ELENA
The alarm cuts through the room, loud and ugly, and for a second I don’t move. My body is still where it was, heat lingering, skin flushed, his scent still on me, his hand only just gone from my waist.
Maksim is already off the bed.
“I’m coming,” he says into the phone, his voice back to hard, like the last minutes never happened. He drags his shirt on without bothering with the buttons and reaches for his gun.
Then he looks at me. “Stay here.”
The door shuts behind him before I can answer.
I sit there for half a second longer, then push the sheets off and swing my legs down. My dress is halfway up my thighs. I drag it down fast, fingers clumsy, then pull it straight over my hips and up over my chest, smoothing it like that will settle anything inside me.
It doesn’t.
Voices bleed in from the corridor. Fast steps. A shout from somewhere below. Metal striking something hard. For a second, my brain tries to file it as routine—a drill. Karpov is running a house drill.
But the timing is wrong. The tone is wrong. No one sounds ready. Something’s off. Then someone screams downstairs.
I get to my feet, then stop myself before I reach the door. He said stay. That means something in this house. It also means I don’t get to see what’s happening.
I hate that.
I move to the edge of the suite instead, listening, tracking what I can. Doors open. Close. A man swears. Another answers, clipped and controlled.
My hand drifts to the phone on the table.
I pick it up. Put it back. Who would I even call?
I press my palm flat against my stomach without thinking, then pull it away at once. I don’t do that here.
“Get it together,” I mutter.
I pace once, twice, then stop near the door again. I could lock it. I don’t. If something gets through this house, a locked door won’t matter.
A louder crash echoes from below, closer this time. My chest tightens. I go still and listen harder.
This is his world. And I’m in it now, whether I stay locked behind his door or not. I stand there, listening, waiting, every sense turned outward, and I realize I’m not staying back.
I pull a robe, his, over my dress, ease the door open, and step into the corridor.
The silk under the robe sticks to my skin, sweat from sex and the rush that came after it. I drag the wrap tighter across my chest and press my back to the wall outside Maksim’s suite, listening. Voices carry from downstairs. Feet move fast. Doors open and shut.
The main lights are gone. Emergency lamps burn along the baseboards and at the turns in the hall, enough to show the wood paneling and runner rugs in dull strips. Somewhere below me a siren tries to start, then cuts off halfway through the first pulse.
Someone shut it down by hand.
I take one step, then another, bare feet soundless on the runner. The upper corridor is empty, no staff in sight, no guard at my door, and nobody coming to shove me back inside. That tells me more than the dark does.
I reach the landing window and flatten beside it, then force myself to look.
The drive is lit. The front gates are shut.
I can see the front sweep of gravel, the fountain, the first slice of trees beyond the lamps, and there’s no firefight out there.
SUVs aren’t tearing up the drive. No men pressing the gates.
No muzzle flashes beyond the perimeter. One of the fixed rifles at the front post is still in place.
They didn’t come through the face of the house. Inside hit.
My stomach drops.
Below me, on the ground floor, a burst of automatic fire rattles hard enough to vibrate through the banister. Glass breaks. Someone shouts, “Left side clear. Move.”
Not Russian. The voice is flat on the consonants and clean around the edges. Italian, maybe, or one of those imported men who learn another city just well enough to sell violence in it.
Then another voice answers in Russian, fast and annoyed. “Stairwell. Two men. Go.”
I turn from the window and start down the upper corridor, fast but bent, one hand skimming the wall so I don’t lose the turns.
The emergency lights cut the old portraits into pieces.
Eyes, uniforms, frames. At the far end of the hall, one of the small red indicators beside a reinforced door blinks three times, goes dark, then glows solid green.
Access override.
My mouth dries. That can only happen if someone inside with clearance triggered it or someone inside gave away how to force the lock without blowing the door.
A pair of men rush across the lower landing below me, visible through the cut of the stairs. Black tactical clothing. Suppressed rifles. One of them wears an earpiece with the wire taped close against his neck. No house insignia. Not one of ours. The other carries a tablet in one hand.
“Feeds are looped for ninety seconds,” the man with the tablet says. He isn’t Italian. He moves through the service hall like he’s worked these routes before. “After that we lose the east side.”
“Take the legal room first.”
I stop so fast my heel slips on the runner. Legal room. They came for paper, for proof, for chains of ownership, and they knew exactly where to go.
A body slams into the wall below. One of the house guards goes down the last three steps on his back, rifle gone, blood running from his throat. The man with the tablet steps over him without looking. I back away from the stairs before either of them tilts his head up.
I need cover, not speed. The upper floor feeds into three routes—the main staircase, the side stairs near the east corridor, and the servants’ back run that drops toward the pantry and kitchen.
If the legal room is the target, the side stairs are bad ground.
If the control room has been compromised, the main hall is worse.
Kitchen.
I turn toward the rear corridor and almost collide with a maid coming the other way.
She gasps and clamps both hands over her mouth before the sound can get bigger. Her apron is twisted, one strap half off her shoulder, and there’s blood on one cuff that doesn’t look like hers. Lidiya.
“Miss,” she whispers hoarsely.
“Where are they?”
Her eyes are wide in the emergency light. “Kitchen passage. I think. I don’t know. They cut the comms and Mr. Hale, one of the guards, is down and they said stay in place but the doors unlocked and then men came through with codes and I ran and I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
I catch her by the shoulders. “Listen to me. Did they come from outside?”
She shakes her head too fast. “No. West service side. They knew the codes.”
I let her go. “Get to the chapel if you can. If you can’t, lock yourself in a linen closet and don’t move.”
“What about you?”
I step back already moving. “I’m making a terrible decision.”
She almost laughs, which is insane, and then she bolts the other way.
I hit the back run and the house changes around me. The nice wood gives way to tighter walls, service sconces, painted trim, practical doors. This side of the house always smells faintly of soap, starch, coffee, and heat from the pipes. Tonight it smells like dead circuits and fear.
Two shots crack from the kitchen side. Not suppressed. Somebody in the house is still fighting with whatever he grabbed first. A man yells, “Move, move, move.”
Another answers in Russian, “Package first.”
Package.
I freeze behind the service stair door.
Me. They mean me. My dress feels thin all of a sudden, absurd on my skin in the middle of men talking routes and packages and collateral. My heart starts slamming hard enough to hurt.
Then boots pound across the corridor ahead.
I flatten myself into the dark beside a pantry alcove just as three men cut across the intersection.
Two I don’t know. The third is one of the estate drivers.
I know his face because I’ve seen him in daylight with coffee in his hand and keys on one finger, talking to security like a bored professional. He’s carrying a rifle now.
He points toward the side passage. “Her floor is clear. If she moved, she moved down. Check kitchen access and lock the chapel wing.”
One of the others says, “Volkov?”
The driver spits onto the tile. “Occupied.”
Occupied can mean alive. It can mean fighting. It can also mean dead men around him and not enough bullets left for elegance.
I don’t let myself stop on it.
The driver keeps going. “Moretti wants eyes on her. Alive. Face intact.”
The other man gives a short laugh. “Listed continuity.”
The driver answers with one I haven’t heard before. “Volkov bridge.”
They move on.
I stay where I am for three full breaths because if I move too soon, they’ll hear the panic in my feet. They keep changing the word. Package. Collateral. Continuity. Bridge. It all means the same thing in their mouths. I’m something they can’t afford to lose.
I slip through the pantry door toward the kitchen, staying low beside the counter. My shoulder hits the edge of the prep table hard enough to throw sparks across my vision, and before I can get my balance back, a hand fists in the back of my robe and yanks me off my feet.
I go down on one knee. Cold tile. Bare skin. My palm skids through water and something slicker than water, and then somebody drives me flat between the shoulder blades and pins me there. Bleach and metal hit my tongue, and panic turns sour in my mouth.
“Hold her.”
The voice is Russian. House-calm, not the bark of an outside gunman guessing his way through a rich man’s kitchen.
It’s the man with the tablet. A second man grabs my wrists and jerks them behind my back so hard my shoulder burns.
Plastic bites down. One tie, then another over it, drawn so tight my fingers flash numb.
I twist anyway. It gets me nowhere except a palm shoved against the side of my face, grinding my cheek into tile.
One of the men laughs under his breath like I’m making the evening more interesting.
“Still lively,” he says in accented Russian. A boot nudges my thigh.