Chapter 6 #2
I printed the files. The printer whirred in the quiet room, spitting out pages that felt heavier than paper should feel. Each sheet was a weight I'd have to carry to my brothers, a burden I'd have to place on Nikolai's already-overloaded shoulders.
The walk back to the secure room felt longer than it should have.
My footsteps echoed in the compound's corridors—good hardwood, expensive, the kind of detail Grandfather had insisted on even when the family was still building its fortune.
Appearances mattered, he'd always said. The way you present yourself shapes how others perceive you.
Right now, I was presenting myself as calm. Controlled. The Fox with intelligence to deliver.
Inside, I was screaming.
Anton was back. Anton, who'd tried to destroy us. Anton, who'd nearly shattered the alliance that kept the five families in balance. Anton, who should have been dead but wasn't because Nikolai had shown mercy.
I should have pushed harder for the kill. Should have made my brother understand that leaving enemies alive was a luxury we couldn't afford. But Nikolai had his reasons, and I'd deferred to my Pakhan's judgment.
I wouldn't make that mistake again.
The secure room door opened at my touch—biometric lock, keyed to family members only. Nikolai and Konstantin were still inside, reviewing something on Nikolai's tablet. Sophie's prenatal schedule, probably, or the security arrangements for her doctor visits.
They looked up when I entered.
I set the documents on the table. Let them speak for themselves.
"Anton's back," I said. My voice came out steady, which surprised me. "And he brought Moscow with him."
The silence that followed was the kind that preceded violence. I watched my brothers process the information—Nikolai's jaw tightening, Konstantin's hands curling into fists, both of them shifting from family men to what they'd always been underneath: soldiers preparing for war.
T he next hour was chaos.
Nikolai issued orders in that voice he used when there was no room for argument. Security protocols elevated to Level Three. All family members confined to the compound until further notice. Communication lockdown—nothing sensitive over any channel that hadn't been personally vetted by me.
Konstantin was already on his phone, mobilizing the men we kept on retainer for exactly this kind of situation.
Ex-military, most of them. Professionals who understood that loyalty paid better than freelancing.
I listened to him rattle off names and positions, watched him transform from the softer version Maya had created back into the enforcer who'd earned his reputation through blood and broken bones.
Sophie, Katya and Maya would need to be moved to the safe room.
The one we'd built for exactly this purpose, reinforced and supplied, buried deep enough that a direct strike wouldn't reach it.
Nikolai was already thinking about it—I could see the calculation in his eyes, the way he was weighing his wife's safety against the chaos of relocating a pregnant woman who was barely keeping down crackers.
I let them handle the tactical response. That wasn't my strength.
My strength was asking the questions no one else thought to ask.
"How did they know?"
Nikolai paused mid-instruction, turned to look at me. "What?"
"Anton's timing." I moved to the room's secondary terminal, pulled up our external surveillance feeds.
"He's been in exile for eight months. Living off whatever scraps the Deshnevs threw him, waiting for an opportunity.
Now he shows up with a full team of operators, ready to move. Why now? Why today?"
Konstantin's jaw tightened. "Someone tipped him."
"Maybe. Or maybe he's been watching." My fingers flew across the keyboard, pulling archived footage from the past week. "Our security is good, but it's not invisible. Someone patient enough, resourceful enough—they could map our patterns without us knowing."
The footage loaded in chunks. Our main gate. The service entrance. The side streets where deliveries came and went. Seven days of mundane activity, hours of nothing happening.
Until three days ago.
"There." I pointed to the screen.
A black sedan, parked across from the service entrance. Occupied. The angle of the shot was bad—our cameras weren't designed to capture faces from that distance—but I could make out two figures in the front seat. One of them was holding something to his face.
A camera.
"They were here for six hours," I said, scrubbing through the footage. "Arrived at seven AM, left at one PM. Photographed everyone who came and went."
Nikolai leaned over my shoulder. "Can you identify them?"
"Working on it."
The plates were stolen, of course. Reported missing from a rental lot in Queens two days before the surveillance. Dead end in terms of registration. But I had other tools.
Facial recognition was tricky with this kind of footage—the resolution was poor, the angle was bad, and the passenger had been careful to keep his face turned away from our cameras.
But careful wasn't the same as perfect. There was one frame, maybe two, where he'd shifted position and given me a partial profile.
I ran it through my databases. Cross-referenced against known associates of every family that might have reason to watch us. The algorithm churned for several minutes while my brothers waited in tense silence.
The match came back at 73% confidence.
Yevgeni Smironov. Former SVR—Russian foreign intelligence, the heir to the KGB. Now private contractor, which was a polite term for "available to the highest bidder." Known associate of the Deshnev family. The kind of professional who didn't work cheap and didn't work sloppy.
"They've been watching," I said. My voice sounded strange to my own ears. "They know our movements. Our patterns. Our vulnerabilities."
The word hung in the air like smoke.
Vulnerabilities.
Three nights ago. After I'd discovered Auralia was Ptichka. After I'd kissed her and pulled away and told her to forget me. I'd driven back to the compound alone, taking the most direct route because I couldn't think clearly enough for tradecraft.
If they'd been watching the compound three days ago, they might still have been watching three nights ago.
My hands weren't quite steady as I accessed the traffic camera network. It took favors—different favors, ones I'd been saving—but I had access to most of the city's surveillance infrastructure. Not officially, of course. Nothing about my work was official.
I found my car on the Brooklyn Bridge at 9:47 PM. Tracked it through DUMBO. Watched myself park on Plymouth Street, outside a converted rope factory with industrial windows and north-facing light.
The footage showed me going inside.
Showed me leaving two hours later, walking like a man who'd just had something vital removed.
"Maks?" Nikolai's voice came from somewhere far away. "What is it?"
I couldn't answer. I was still staring at the screen, at the timestamp, at the irrefutable evidence of my own stupidity.
If Smironov's people had been surveilling me—and why wouldn't they be surveilling the Besharov intelligence officer?
—they would have seen everything. Would have noted the address.
Would have run it through their own databases and discovered that the property was registered to a woman named Auralia Hart.
Would have started digging.
Would have found what I'd found. Or worse—would have found things I hadn't. Connections I'd missed. Details I'd overlooked because I was too busy falling in love to notice the danger I was creating.
They know about Auralia.
The thought was ice in my veins. Cold and clear and absolutely certain.
I'd led them straight to her. I'd been so focused on protecting her from myself that I'd forgotten to protect her from them.
"I need to make a call," I said. My voice came out steady, which was a miracle. "Give me ten minutes."
Nikolai opened his mouth to argue—we were in the middle of a crisis, there wasn't time for personal calls—but something in my face must have stopped him. He nodded once, sharply, and turned back to Konstantin.
I was already moving toward the door.
Ten minutes. Maybe less.
I just had to hope it wasn't already too late.
I called her from the car.
The compound gates were still closing behind me as I pulled up her contact—not saved under her name, not saved under any name, just a string of numbers I'd memorized the moment I'd found her file.
The engine hummed. The Brooklyn streets blurred past. My hands were steady on the wheel because I'd trained them to be steady, even when everything inside me was screaming.
The phone rang once. Twice. Three times.
Answer. Please answer. Please be alive, please be safe, please—
Four rings. Then her voice.
"Maksim?"
My name in her mouth. Cautious, wounded, still wanting despite everything I'd done to make her stop. The way she said it made my chest crack open all over again, made me remember the sound she'd made when I'd kissed her, the way she'd reached for me when I pulled away.
I didn't have time for any of that.
"Auralia, listen to me." My voice came out harder than I intended—the Fox's voice, the voice I used for interrogations and negotiations and situations where softness could get people killed.
"Has anything unusual happened today? Anyone following you, anything out of place, any deliveries you weren't expecting? "
The silence stretched. Long enough for my heart to stop. Long enough for me to start calculating distances and response times and how fast I could get to DUMBO if I ignored every traffic law between here and there.
Then: "There was—how did you know?"
Her voice had changed. The caution was gone, replaced by something thinner. Frightened.
I took the turn onto the bridge too fast, tires squealing. "Tell me."
"I came back from walking Ghost and there was an envelope under my door." The words came out in a rush, tumbling over each other. "No postmark, no return address. Just my name, handwritten. I thought it was from the building management—they leave notices sometimes—but it wasn't."
"What was inside?"
"A photograph."
She sounded like she was going to be sick.
I knew that tone—had heard it in her typed messages during the bad nights, when the anxiety got so thick she could barely form sentences.
But hearing it in her actual voice was different.
Worse. Real in a way that made me want to tear something apart with my bare hands.
"Me and Ghost," she continued. "From this morning, at the waterfront. We're just—we're just walking, but someone was watching us, someone took—"
Her breathing was going ragged. The edge of panic I recognized from five months of careful check-ins, five months of asking are you okay and what's your color level and breathe with me, little bird.
"Maksim, what's happening? Who would—"
"I'm ten minutes away." I cut her off because I had to, because letting her spiral would help neither of us. "Pack a bag—clothes for a few days, anything Ghost needs, your laptop if you need it for work. Don't answer the door for anyone except me. Do you understand?"
"I—yes, but—"
"Auralia." I made my voice gentle. Forced the fear down, locked it away, became the version of myself she needed right now instead of the version that wanted to scream.
"I know you're scared. I know you have questions.
I'll explain everything when I get there.
But right now, I need you to trust me. Can you do that? "
The silence was different this time. Not fear—consideration. She was weighing my words, processing them, deciding whether the man who'd kissed her and walked away deserved another chance at her faith.
"Yes," she said finally. "I trust you."
Three words. Just three words, and they hit me harder than any blow Konstantin had ever landed.
She trusted me. After everything I'd done—the secrets, the leaving, the twelve hours of silence that must have felt like abandonment—she still trusted me.
I didn't deserve it. But I was going to earn it, even if it killed me.
"Good girl," I said, and the words came out before I could stop them.
Her breath caught. I heard it clearly through the phone—that small, sharp intake of air that meant the words had landed somewhere deep.
"Pack now," I continued, softer. "I'll be there soon."
I should have hung up. Should have ended the call and focused on driving, on planning, on the thousand tactical considerations that would determine whether we both survived the next few days.
Instead, I said: "It's going to be okay, Ptichka. I've got you."
The silence that followed was different from all the others. Warmer. Like something broken had started to knit back together.
"Ptichka," she repeated. Her voice was barely a whisper. "You called me that. You actually said it."
"I've been calling you that for five months." I took another turn, accelerating through a yellow light. "I'm sorry it took so long for you to hear it."
"Maksim—"
"Pack, Auralia. We'll talk when I get there."
I ended the call before I could say anything else. Before I could tell her I loved her, or beg her to forgive me, or make promises I wasn't sure I could keep.
The bridge stretched out before me, the East River dark and glittering below. Somewhere behind me, my brothers were mobilizing for war. Somewhere ahead, the woman I loved was stuffing clothes into a bag and trying not to fall apart.
And somewhere in the city, Anton Belyaev was watching. Waiting. Planning whatever move came next in his bloody game of chess.
I pressed the accelerator harder.
Ten minutes. Maybe less.