that man again when he sleeps. The original version. Before I put my hands on him. Before I wrote the instructions on how to break him.
Something in my chest shifts, sharp enough that I almost inhale wrong. It's not warmth. It's not softness. It's a tight, ugly pressure that makes me want to reach out and put my hand on his throat just to feel the life beating under my fingers.
I don't.
I keep my hands on the arms of the leather chair and let the restraint bite into me.
This is not the time to indulge in anything—neither sentiment nor guilt, nor the hunger that has been circling me since that night in the restaurant when I watched him turn bodies into silence.
I should be thinking about Boris.
I should be focused on the next strike, the next move, the next leak. I should be planning a counter-offensive that leaves my uncle with nothing but regret.
My phone vibrates against my thigh.
No sound, just that private pulse that makes my skin crawl.
I glance down, expecting a message from Alexei—another report, another name, another piece of the puzzle. Instead, the alert fills my screen in red block letters that don't care whether I'm ready for them.
PERIMETER brEACH DETECTED
SECURITY PROTOCOL COMPROMISED
AUTHENTICATION CODES ACCESSED
For a second, my brain stalls, unable to decide which part of the message to panic about first.
Then my body takes over.
Cold dread drops through my stomach, heavy and immediate. My mouth goes dry so quickly that my tongue feels stuck to the roof of my mouth.
I open the diagnostic packet with my thumb and scroll.
This isn't someone trying doors. It isn't a guard bribed in the lobby with an envelope of cash. It isn't a surveillance van parked outside with a long lens.
This is deeper.
This is the building's nervous system.
Elevators. Locks. Camera routing. Access logs. Dead zones. Override codes.
My eyes catch the timestamp, and my jaw tightens until it aches.
Overnight. Before dawn.
During the vendor handshake window.
That stupid, unavoidable slice of time when the security system pings the external update server for certificate validation and firmware compliance—something the building management insists on because the vendor sold it as "necessary for optimal performance.
" I signed off on it years ago because the vendor was the same one my father used at the Estate, and I believed blood meant protection.
Now the same shared backbone is a knife.
I scroll again. The access token doesn't just look valid—it looks familiar. Like a key that belongs in the lock.
The credential tag traces back to the Estate network.
Not a clean line, not "Boris Baranov" stamped in bold letters, but the kind of trace that reveals exactly who has the reach and patience to do this.
The kind of trace that shows someone used a legacy admin token—old, trusted, rarely audited because the men who designed the system never imagined it would be turned inward.
Boris.
My uncle doesn't need to send men to kick down a door if he can make the door forget it's locked.
The glass walls around the penthouse suddenly feel like a joke. Forty-seven floors up and still exposed, because the threat isn't climbing the walls. It's already inside the wiring.
I look out at the city without seeing it—all those streets, lights, and moving dots of cars. All that life I control in a thousand small ways.
None of it matters if the elevator opens for the wrong people.
I stand slowly.
The chair makes a faint sound against the floor—leather shifting against wood—and I pause, listening, absurdly afraid it will wake him.
Maksim doesn't stir.
He's gone deep. Good.
Bad.
I track the alert again. The breach occurred three hours ago.
That doesn't mean someone is in the building; it means they can be.
It means they harvested enough to build a route, enough to map my patterns, enough to know exactly which doors I lock and which I leave open.
Maybe the data is already sitting on a drive in Boris's pocket.
Maybe it's being passed to hitters while we breathe.
I don't have the luxury of guessing.
We need to leave.
Not to the Estate. Not to one of my city apartments. Those are inside the same ecosystem. Too many eyes. Too many hands. Too many ways to be cornered.
My mind cycles through options like a malfunctioning machine—because it's trained to. Because in a crisis, my brain makes lists.
Hotel? Laughable. Too many variables.
A safehouse under Alexei's control? If Boris has compromised my protocols, he can compromise the men who run them.
Out of state? Too slow. The airports will be watched. The highways are choke points.
There is one place that exists outside all of it.
A lake house three hours north. Purchased five years ago through shell companies layered like armor. Cash. Contractors from out of state who never learned my name. No paper trail that leads back to Ivan Baranov unless someone already knows where to dig, and no one knows where to dig.
No one knows it exists.
Not my father.
Not Boris.
Not even Maksim.
I built it for myself, for the day paranoia became a necessity.
That day is today.
I cross the room to the bed, moving quietly on the hardwood, and stop at the edge.
He's on his side, facing the door, as if even asleep his body chose the position with the best tactical awareness.
The sheets cover his waist and legs. His shoulders are bare.
The cotton shirt he wore last night is twisted slightly, exposing the side of his ribs where the bruise from the restaurant still stains him under the skin.
It's lighter now, turned from dark purple to that sickly yellow-green that means healing. His bandaged hands rest near his face.
I shouldn't be looking at him like this.
It feels like trespassing. It feels like looking at something sacred that I've already desecrated.
I stand over him anyway, caught between two impulses: let him sleep and keep him alive.
If we stay, we die.
If we leave, I wake him and pull him back into the world he's been trying to escape.
I choose survival.
"Maksim."
His eyes open instantly. The softness vanishes in a single breath. He's awake as if he was never asleep, focus snapping into place. He pushes himself upright, sheets slipping down, and his gaze lands on me with that automatic assessment: injury? threat? command?
"Sir," he says, his voice rough with sleep but steady. "What time—"
"We're moving." I keep it clipped. There's no room for questions that waste time. "The building's been breached. Security layer compromised. Authentication codes accessed."
His expression shifts. A small change at the corners of his eyes. Not surprise—calculation.
"How long?"
"I don't know," I say. "Three hours since the breach. They could already be in motion."
He swings his legs out of bed.
Bare feet hit the cold floor.
He doesn't look at the bed. He doesn't look at me. He moves as if snapping back into the only role that has ever felt safe—function. He reaches for his weapon on the nightstand before he even stands up.
"Where?"
I hesitate with the go-bag half-unzipped on the closet shelf because the question isn't just about geography.
It's about trust.
And trust is not something I can ask for casually, not after what he read, not after the way he went blank for days and only started to bleed back into himself when his body finally broke.
"Out of the city," I say. "Private location. Off-grid."
His eyes flick to my face.
A beat.
"You need to trust me," I add, because there's no way to dress it up.
His jaw works once. A swallow.
Then he nods and heads for the bathroom.
"I'll be ready."
I pack quickly.