Chapter 6
Maksim
I stood at the head of the table where my grandfather had built empires and my brother had learned to command, and I told my family I'd failed.
Not in those words, of course. I'd spent the night composing the report—when I wasn't staring at my ceiling, when I wasn't replaying the sound she'd made when I pulled away, when I wasn't fighting the urge to drive back to DUMBO and beg her to forgive me for everything I was about to do.
"The authenticator lead is dead," I said. My voice came out flat, professional, the voice of the Fox delivering intelligence. "She's not going to work for us."
The fluorescent lights hummed overhead. Twelve feet underground, soundproofed walls, electromagnetic shielding that turned cell phones into expensive paperweights.
Nikolai sat at the head of the table—his seat now, not Grandfather's, though sometimes I still expected to see Mikhail's silver hair and knowing eyes when I walked in.
My oldest brother looked tired in a way he never used to.
The shadows under his grey eyes had deepened over the past month.
His six month old daughter, Katya, was not sleeping well.
"Did she give a reason?" Nikolai asked, but his attention was already drifting. I watched his fingers tap against the table in that particular rhythm he used when he was thinking about something else. About Sophie, probably. About the baby that was keeping them both awake every night.
"She wasn't comfortable with the scope of work." The lie slid out smooth as silk. I'd always been good at this—the careful construction of truths that obscured larger truths, the art of saying everything while revealing nothing. "Too much risk for someone outside our world."
Nikolai nodded. Accepted it. Moved on.
That should have been a relief. Instead, it felt like a betrayal—not of my brother, but of her.
Of the woman who'd looked at me with those grey-green eyes and seen something worth wanting.
I'd reduced her to a failed lead, a dead end, a line item in the ongoing project of tracking Anton Belyaev's money.
She was so much more than that.
Konstantin hadn't spoken. That was never a good sign.
My middle brother sat with his chair pushed back from the table, boots crossed at the ankle, arms folded over his massive chest. The pose looked casual—was designed to look casual—but I'd grown up watching Kostya read people the way I read code.
He saw patterns in body language, tells in micro-expressions, the particular tension that meant someone was hiding something.
Right now, he was reading me.
I kept my face neutral. Shuffled my files. Pretended to check the next item on my agenda while my skin prickled under the weight of his attention.
"We'll need another approach," I continued. "I'm working on alternatives. There's a gallery in Geneva that might give us access to—"
"Later." Nikolai was already standing, already checking his phone—a breach of protocol in the secure room, but the device was one of mine, hardened against surveillance, and I wasn't going to call out my Pakhan for worrying about his pregnant wife.
"Send me the summary. I need to check on Sophie and Katya. "
He was gone before I could respond. The door sealed behind him with a soft hiss of pressurized air, and then it was just me and Konstantin in the fluorescent silence.
I gathered my files. Organized them into their proper folders. Maintained the illusion of control even as everything underneath was cracking apart.
"Maks."
I didn't look up. "We should talk about the security rotation for—"
His hand closed around my arm. Not hard enough to hurt—Kostya was always careful about that now, always conscious of his own strength in ways he hadn't been before Maya. But firm enough to stop me.
"What happened?"
I met his eyes. Dark brown, sharp as broken glass, seeing everything I was trying to hide. My brother the enforcer, the monster, the man who'd spent fifteen years learning to read pain and fear in the faces of people who had every reason to lie.
"Nothing."
"Bullshit." His grip didn't loosen. "You look like someone died."
The laugh that escaped me was raw, bitter, nothing like humor. I pulled my arm free and stepped back, putting the table between us. Distance. Control. The architecture of separation I'd been building my whole life.
"No one died."
"Then what?"
I looked at my brother—really looked at him, past the tattoos and the scars and the reputation that made grown men cross the street to avoid him.
Kostya had found something, these nine months.
Someone. Maya had cracked him open and crawled inside and built a home there, and now he looked at me with eyes that understood what it meant to want someone you shouldn't have.
I almost told him.
The words were right there, pressing against my teeth: I found her.
My little bird, the woman I've been falling for across five months of careful distance.
She's real and she's brilliant and she kissed me like I was oxygen and I walked away because if Anton finds out about her, he'll destroy her just to watch me suffer.
But saying it would make it real. Would make it something that existed outside my own chest, something that could be tracked and targeted and used against us.
"It's handled," I said instead. "The lead is dead. We move on."
Kostya watched me for a long moment. I could see him weighing the cost of pushing further against the reality of what we were facing. Anton was coming. War was coming. There wasn't time for emotional excavation, not now, not when the family needed every advantage we could scrape together.
Finally, he stepped back.
"When you're ready to talk," he said, "I'm here."
Then he was gone too, and I was alone in the secure room with the hum of fluorescent lights and the weight of everything I couldn't say.
I sank into the nearest chair. Pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes until colors bloomed in the darkness.
The truth was worse than death. Death was clean, final, something you could grieve and move past. This was a wound that wouldn't stop bleeding—the knowledge that I'd found her, held her, tasted her, and then ripped myself away because loving her might get her killed.
Forget me, I'd told her.
As if I could forget her.
T hree hours later, I was pretending to work.
The tech hub occupied the east wing of the compound's second floor—a converted bedroom that I'd gutted and rebuilt into something that would make most intelligence agencies jealous.
I'd built this room to be my sanctuary. A place where data made sense, where patterns revealed themselves, where I could impose order on chaos.
Today, it felt like a prison.
My fingers moved across the keyboard, pulling reports I'd already read, running analyses I'd already completed.
Going through the motions while my mind kept circling back to the same impossible loop: her face when I walked away.
Her voice when she called my name. The taste of her that I couldn't scrub from my memory no matter how hard I tried.
The alert chimed at 2:47 PM.
Not a loud sound—I'd calibrated all my notifications to be unobtrusive, because loud sounds shattered concentration. Just a soft tone, a change in one of my peripheral monitors, a flag on the algorithm I'd been running for eighteen months.
I turned to look, expecting another false positive. The system flagged dozens of transactions every week, most of them innocent, noise in the endless signal of international money movement.
This wasn't noise.
A private jet had landed at Teterboro an hour ago. Registration traced to a shell company in the Caymans, which traced to a holding company in Luxembourg, which traced through five more layers of obfuscation to a name that made my blood run cold.
Deshnev.
I sat very still, staring at the screen.
The Deshnevs were old bratva. Not the scrappy post-Soviet criminals who'd clawed their way up through chaos—these were the original architects, the families who'd transformed street gangs into something that resembled an empire.
They had Kremlin connections that made them effectively untouchable in Russia.
Politicians on their payroll, generals in their pocket, enough leverage to survive regime changes that destroyed lesser organizations.
They didn't invest in failures. They didn't back exiled pakhan's sons unless they were absolutely certain of returns.
If the Deshnevs were involved, Anton wasn't slinking back to negotiate. He was coming to conquer.
My hands were already moving, pulling up secondary systems, burning favors I'd been hoarding for years.
Flight manifests from Teterboro—not public record, but accessible if you knew who to ask and what to offer.
Customs records from JFK and Newark, cross-referenced against known associates.
The particular kind of dark web intelligence that cost money and connections and pieces of information I'd never get back.
Each query was a transaction. Each answer cost something. By the time I was finished, I'd owe debts that would take months to repay.
I didn't care.
The picture assembled itself in fragments, each piece making the whole more terrible. Anton Belyaev had been on that plane. Not alone—with six men whose backgrounds read like a catalog of violence that made Konstantin look gentle by comparison.
Former FSB. The kinds of agents who'd done wet work in Chechnya, who'd made problems disappear for the state, who'd retired with skill sets that had no civilian application.
Former Spetsnaz. Special forces with body counts they'd stopped tracking years ago. The kinds of soldiers who went into buildings and left nothing but silence behind.
Six of them. Professional killers, every one.
This wasn't a negotiation team. This wasn't even a bodyguard detail. This was the advance force for a war.