Chapter 34
AURORA
"Aurora." Axel's voice is quiet, final, the particular quiet that means the conversation is over. "You're staying here."
"I'm going with you."
"You're not."
"Then I'll follow in my own car." I hold his eyes. "One of those options has your security around me, and one doesn't. Your choice."
The muscle in his jaw tightens. He stares at me long enough that I feel it in my spine, that stare, the full weight of it. Then he turns to Viktor.
"Third car," he says. "Keep her back from the front line."
I get in the third car before he finishes the sentence.
Viktor doesn't look at me. Sergei suddenly finds his weapon extremely interesting. Every single one of Axel's men develops an urgent need to examine the middle distance. I buckle my seatbelt and face forward and say nothing.
The warehouse district is ugly at night.
Wide empty roads between blocky buildings, sodium lights bleeding everything into the color of old bruises, the cold smell of the river threading through it all underneath.
Our cars roll in without headlights, slow and quiet, and I watch through the window as Axel's men filter out into the dark like they were never in the vehicles at all, absorbed by shadow in seconds.
Through the warehouse's high windows, the decoy is visible.
Two of Axel's men are moving around a table with documents, unhurried, conducting a routine business exchange to anyone looking from the outside.
Below the sight lines, twelve more men wait in the dark.
In the buildings flanking this one, Luca's men are already in position, have been for two hours.
The trap is set.
My tablet shows four camera feeds, the hastily rigged system Viktor built this afternoon.
I watch them, tracking positions, and try not to think about Leo.
About the fact that he's coming. About what his face looked like the last time I saw it, in Luca's house, spitting things at me that I can still hear if I'm not careful.
Don't. Watch the feeds. Be useful.
Viktor's voice crackles through the radio. "East approach. Four vehicles. Moving."
My stomach drops straight to the floor.
They come in fast. Four cars emptying into the space between the buildings, men fanning out with the horrible efficiency of people who have rehearsed this specific approach, and I understand immediately from the way they split — half to the entrance, half to the flanks — that someone gave them a precise picture of this location.
The trap springs.
The noise hits like a physical force. Gunfire cracks across the empty district from all directions at once, and my whole body flinches with the first volley, even though I knew it was coming, even though I've been bracing for it; the sound still pierces through skin and bone and lands somewhere animal and scared.
Breathe. Watch the feeds. Call positions.
I do it. I focus on the tablet, tracking movement and calling out what I see over the radio.
A Volkov shooter repositioning to the north roof — I call it before he settles.
Sergei's voice crackles back ten seconds later, confirmed, handled.
Three men pushing through the east door while the defense is focused left — I call it — Viktor redirects and the push collapses.
For twenty minutes, I breathe through the fear, and it works.
Then the third feed shows me Leo.
He comes in from the south entrance alone, no tactical positioning, no coordination with the men fighting twenty meters away. He moves in a straight line, purposeful, and I follow the direction of that line on my screen and feel the cold arrive in my chest before my brain finishes the calculation.
He's walking directly toward the third car.
He already knows which one.
"Viktor." My voice comes out strange. Too high. "Viktor, Leo is at the south entrance, he's coming toward—"
The door opens.
He's faster than I expected. I throw myself across the seat, but his hand closes around my arm, and he hauls me half out of the car before I get any traction, and up close, his face stops me cold.
Not the composed cruelty I remember from the estate.
Something fractured and pressurized and completely beyond the reach of reason, the face of someone who has been building toward this moment for a very long time.
"There she is." Almost conversational. "There's the woman who ruined everything."
"Leo—"
"Shut up." He pulls me fully from the car, and I wrench hard sideways, breaking his grip, stumbling but staying on my feet.
The cold ground, the noise of the battle on the other side of the building, the sodium light turning everything jaundiced and wrong.
He has a knife. Long and flat, already in his hand, and my body registers it before my brain does, every muscle going cold and tight at once.
Run. Scream. Do something.
"You know what you took from me?" His voice is climbing, the fracture in it widening with every word.
"Twenty years I waited. Twenty years I watched him build something I was going to inherit, and then you walk in, and suddenly there's a baby, suddenly he loves you, suddenly everything I was owed gets handed to a child that doesn't even exist yet—"
"It was never yours," I say. Keep his eyes. Keep him talking. "Axel never said—"
"He owed me." Raw and torn. "Elena left me to him. He owes me everything."
He lunges.
I throw myself sideways, and the knife hits my shoulder.
The pain isn’t what I expected; it doesn't come on cleanly. Instead, it explodes—white, massive, and overwhelming—ripping straight through the brief moment of shock that tried to settle first. I fall to both hands and knees, and the impact shoots up through the wound. I hear a sound that’s not quite human—high and broken—and my left arm starts shaking.
I can already feel warmth quickly soaking through my sleeve.
Get up. Get up right now.
I get up.
Ten feet, twelve, running aimlessly, just away, and my arm is screaming with every stride. I can hear him behind me, then his hand is in my hair, yanking me backward. The pain from my shoulder spikes so violently that my vision smears at the edges.
He spins me to face him.
"You should have stayed away from him," he breathes. Something is moving behind his eyes that I don't have a name for. Something that is completely at peace with whatever comes next, and that is more terrifying than the knife, more terrifying than anything. "You should have just stayed away."
"LEO." Viktor's voice, close now, coming fast. "Put it down—"
Leo doesn't look at Viktor. His eyes stay on mine, and he drives the knife toward my thigh.
I twist, trying to turn away from it, and it doesn't matter.
It hits the outside of my thigh, and this pain is entirely different from the shoulder — deeper, hotter, with a wrongness that runs all the way down to a spot I can't pinpoint, a tearing feeling that doesn't stop even when the blade does, echoing over and over while I still feel it.
My leg just stops working. Not a choice.
Just a fact. The ground rises up, and my cheek hits the cold concrete as I press both hands to my thigh.
Blood immediately soaks through my fingers, slick, warm, and way too much. I think with incredible clarity—
The baby. Get up. The baby.
I try.
My arms shake. My thigh won't bear weight. I press harder against the wound, and the pain whites out my vision for two full seconds. When it clears, Leo is standing over me, and I cannot get up— I keep trying, but I just can't.
"AURORA."
The world stops.
His voice tears across the entire battle like the battle isn't there, like nothing between him and me has any substance at all. Raw and enormous and nothing, nothing like the controlled man I know, just my name ripped out of him from somewhere without walls or ceilings.
I lift my head.
He's coming from the far side of the building, still fighting, two men trying to stop him, and he's going through them like they're weather, like they're theoretical, like the concept of obstruction no longer applies to him.
Blood on his face. Moving with something beyond rage, beyond fear, something that has collapsed all the way down to a single point, and that point is me.
Leo spins toward the sound.
Axel raises the gun.
The shot rings out.