Chapter 23 – Iris
If he had even been a minute late, I would’ve been dead by now.
The attack happened hours ago, and the entire mansion was being cleaned up, but I was still shaking with fear. I’d never experienced such violence before in my whole life, and I never wanted to experience it ever again.
Luckily, the attack hadn’t claimed the lives of anyone at the mansion. However, it left thirteen people injured—including Natasha—and in need of medical attention.
I was so traumatized by the attack that I hadn’t been able to close my eyes without seeing the gun pointed at my face. That man had his finger on the trigger and would’ve shot me dead at such close range if Ilya hadn’t shown up in the nick of time.
He was the reason I was still breathing. God, speed and agility were rather remarkable. I’d always known that he was ruthless as they came, but watching him in action changed everything I thought I knew about him.
Ilya would do anything to protect me. He proved it when he beat that man to death with his bare hands. His bare hands. How was that even possible?
Seeing him as a monster was as disturbing as it was intriguing.
While I replayed the scene of my near-death experience over and over in my head, a few questions lingered. Did the assassin barge into my room to kill me specifically? Or did he just walk into a random room, looking to kill whatever was in there?
The answers to these questions mattered because they could shed more light on the dark corners of this whole situation.
I was helping Natasha bandage her wounded arm when Ilya showed up and said he had something important to show me. I hesitated for a moment but eventually went with him.
The room Ilya took me to was small and windowless, with monitors lining one wall, showing feeds from the estate outside.
Cleanup crews moved across the screens in silent black and white, sweeping the grounds, clearing bodies, and checking the perimeter for anything left behind.
He shut the door and sat me down across from him at a metal table, a folder already waiting there.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“I’m not going to soften this,” he said. “You need to see it clearly.”
He opened the folder.
The first page was a weapon inventory, photographs of rifles and gear pulled off the men who’d attacked the estate.
None of it matched anything Bratva-issued, he explained. Manufacturing origins traced back to a supplier that didn’t sell to organizations like his. Foreign. Untraceable through any channel his people normally used.
The second page held printouts from a recovered comm device. Fragments of intercepted messages, encrypted, in a language none of his men could immediately place. Not Russian. Not anything close to it.
“We’re working on translation,” he said. “It’ll take time.”
The third page was the one that made my stomach drop.
A payment trail. Offshore accounts routed through jurisdictions that had nothing to do with Bratva systems. Money moved through numbered shell entities that dissolved the second each transaction cleared, with no name attached to any of it.
I stared at it, my mind already running the comparison before I fully decided to make it.
“Wait. This is the same structure,” I said slowly. “The same pattern I found in the ledgers. Shell companies opening and closing around specific transactions.”
He nodded.
“So whoever’s funding this attack—”
“Might be connected to whoever’s been rerouting money inside my own organization.” He finished the thought before I could, his voice flat. “I don’t know that for certain yet. But the structure is close enough that I can’t rule it out.”
I sat back, trying to process what that actually meant.
For weeks, I’d told myself the danger in this house came from the Bratva itself. From Ilya. From the men who wanted me eliminated because I knew too much about their internal operations.
That fear had shaped everything, every decision, every moment of distrust I’d carried since the night he first knocked on my apartment door.
This was different.
I looked into his eyes, my eyebrows knitting together. “Ilya, is there something you’re not telling me?”
He hesitated. “Based on everything we’ve gathered, I have reasons to believe that you might’ve been the main target.”
“Me?” My eyes widened.
That’s when it hit me—he’d just answered the question lingering on my mind all day.
“I think you’re right,” I said. “They knew where I was. Not just the estate. They knew which room, which floor. The man who held me at gunpoint wasn’t searching randomly. He knew exactly where to look.”
“I’m afraid so,” he answered.
“That means someone gave them that information. Surveillance data. Routines. Something only your people should have had access to.”
Ilya’s jaw tightened. “That’s what concerns me most.”
“So either someone inside the Bratva sold that information to whoever’s outside it,” I said, voicing my thoughts.
“Or the corruption I found in those ledgers isn’t just about money.
It’s about information too. Someone’s been feeding details outward for a long time, probably longer than anyone realized. ”
He didn’t answer right away, which told me I’d landed somewhere close to what he was already thinking.
I looked back down at the folder, at the payment trail, at the fragments of encrypted messages sitting there in a language none of us understood yet. Something cold settled in my chest as the full shape of it came into focus.
“That means the corruption I found,” I said quietly. “Someone else might have found it first. Before me. Maybe they’ve been watching this whole thing longer than we have.”
“That’s possible.”
“And if they’ve been watching that long, they knew about the breach. They knew someone accessed those files. They might have known about me before you ever did.”
Ilya went still across the table, and I watched the same realization settle over him that had just settled over me.
I wasn’t the reason danger existed in his world. I was the reason someone outside his world had started paying attention to him, specifically through me.
Whatever I’d uncovered, whoever had built that corruption in the first place, they’d noticed me noticing.
And now they were willing to send trained men into a fortified estate in the middle of the night to make sure I didn’t get the chance to notice anything else.
One thing was certain now: Ilya and I weren’t captor and prisoner anymore, hadn’t been for weeks now.
We were something else entirely. Two people standing inside the same set of crosshairs, whether either of us had chosen it or not.
Who were these people? And why were they targeting me?
The thoughts had yet to settle when another explosion beyond the estate walls shook the building.
My heart skipped a beat as radio chatter spiked and rapid gunfire filled the air again. Ilya’s hand closed around my wrist before I fully registered the sound behind it.
“Move. Now!”
He pulled me out of the room, through the hallway, and into a narrow interior corridor I hadn’t even known existed. The spot was tucked between the kitchen wall and a service stairwell. No chandeliers here. Just emergency strips, dim red-orange along the baseboards, barely enough to see by.
The space was tight. My shoulder pressed against cold concrete on one side. Ilya’s chest stayed inches from mine on the other. The corridor had been built for staff to pass through unnoticed, never meant to hold two people standing still.
Gunfire cracked somewhere outside. Closer than before. Muffled through the walls but unmistakable.
My breath caught hard in my throat, my hands trembling. This was the second attack in just a few hours, and to make matters worse, no one was sure it would be the last.
“Hey.” His voice dropped low, right against my ear. “Look at me.”
I couldn’t. My eyes stayed fixed on the door at the end of the corridor, waiting for it to open, waiting for whatever was happening on the other side of these walls to find its way to us.
Another burst of gunfire, further off this time. I flinched hard enough that my back hit the wall behind me.
“I’m not gonna let anything happen to you, I promise,” he assured me, swinging an arm around me immediately.
He pulled me fully into cover, his body angled between me and the corridor’s exit without a single moment of hesitation. No calculation in it. No possessive weight to the way he held me.
This was pure instinct. I felt it in the way his grip tightened around me now. Not controlling. Just holding on.
Pressed against him in the dark, I realized whatever calm he usually carried had cracked the same way mine had. His pulse hammered against my back where his chest met my shoulder blades. His breathing wasn’t steady either.
He wasn’t in control right now. He was reacting, the exact same way I was.
The gunfire faded slowly. Radio chatter took its place—voices calling clear across different sections of the estate. Minutes passed. Neither of us moved.
When the corridor finally went quiet, really quiet, Ilya’s grip loosened. He still didn’t step back completely. We stayed there, tucked into that narrow space longer than we needed to, both of us catching our breath in the dim red light.
That’s when I saw it.
Blood, dark and drying, stained the sleeve of his shirt near the elbow. Too much of it to be a graze he hadn’t noticed.
“You’re hurt.”
“It’s not mine.”
I reached for his arm anyway. Instinct took over before I could think better of it. My fingers wrapped around his forearm and turned it toward the light. He let me. Didn’t pull away. Just watched me check the fabric for a wound that wasn’t there.
“It’s really not mine,” he said again, quieter this time.
I believed him. No wince in his face. No tension in his arm that would have suggested pain. Just blood that belonged to someone else—someone who hadn’t survived whatever had happened downstairs.
I didn’t let go of his arm right away.
Neither of us said anything for a moment.
The corridor stayed dim and close around us.
The emergency lights cast everything in that same low red glow.
I became aware of how little space existed between us.
How my hand was still curled around his forearm.
How his eyes had settled on me instead of the door.
Something had shifted. I felt it the same way I’d felt it in the library the night he stood too close behind my chair. Except this time it wasn’t tension building toward something unspoken. It was quieter. Steadier.
We weren’t captor and prisoner in this corridor. We weren’t even husband and wife playing a role for a room full of Bratva associates.
We were just two people who’d survived the same fifteen minutes together, both still shaking slightly from it. Both still holding onto each other longer than the danger actually required.
I finally let go of his arm.
Neither of us moved to leave the corridor right away.