Chapter 1 – Lev
The office door slammed behind me with enough force to rattle the glass panels, but it didn’t drown out the noise bleeding through the walls. Raised voices. The crash of something hitting the floor. A string of curses in what sounded like three different languages.
Fucking circus.
I’d been gone for exactly eighteen hours—long enough to chase down a lead on some missing shipment that turned out to be nothing but paperwork filed in the wrong fucking drawer—and somehow the entire operation had devolved into chaos.
“—told you not to touch my things!” Casandra’s voice cut through the air like a blade, sharp enough to make my temples throb.
“It’s a bottle of coffee, not the crown jewels.” Drew’s response was pure sarcasm wrapped in that clipped Russian accent that marked him as fresh off the boat. “Perhaps if you labeled your precious belongings—”
“Don’t you dare—”
I pushed through the main office doors and found them squared off like prizefighters, a shattered glass coffee pot between them and dark liquid spreading across the marble floor.
Casandra had her hands on her hips, her usually perfect blonde hair escaping its pins.
Drew stood with his arms crossed, that irritatingly calm expression he wore like armor firmly in place.
Two fucking months. Maxim had been gone for two months, and this was what I had to show for it.
“Enough.” The word came out harsher than I’d intended, but it cut through their argument like a gunshot. Both of them turned to look at me, and I saw Drew’s jaw tighten at whatever he read in my expression.
Good. Maybe the new boy was smarter than he looked.
“Clean this up,” I said, gesturing at the mess without taking my eyes off either of them. “Both of you. Then figure out how to work in the same space without destroying the office, or I’ll find replacements who can.”
Casandra opened her mouth—probably to launch into some explanation about why none of this was her fault—but something in my face made her think better of it. She nodded once, sharp and professional, then crouched to start picking up the larger pieces of glass.
Drew watched her for a moment, and I caught something that might have been regret flicker across his features before he moved to help her. Progress, maybe. Or maybe he was just better at reading a room than I’d given him credit for.
Either way, I didn’t have the patience to supervise their cleanup. The headache that had been building behind my eyes all morning was threatening to split my skull, and the last thing I needed was to babysit two adults who couldn’t manage to coexist long enough to make a pot of coffee.
I retreated to my office and closed the door, but it didn’t shut out the memory of their voices or the way the sound had grated against something raw in my chest. Everything felt wrong lately.
Off-balance in a way that had nothing to do with Maxim’s absence and everything to do with the phone call I’d gotten three days ago.
She’s coming back to Chicago. Tomorrow.
Three words that had turned my carefully constructed world upside down.
Anya.
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and tried to push her name out of my head, but it clung there like smoke.
Five years. Five fucking years since I’d seen her face, since I’d been close enough to smell her perfume or hear her laugh or watch the way she moved through a room like she owned it.
Five years since I’d kissed her in that back room and felt my control crack like thin ice.
She’d been twenty then. Young and reckless and so goddamn beautiful it had taken everything I had not to press her against that wall and take everything she’d been offering.
The memory of her mouth under mine still hit me at the worst possible moments—usually when I was trying to sleep or focus on work or pretend I was the kind of man who could be trusted around his best friend’s little sister.
Twenty-five now. Still too young for me, but no longer the girl who’d danced with fire just to see if she could get burned.
The phone on my desk rang, startling me out of thoughts that had no business being in my head during office hours. I grabbed it without checking the caller ID, grateful for the distraction.
“Antonov.”
“Mr. Lev?” The voice was familiar—Dmitri, one of the guards assigned to my father’s house. But there was something wrong with his tone, something that made my blood turn cold. “You need to come. Now.”
The world tilted sideways.
“What happened?”
“Your father. He’s... there was an attack. We’re taking him to the hospital.”
The phone slipped from my hand, clattering against the desk as I bolted to my feet. Hospital. Attack. The words echoed in my head like gunshots, but they didn’t make sense. My father was untouchable. Had been for thirty years. He didn’t get attacked—he was the one who did the attacking.
I was moving before I consciously decided to, grabbing my jacket and keys with hands that felt like they belonged to someone else. The elevator ride down to the parking garage lasted forever, each floor marked by a soft ding that sounded like a countdown.
The hospital was across town, but I made the drive in fifteen minutes through traffic that should have taken thirty. Red lights were suggestions. Speed limits were for people who didn’t have family bleeding out in emergency rooms.
Family. The word tasted bitter in my mouth because it was such a small word for such a massive lie.
My father was all I had left. Had been for twenty-seven years, ever since the fire that took my mother and my twin brother.
Since the night that burned the softness out of me and left nothing but scar tissue and steel.
The hospital hit me like a physical blow—that cocktail of antiseptic and fear and death that clung to everything despite the best efforts of industrial-strength air fresheners. I’d smelled it before, too many times, but never when it was my blood on the line.
“Mikhail Antonov,” I told the woman behind the admissions desk, my voice coming out rougher than I’d intended. “Where is he?”
She looked up at me with the kind of practiced sympathy they probably taught in hospital administration classes, and I knew before she opened her mouth that the news wasn’t going to be good.
“Are you family?”
“I’m his son.”
Her expression shifted, became more careful. More professional. “Room 314. Third floor.”
The elevator ride felt like descending into hell, each floor bringing me closer to a truth I wasn’t ready to face.
The hallway on the third floor was too bright, fluorescent lights that made everything look washed out and artificial.
Room 314 was at the end, and I could hear the machines before I saw them—the steady beep of monitors, the mechanical whisper of a ventilator.
My father looked small in the hospital bed. Smaller than I’d ever seen him, hooked up to more tubes and wires than should fit in one human body. His skin was gray, his breathing shallow, and when he opened his eyes and saw me standing in the doorway, I knew I was looking at a dead man.
“Lev.” His voice was barely a whisper, but it carried the weight of thirty-seven years of history. “Come here.”
I moved to the bed on legs that felt like lead, my mind cataloging the damage with the kind of clinical detachment that had kept me alive in situations like this.
Gunshot wounds. Multiple. Close range, judging by the powder burns.
Professional work, but sloppy—whoever did this had wanted him to suffer.
“Who?” I asked, pulling a chair close to the bed.
He shook his head, a movement that cost him. “Doesn’t matter. They’re already dead.”
That should have surprised me more than it did. But my father had been in this business longer than I’d been alive, and he hadn’t survived by leaving loose ends.
“Listen to me,” he said, his hand finding mine with surprising strength. “There are things... things I never told you. Should have told you years ago.”
“Save your strength—”
“No.” The word came out sharp enough to cut. “This can’t wait. I’m dying, Lev. We both know it.”
The machines around us seemed to get louder, their electronic chorus a soundtrack to the end of the world as I knew it.
“Your mother,” he said, and I felt something inside me go very still. “Your brother. They’re not dead.”
The words hit me like physical blows, each one landing with enough force to steal my breath. Not dead. Twenty-seven years of grief, twenty-seven years of carrying their ghosts, and they were not dead.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“The fire.” His eyes were distant now, lost in memory. “It was meant for all of us. The whole family. But I got word…minutes before. Barely enough time to get them out.”
The room spun around me, walls shifting like I was drunk or dying or both. “You’re lying.”
“Your brother. Your twin. Trev.” He squeezed my hand, and I could feel the life bleeding out of him with each word. “Hannah. Your mother. They’re in Australia. Have been for twenty-seven years.”
Australia. The word sounded foreign, impossible. Like he’d told me they were living on the moon.
“I had to fake their deaths.” His voice was getting weaker now, each word an effort. “Had to make everyone believe they were gone. It was the only way to keep them safe.”
“From who?” The question came out as a roar, and I realized I was on my feet without remembering standing up. “Safe from fucking who?”
“The Kozaks.” He coughed, and blood flecked his lips. “Petro. He wanted me to watch my family burn before he killed me. So I gave him what he wanted to see. Empty coffins. Fake bodies. Let him think he’d won.”
Petro Kozak. The name tasted like poison in my mouth, but it made a sick kind of sense. The Kozaks had been gunning for our family for as long as I could remember, and Petro was exactly the kind of psychopath who would target women and children to make a point.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” The words came out broken, and I hated how young I sounded. How lost.