24. Viktor
VIKTOR
I wake with a clarity I haven’t had in weeks, the kind that used to come easily before Pavel Ivanov reentered my life, the kind that comes from finally deciding on a course of action.
Harper’s still asleep beside me, one hand curled against her stomach even unconscious, and I lie there a moment longer than necessary, watching her, before I get up and start making calls.
Nothing about today needs to look frantic.
Panic invites mistakes, and mistakes are exactly what a man like Pavel would be counting on if he ever managed to rattle me.
Whatever I do from here forward gets done the way I’ve built this entire business, deliberate, controlled, three steps ahead of anyone watching.
I call the head of my security detail first, before coffee, before anything else.
“I want cameras on every access point to the property by the end of the week. Not obvious ones, integrated into the landscaping, the fixtures, nothing that reads as new to anyone watching from outside.”
“We can have a team here by this afternoon.”
“Good. I also want the safe room in the basement fully stocked and tested. Communications, medical supplies, enough for several days if it ever comes to that. I want my wife and daughter to know exactly where it is and exactly how to get there without needing instructions in the moment.”
“Understood. Anything else?”
“Rotate the routine. School pickup, grocery runs, anything predictable. I don’t want a pattern anyone can study and exploit.”
He confirms everything without asking why, which is one of the reasons I pay him what I do, and I hang up already moving to the next call, Dimitri, who picks up on the first ring like he’s been waiting for it.
“You’re up early,” he says.
“I’ve made some decisions.”
“About Harper?”
“About the house. I’m not telling her yet. But I’m done reacting to whatever Pavel does next. I want us building toward something instead.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I want everything you’ve gathered on him laid out properly, patterns, associates, anywhere he might actually be vulnerable instead of just watching us from a distance forever. If he wants a war, I’d rather fight it on ground I choose.”
Dimitri’s quiet a moment, and I can practically hear him recalibrating, the shift from defense to something closer to offense clearly not what he expected from me this early in the morning. “That’s a significant shift.”
“She’s pregnant, Dimitri. The stakes doubled overnight. I’m not spending the next several months just watching cars idle outside my house and hoping we catch a break before he decides to stop being patient.”
His reaction to the news is unreadable. “I’ll have everything organized by this afternoon. We can go through it together, figure out where the actual leverage is.”
“Good. Come by after Ginger’s at school. I don’t want this conversation happening anywhere near either of them.”
He agrees, and I end the call feeling steadier than I have in weeks, the particular calm that comes from finally choosing a direction instead of drifting reactive through someone else’s timeline.
The calm doesn’t last past breakfast.
Harper finds me in the kitchen an hour later, Ginger already off to school, security detail rotating through their new positions with quiet efficiency, exactly as I requested, nothing dramatic, nothing that would alarm anyone watching from outside.
“There are new cameras on the fence line,” she says, no preamble, arms crossed. “I counted four just walking to the mailbox. And there’s a man near the garage I don’t recognize, and another one who was apparently walking the property at six this morning while I was getting Ginger ready.”
“Security review. Standard, given everything else going on.”
“Viktor.” Her voice has an edge to it I haven’t heard from her before, sharper than the courthouse, sharper than the school pickup line conversation.
“I’m done with standard. I’m done with vague.
I’m pregnant, and this morning I wake up to my house looking like it’s preparing for something you still won’t name. ”
“Harper.”
“No.” She holds up a hand, stopping me before I can deploy whatever careful deflection I was about to reach for. “You don’t get to do the thing where you say my name like that and expect it to end the conversation. Not today. Not with a baby involved now, not just Ginger, not just me.”
I look at her, and my chest, steady for weeks now, finally starts to crack under the weight of how much she deserves better than what I’ve been giving her.
“You’re right,” I say quietly. “You deserve more than I’ve given you.”
“Then give it to me.”
“I can’t. Not yet.” Her face falls, and I press on before she can pull away entirely.
“There are people whose lives are at risk if I say certain things before I’m certain of them, Dimitri’s contacts included, people who trusted me with information they’d be killed for if it traced back to them.
I need a few more days. That’s nothing, Harper, and I know it isn’t enough either. ”
“You’re asking me to trust a locked door again.”
“I’m asking you to trust me while I finish making sure that door doesn’t open onto something worse than what’s already inside it.
” I pull out a chair at the kitchen table, and after a long moment, she sits, still tense, arms still crossed.
“What I can tell you is this. Someone from my past has been watching this house. The car. The man at Ginger’s school.
Both connected to the same person. I believe he means to use Ginger, and potentially this baby, against me. ”
Harper goes pale, one hand instinctively moving to her stomach. “Against you how?”
“I don’t fully know yet. That’s the truth, not an excuse. The moment I know more, you’ll know it too. All of it. Not a sanitized version, not a version designed to keep you calm. The truth, whatever shape it turns out to have.”
“Why didn’t you tell me even this much weeks ago?”
“Because I’ve spent fifteen years believing the people I love are safer the less they know about the threats against them.
Because telling you meant admitting how much danger I might have put you and Ginger in the moment I married you.
” I reach across the table, and she lets me take her hand, though she doesn’t fully relax into it.
“I still believe waiting a few more days is right. I understand if you don’t agree with that. ”
She’s quiet a long moment, processing, her hand still in mine, and I watch her work through the same math I’ve been working through alone for weeks, fear and anger and the particular exhaustion of realizing the ground under your life isn’t as solid as you thought it was.
“What happens now?” she asks finally.
“Now Dimitri and I finish what we started, quietly, and the moment there’s something solid to tell you, I tell you. No more waiting for certainty I don’t actually need to have first.”
“That’s not the same as telling me everything.”
“No. It isn’t. I know that’s not enough, and I know you have every right to be angry that it isn’t.” I squeeze her hand anyway, needing the contact even if she isn’t ready to fully return it. “I’m asking for a a little more time. Not forever.”
She studies me a long moment, and I can see her deciding whether a little more time is something she can actually give me, or whether she’s already decided it isn’t.
“A little more time,” she says finally, voice tight. “Then I want everything, Viktor. Not pieces. Not a version you’ve decided is safe for me to hear. Everything.”
“You’ll have it.”
“I mean it.”
“So do I.”
She doesn’t look fully convinced, and I don’t blame her, given how many times I’ve said some version of this exact promise over the last several weeks without following through. But she doesn’t pull her hand away either, and for now, that has to be enough for both of us.
We sit there a while longer, hands still joined across the table, the new cameras outside doing their quiet work, the safe room downstairs waiting, unused, for a threat I’m hoping never actually reaches this house.
Later, once she’s gone to pick up Ginger, I sit alone in the kitchen a moment longer, thinking about how little that partial truth actually cost me to give her, and how much more it’s going to cost when the days I asked for run out.
The weight of what I stand to lose doubled the moment she told me about the baby.
Today it settled into something I can start actually working against, instead of something I’ve been quietly drowning under in silence, even if I’ve only given her a fraction of what she deserves to know.
Dimitri arrives that afternoon with a folder considerably thicker than the last one, and we sit together at the same table where I gave Harper the smallest possible version of the truth an hour earlier.
“You told her,” he says, not a question, reading it off my face the second he sits down.
“Some of it. Enough to earn me a few more days before she stops accepting partial answers.”
“How’d she take it?”
“Better than I deserved. Worse than I’d hoped.” I push the folder open between us. “Walk me through what you found.”
Dimitri lays it out. Photographs clipped to a timeline that now stretches back nearly five months, longer than either of us initially estimated.
A second address surfaces, a warehouse on the industrial side of the river, leased under yet another shell company with threads leading back to the same dissolved entity behind the sedan.
“This is where he’s actually operating from, I’d bet on it,” Dimitri says. “The storage unit’s just overflow. This is the real base.”
“Confirmed, or educated guess?”
“Educated guess, backed by utility usage that doesn’t match an empty warehouse. Someone’s running equipment in there regularly. Could be exactly what we’re looking for.”
“I want eyes on it. Discreetly. I don’t want anyone spooked before we understand what we’re looking at.”
“Already planned for tomorrow night.” Dimitri closes the folder partway, studying me. “You’re different today. Calmer than you’ve been in weeks, even with everything that’s happening.”
“I stopped waiting for something to happen to me. That changes how a man carries himself.”
“Good. You’ve needed that shift for a while now.” He stands, gathering the folder. “For what it’s worth, I think you made the right call telling her something, even if it wasn’t everything. She deserved that much, at minimum.”
“I know.”
He leaves, and for the first time since that courtroom, I feel like I’m finally building toward an ending instead of just waiting for one to happen to me.
I only hope the ending arrives before Harper’s patience for partial truths runs out first.