Chapter 15 - Damian
The council chamber feels smaller than it ever has. Mikhail is pacing like a caged wolf, boots thudding against the marble floor, while Iosif sits with his fingers steepled beneath his chin, calculating.
I stand at the head of the long table, the wood scarred by decades of arguments that never mattered as much as this one. My family watches me as though waiting for a verdict.
Mikhail slams his palm down.
“We strike back now. No hesitation. No half-measures. Anton isn’t hiding—he’s advancing.”
“We don’t have full intel,” Iosif counters, voice smooth enough to hide the tremor beneath. “Acting blindly is exactly what he wants. We need to know how deep the infiltration goes.”
I listen, but their words scrape uselessly across my nerves. My mind is already ahead of them, tracing the shape of the next attack. Every instinct, honed by years of reading people who lie for a living, whispers the same thing: Anton doesn’t waste time. His next move will be personal.
And personal means Harper.
I don’t let my expression shift, even when the thought sharpens behind my ribs. I only feel the tremor of restraint in my hands.
“Mikhail. Iosif.” My voice cuts clean through their argument. “Time is not a luxury we have. He’s already inside our systems. He’s already watching us. We’re reacting to a game that’s been running for months.”
They fall silent. I already know how the rest of this day unfolds, and I hate every version of it.
By late afternoon, the dusk over my head feels like a warning. I stay in motion, installing security protocols myself because I no longer trust anyone else to touch the network. Not after the fucking transmitter we found buried like a parasite in my own walls.
Harper shadows me despite her protests, her steps soft but certain. She hates the idea of being moved into the secured command center, but I refuse to entertain her resistance.
“This is excessive,” she complains as I enter the last access code.
“It’s necessary.”
“You mean it makes you feel in control.”
I look at her. Her tired yet determined eyes reflect the dim glow of the monitors. I know she’s right; control is a fantasy, but I cling to it anyway.
“Control doesn’t matter,” I say. “Keeping you alive does.”
Her expression changes, but she doesn’t argue again. She just steps into the room as the reinforced door seals behind us with a hydraulic hiss.
Not even five minutes after we’re back in the command center, a live feed flickers to life. The tech executives mutter frustratedly under their breaths, but it all goes over my head until—
Inessa’s face appears with the kind of glossy composure she wears like a second skin. Her makeup is immaculate, her smile soft and venom-laced. She doesn’t speak at first, letting the silence draw tight as wire. Everyone freezes where they are for a moment, taking her in.
“How the fuck is she—” Mikhail begins to shout, only to be intercepted by file after file blooming onto the screen; confidential documents stamped with Ignatov seals with Harper’s signature looping at the bottom like an executioner’s flourish.
My blood goes cold.
The documents look real and convincing enough to damn her without trial. Inessa narrates them like a bedtime story.
“Harper Ignatov assisting Anton’s laundering channels. Who could have imagined such betrayal so close to home? Tragic, really.”
Harper exhales a strangled sound. She steps closer to the screen, eyes narrowing, scanning code, metadata, timestamps; they are all forged with surgical precision.
Kiro curses behind us. Mikhail shouts into a comm channel. The entire room erupts in overlapping voices.
Harper only looks at me, her gaze expectant. As if she expects, even now, that I might doubt her.
How could she even think—after all we have been though—
“I know these are fake,” I state matter-of-factly.
Her shoulders loosen by a fraction, as if the air itself gives her back a piece of herself.
Then the alarms scream.
Loud shouts to get that redhead quick fill in the room as law enforcement and federal agents burst in to arrest her. The screens flash red with perimeter breaches, incoming orders, warrants already filed.
The room spins, voices rising in panic, guards drawing weapons.
“Seal the gates,” I snarl, loud enough to carry over the panic.
Kiro’s stormy eyes narrow as he hesitates.
“Damian—”
“Now!”
My voice thunders through the room like a nuclear blast. The guards freeze as their shouting cuts off.
The words leave me, full of conviction, the final gong before the cavalry is released in a war—“Any hand raised against my wife will answer to me directly.”
Silence.
Harper stares at me, something wide and raw flickering behind her eyes.
The ground beneath my feet shakes, a deep reverberation echoing through all of us. An explosion.
Anton’s mercenaries have arrived.
My legs jump into action without a second thought. Smoke climbs the windows as we move.
The ground vibrates with precise and well-timed concussive blasts.
Fucking hell. He knows the estate layout too well. He knows where we run and where we hide.
Kiro barks orders into comms while escorting Harper ahead of us. Mikhail curses in Russian as he fires back toward the collapsing east wall. Alarms howl as sprinkler systems activate, spraying mist through the corridor like artificial rain.
Through this Armageddon, Harper pushes against her escort, breath sharp.
“Damian—”
“Keep going,” I tell her, placing a hand on her back, guiding her forward. Her spine trembles beneath my palm, the only sign she’s afraid.
We sprint through the emergency tunnel beneath the estate, the sound of distant gunfire echoing like metal thunder overhead. At the far exit, one of our armored vehicles waits, engine running, lights off.
We pile inside and the driver floors it.
A painful vibration and a piercing shatter makes me look through the glass. Like the scene of an action movie, the house of generations, the home I rebuilt from ashes once before, erupts in fire.
The flames spill skyward, lighting the frozen river in violent orange. It looks like the world is burning from the inside out.
Harper turns, watching through the window. Her reflection blends with the flames, her features carved in flickering gold. She holds herself still, as if movement might shatter her.
The safe house is silent when we arrive, the kind of silence that makes every sound too loud. The vehicle doors slam.
I sit beside her in the dim living room, elbows on my knees, hands clasped so tightly my palms ache. Nothing has set in yet. My world feels like it’s stuck in one place, and the whole world has left me behind.
Words feel small, flimsy against the ruin we just left behind. I have Harper with me, looking at the fire staining the horizon as though trying to memorize its shape.
I open my mouth, the words on the tip of my tongue when the door crashes open.
Kiro storms inside, sweat on his brow, a laptop under his arm like a weapon.
“Damian, look.”
He flips the screen toward us. A line of code stares back at us unassumingly.
Harper’s brows furrow. “What is this?”
Kiro exhales through his teeth. “The trigger sequence for the assault on the estate. Someone activated it from inside our own servers. Look at the embedded root key.”
Her face drains of color.
“That’s…that’s my encryption prefix,” she whispers. “That’s—that’s my old schema, from before—”
Harper’s code.
Her work twisted into a weapon. My lungs finally unlock, dragging air in with a sound that feels like breaking.
Kiro looks between us as he goes on, “The signal that called the mercenaries, that identified the estate as a valid target—it originated from her algorithm. It’s a perfect mirror of her work.”
Harper’s hands fly to her mouth.
“I—I didn’t do this,” she says, voice cracking. “Damian, I swear to you—I didn’t—this isn’t—someone replicated my code, someone used—”
“I know,” I say.
But knowing the truth doesn’t make this any less catastrophic.
The screen continues flashing the lines of betrayal, each string of data another twist of the blade. The sirens are now an approaching chorus, closing in like wolves following blood-scent.
Kiro lowers his voice.
“If we stay here, the Council will find us in minutes. And if they believe she triggered the attack—”
“They won’t take her,” I snap.
He nods, but he’s pale.
“Then we run now.”
Behind me, Harper is shaking her head, bewildered, frantic.
“Damian, I don’t know how they got this—I don’t know how—”
“Harper.” I grip her shoulders. “Look at me.”
She does, with those brown eyes that have stabilized me ever since I’ve known them.
“We leave,” I say. “Now.”
Her throat bobs as she nods.
Kiro moves to the back entrance, already scanning perimeter signals and encrypted alerts. The safe house groans with the weight of winter settling into its bones.
I crush down the grief curled in my chest. I don’t have time for it.
“Damian…” Harper’s voice is barely a whisper. “They used my code. They used me.”
“I know.” My voice comes out rougher than I intend. “We’ll find who did it. We’ll make them answer for it.”
She closes her eyes for a second, and when she open them, they’re blazing fiercely. That’s the Harper I know.
“Then let’s move.”
I take her hand and she grips back.
Kiro curses from the door. “We have company.”
Figures appear through the trees—first silhouettes, then armored shapes, then glints of rifles catching the distant firelight. They’re spread too efficiently to be coincidence.
Anton’s men and the Council’s scouts.
I draw Harper behind me as we move toward the back exit. The floorboards tremble under boot steps. Shouts rip through the night.
Everything is closing in.
Everything except the one thing that matters—that she’s beside me, alive, and finally within reach in a way she has never been before.
As we break into the freezing night, the safe house behind us swarmed by shadows, one truth hits me like a punch to the ribs: we have no more time and no more allies.
The world is burning down, and all that’s left is her hand in mine.