Chapter 18
Auralia
T he darkness was absolute before my brain came online.
Then pain—sharp, specific, radiating from somewhere behind my left ear where something hard had connected.
My first coherent thought wasn't fear. It was cataloging: damp concrete smell, cold seeping through my clothes, the distant hum of machinery that meant industrial space, urban, probably underground.
I couldn't see anything yet. Just darkness and the pressure of air that said enclosed space, low ceiling, no windows. My fingers found rough floor beneath me. Concrete, old, the kind with aggregate showing through where decades of feet had worn the surface smooth.
Slowly—agonizingly slowly—my eyes adjusted.
A single bare bulb hung from a cord overhead. I could make out walls now. Cinder block, industrial grey, the aesthetic of a basement that had never been meant for human habitation.
Not alone.
The realization hit me before the visual confirmation. Someone breathing in the far corner—shallow, rapid, the rhythm of distress. And another sound, softer: murmuring, words I couldn't make out, a voice I knew.
Maya.
I turned my head. The pain spiked, white-hot and nauseating, and I had to close my eyes and breathe through it.
When I opened my eyes again, I could see them.
Sophie was curled against the far wall, arms wrapped around her knees, her whole body engaged in a rocking motion that looked more like seizure than comfort.
Even in the dim light, I could see how wrong she was—the Sophie I knew moved like a dancer, all grace and deliberate precision.
This Sophie was broken. Something fundamental had snapped.
Maya sat beside her.
One hand pressed to her own forehead, where dark liquid had dried in a streak down her temple. Blood. The clinical part of my brain assessed it automatically—not spurting, not actively flowing, probably not life-threatening. Her other hand gripped Sophie's arm, holding on, trying to anchor.
They were alive.
All three of us, alive and together.
The relief was short-lived. I tried to move—to sit up, to crawl toward them—and discovered the weight around my ankle.
Metal. Cold and heavy, biting into the skin just above my foot.
I reached down with shaking fingers and found a cuff.
It was thick and heavy. A chain ran from it to a pipe against the wall, maybe three feet of slack.
Enough to move, to sit up, to lie down. Not enough to reach the door I could now make out across the room.
Professional.
The word kept surfacing. Professional restraints. Professional attack. Professional planning that had known exactly when to strike, exactly how to draw the brothers away, exactly how to take three women from one of the most secure compounds in Brooklyn.
"You're awake."
Maya's voice carried across the basement. Steady—that was the first thing I noticed. Drawing on her bedside manner. But underneath the steadiness, I could hear the strain. The fractures in her composure that she was holding together through sheer will.
"They took us from the compound." She shifted, and I heard the clink of her own chain. Another cuff, another pipe. We were all tethered. "Two hours ago, maybe three. It's hard to tell."
Two hours. Maybe three.
That meant the brothers knew by now. Maks knew. Had he found the empty rooms, the overturned furniture, the book I'd left face-down on the floor? Had he stood in the wreckage of everything he'd promised to protect and—
I couldn't think about that. Couldn't afford to.
My brain was still working, still fizzing despite the fear that wanted to shut everything down.
The hum I'd noticed earlier—traffic, distant but present.
We were underground but not deep. The echo when Maya spoke suggested high ceilings somewhere beyond this room.
And there was something else, something my eye had snagged on without consciously processing.
A painting on the wall.
Just visible in the dim light filtering from under the door. Oil on canvas, traditional frame, the subject matter that my professional training could identify even in these conditions. Still life with flowers. Dutch influence, probably nineteenth century, possibly earlier.
Why would there be a painting in a prison basement?
Sophie made a sound.
Not quite a sob. Something worse—a wounded animal noise, the keening of someone whose pain had gone beyond tears. Her rocking intensified, and Maya pulled her closer, murmuring words I still couldn't make out. Comfort sounds. The medicine of human contact when nothing else could help.
I understood, then, what was missing.
Not something. Someone.
Katerina.
The baby who'd reached for me at the dinner table, who'd gripped my finger with that startling infant strength.
The daughter Sophie had fought through hell to have, who represented everything she and Nikolai had built together, who was the beating heart of that impossible family I'd only just been welcomed into.
Sophie had been taken from her child.
The horror of it landed somewhere deep—deeper than my own fear, deeper than the pain still throbbing behind my ear. I didn't have children. Couldn't fully comprehend the specific devastation of being ripped from your baby, of knowing she would wake and cry and reach for a mother who wasn't there.
But I understood loss.
Understood the cruelty of having something precious exist outside your protection, vulnerable and alone.
The collar sat heavy against my throat.
I wrapped my fingers around the leather.
Held on.
"Katya."
Sophie's voice was shattered glass. The name came out broken into syllables, each one a wound. "They took me away from Katya."
She wasn't looking at us. Her grey-blue eyes were fixed on something only she could see—some internal landscape where her baby still existed within arm's reach, where the world still made sense. The rocking hadn't stopped. If anything, it had intensified.
"She'll wake up and I won't be there." The words came faster now, tumbling over each other. "She'll cry for me. She'll reach for me and I won't—she doesn't understand. She's too little to understand why Mama isn't—"
She couldn't finish.
The sentence dissolved into something that wasn't quite a sob, wasn't quite a scream. Something worse than either. The sound of a mother's heart breaking in real-time.
Maya pulled her closer.
"Breathe with me." Her voice was steady, that doctor-calm I'd come to recognize. But her hands were shaking. I could see the tremor where she gripped Sophie's arm, the small betrayal of composure that she was fighting to maintain. "Steady. Deep. You can do this."
Sophie tried.
I watched her chest expand, watched her attempt to follow the rhythm Maya was counting. But the breathing exercises that worked for panic attacks weren't designed for this kind of terror. Weren't designed for a mother separated from her infant by unknown men with unknown intentions.
I wanted to help. Wanted to crawl across the floor and wrap my arms around both of them, to add my body to the protective huddle Maya had created. But the chain held me three feet from the pipe, and they were too far away.
All I could do was watch.
The helplessness was suffocating.
"Nikolai will keep her safe."
Maya's voice cut through the darkness, firm and absolute. The doctor-voice had shifted into something else—a commander's tone, the authority of someone who needed Sophie to believe.
"He'd die before letting anyone touch her. You know that. You've always known that."
Sophie's rocking slowed. Just slightly. Just enough to suggest the words were landing somewhere.
"She’s with Dedushka."
I remembered.
Sophie had mentioned it at breakfast, casual, the easy logistics of a family that trusted each other with their most precious cargo. The baby would be with Nikolai's grandfather while Sophie painted in the nursery with me and Maya. A normal day. A safe day.
Until it wasn't.
"She's with her father now." Maya's voice softened, but the certainty remained. "Nikolai found out within minutes. He's probably holding her right now, Sophie. Probably hasn't put her down since. You know how he gets."
A sound escaped Sophie. Half laugh, half sob.
"He's terrible at diaper changes," she whispered. "He approaches them like military operations. Charts. Checklists."
"Then he's probably made seventeen checklists by now." Maya stroked her hair. "And he's probably killed anyone who looked at her wrong. You know him. You know what he's capable of, when it comes to her."
Sophie nodded.
But her eyes were still empty. The logic was landing, the words were being processed, but the mother in her was somewhere else entirely. Back at the compound. In the nursery. Holding a baby who wasn't there.
My throat tightened.
I thought of Maks.
I wondered if he was standing in my absence right now, the way Sophie was standing in Katerina's. Wondering what had happened. Wondering if I was hurt. Wondering if he'd ever see me again.
The collar pressed against my pulse.
He was out there somewhere. Planning. Calculating. Being the clever fox I'd fallen in love with.
But clever hadn't saved us.
Clever had walked into a trap, had taken all the brothers to Chelsea while Anton's men breached the compound. Clever had failed, spectacularly, and now three women sat chained in a basement with nothing but each other and the thin thread of hope that someone would find them in time.
Will I ever see him again?
The question surfaced before I could stop it. Before I could build the walls I'd spent a lifetime building, the ones that protected me from wanting things too much.
I didn't know the answer.
The door opened, and painfully bright light flooded in like an assault.
I flinched—too bright, too sudden—and by the time my eyes adjusted, he was already halfway down the stairs. He descended like he was entering a dinner party. Unhurried. Composed. The grace of someone who had never in his life been afraid of anything in any room.
Anton Belyaev.