Chapter 11 – Lev
After Trev left, I sat in the crushing silence of my office, staring at the door he’d walked through. The ghost of his words hung in the air like smoke: You didn’t get the signal because you made peace without me, but I never made it without you.
I shook my head, trying to clear the fog of emotion that threatened to cloud my judgment. I had work to do. Enemies to identify. A war to prepare for.
My hands moved with mechanical precision as I opened the locked drawer and pulled out the thick file marked with Taras Kozak’s name.
The folder was worn from years of handling, pages yellowed with age and stained with coffee rings.
Some secrets aged like fine wine. Others festered like infected wounds.
I spread the contents across my desk, photographs and intelligence reports creating a mosaic of violence that stretched back three decades.
Taras Kozak stared up at me from a surveillance photo, his face twisted with the kind of hatred that burned for generations.
Dead now, killed by my father’s hand in the aftermath of our childhood home burning to ash.
But death, I’d learned, didn’t always end vendettas.
My finger traced the family tree that branched out from Taras’s name like roots of poison oak. Brothers, cousins, sons—all marked with the same Cossack codes of honor that valued blood debts above human life.
Petro Kozak.
The name at the bottom of the page made my jaw clench.
Taras’s younger brother, forty-eight years old, built like a mountain and twice as immovable.
After Taras died, Petro had risen to lead the Ukrainian syndicate with the kind of ruthless intelligence that made enemies disappear in the night and allies wake up grateful to see another sunrise.
The psychological profile painted a picture of controlled brutality wrapped in traditional Cossack mysticism.
He didn’t just kill his enemies—he turned their deaths into theatrical lessons for anyone else who might dare cross him.
Saint Michael tattoos, ritual prayers, bodies arranged like altars to some twisted sense of divine justice.
But it was the last line of the report that hit me like a sledgehammer to the chest: “Cossacks hold grudges for decades. Blood debts are considered sacred obligations, passed down through generations until justice is served or the family line ends.”
My gut tightened with the sick certainty that I was staring at our executioner’s resume.
Petro had to be behind Dad’s murder. The Saint Michael tattoo, the ritualistic nature of the attack, the timing—it all pointed to him settling accounts that had been accumulating interest for twenty-seven years.
But one thing didn’t add up, and it gnawed at me like a splinter under the skin. Why attack Anya? She was Maxim’s sister, not related to me. At least, not until yesterday. Petro couldn’t have known about our marriage before he’d ordered the hit on her mansion.
Unless….
Unless there was another player in this game. Someone else with their own reasons for wanting Anya dead.
My phone buzzed against the desk, shattering my concentration.
Trev.
I answered on the first ring. “What—”
“Lev.” His voice was strained, tight with pain and something that might have been fear. “I’ve been hit. Outside Dad’s mansion. They got me good, but I’m alive.”
The world tilted sideways. All the anger, all the resentment, all the walls I’d built between us crumbled like paper in a hurricane. My brother—my twin, my other half, the piece of myself I’d mourned for twenty-seven years—was hurt.
“How bad?” I was already moving, grabbing keys, checking my weapons.
“Shoulder. Clean through. I’ll live, but Lev….” His voice dropped to a whisper. “They sent a girl. Young. Professional. This wasn’t random.”
A girl. My mind immediately went to the intelligence reports scattered across my desk. Petro Kozak was old school, traditional. He didn’t use female assassins.
But someone did.
“I’m coming,” I said, ending the call.
The drive to the hospital passed in a blur of Chicago traffic and mounting dread.
Every red light felt like an eternity, every slow-moving car an obstacle between me and the brother I’d just gotten back.
The rational part of my mind knew that if Trev was well enough to make phone calls, his injuries weren’t life-threatening.
But logic had no power over the primal terror that gripped my chest.
I’d lost him once. I wouldn’t survive losing him again.
***
The Bratva Hospital sat on the edge of the medical district like a fortress of secrets and shadow medicine. No questions asked, no records kept, no authorities notified. It was where people like us went to bleed in private.
I burst through the doors of the private wing, my footsteps echoing off polished floors that had seen more blood than most battlefields. The familiar scent of antiseptic and controlled violence hung in the air like incense.
Room 314. I pushed through the door without knocking.
The scene that greeted me stopped me cold.
Hannah—my mother, older now but unmistakably the woman who’d sung me lullabies and kissed my scraped knees—sat beside the hospital bed, her weathered hands wrapped around Trev’s fingers.
She looked up when I entered, and her face crumpled with an emotion so raw it felt like looking directly at the sun.
“Lev,” she whispered, and the way she said my name broke something inside me I didn’t know was still intact.
But it was the sight of Trev that made my vision go red.
He was sitting up in bed, alive and conscious, with his left shoulder wrapped in pristine white bandages. A smirk played at the corners of his mouth—the same expression he’d worn when we were kids and he’d gotten into trouble but wasn’t sorry about it.
Before I could think, before I could process what I was doing, my hand connected with his cheek in a sharp slap that echoed through the room like a gunshot.
Hannah gasped. Trev’s head snapped to the side, but when he looked back at me, that infuriating smirk had only widened.
“Fucker,” he said, touching his reddening cheek with his good hand. “You can slap me, but can’t hug me?”
My jaw clenched so hard I thought my teeth might crack. “Don’t you dare get yourself killed. You just came back from the dead.”
The words came out rougher than I’d intended, thick with emotions I didn’t know how to name. Relief. Terror. Love. Rage. All of it twisted together into something that felt too big for my chest to contain.
Hannah stood slowly, her eyes never leaving my face. “My boy,” she said, and then she was crossing the small space between us, pulling me into a hug that smelled like vanilla and memories I’d buried so deep I’d forgotten they existed.
For a moment, I let myself be eight years old again.
Let myself believe that families could be rebuilt from ashes, that love could survive decades of lies and separation.
Her arms felt exactly the same as they had all those years ago, and for the first time since Dad died, I felt something that might have been peace.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered against my shoulder. “I’m so sorry we had to leave you. I’m sorry we couldn’t find another way.”
I pulled back just enough to look at her face—lined with years of guilt and grief, but still beautiful in the way that had made my father fall in love with her when they were barely more than children themselves.
“We’re here now,” I said, and meant it. “That’s what matters.”
Trev cleared his throat from the bed. “Not to interrupt this touching family reunion, but we need to talk about what happened.”
I turned to face him, noting the way he winced as he shifted position. Professional assessment kicked in, cataloging his injuries, his alertness level, the likelihood that he was hiding more serious damage than he’d let on.
“Tell me everything.”
“Female. Young, maybe nineteen or twenty. Small build but moved like a dancer. Professional training, definitely not local talent.” Trev’s voice took on the crisp authority of a police officer giving testimony.
“She came at me from the shadows beside Dad’s gate.
Would have had me clean if I hadn’t heard her boot scrape concrete at the last second. ”
“How close?”
“Close enough to kiss.” His expression darkened. “She had me dead to rights, Lev. Should have been a perfect headshot. But she hesitated.”
That detail sent warning bells clanging in my skull. Professional assassins didn’t hesitate. They certainly didn’t give their targets time to react and fight back.
“Why?”
“That’s the interesting part.” Trev leaned forward, his blue eyes intense.
“Right before she pulled the trigger, she closed her eyes and started chanting some kind of prayer. Saint Michael, guardian of souls, guide this sinner to judgment. Some ritualistic bullshit that gave me the opening I needed to dive and draw my weapon.”
The Saint Michael connection confirmed my suspicions about the Kozak family’s involvement, but the behavior pattern was all wrong. Petro’s people were brutal but efficient. They didn’t waste time with religious theater when a simple bullet would suffice.
“She say anything else?”
“Just before she disappeared into the night.” Trev’s voice dropped to barely above a whisper. “‘Collecting Kozak’s debt in blood.’ Then something in Ukrainian I didn’t catch.”
I felt the pieces of a larger puzzle shifting in my mind, forming a picture I didn’t like. This wasn’t just about old grudges or blood debts. This was personal. Targeted. Someone was playing a game with rules I didn’t understand yet.
“How did you survive a close-quarters ambush?” I asked. “Even with training, the odds—”
“AFP tactical response training,” Trev interrupted. “Six years undercover with organized crime syndicates. You learn to expect death around every corner and react accordingly.”
“So you’re telling me you spent fifteen years learning how to destroy everything our family built.”
“I spent fifteen years learning how to protect what mattered most.” His voice was steady, unflinching. “And right now, what matters most is keeping the three of us alive long enough to end this war.”
I was about to respond when the door burst open with a sound like thunder, hinges protesting the violent force. All three of us tensed, hands moving instinctively toward weapons that weren’t there.
But it wasn’t an enemy who filled the doorway.
It was Anya.
She stood there like an avenging angel, face pale as porcelain, hazel eyes wide with an emotion I couldn’t name. Her chestnut hair was windblown, cheeks flushed from running, and everything about her radiated barely contained panic.
The world narrowed to just her face, just the way she was looking at me like she’d expected to find my corpse instead of my voice.
Silence crashed between us like thunder.
In that suspended moment, I realized several things at once. Eleanor had overheard about the attack while I’d briefed Drew and called her—likely thought I’d been the one who had been shot.
And instead of staying safe in her office or her mansion, instead of letting Drew handle whatever danger might be waiting, she’d come here.
To a Bratva hospital. To check on me. To make sure I was alive.
The woman who claimed to hate everything about my world had armed herself and walked straight into the heart of it because she thought I might need her.
My chest tightened with something that felt dangerously close to hope.
“You’re not dead,” she said, and her voice was smaller than I’d ever heard it. Vulnerable. Relieved. Angry.
“Not yet,” I replied, unable to look away from her face.
She took a step into the room, and I caught a glimpse of something metallic tucked beneath her wrist. A blade. She’d come armed, ready for war, prepared to fight whoever had dared to hurt her husband.
The thought sent heat racing through my veins.
Behind me, I heard Hannah’s sharp intake of breath and Trev’s muttered curse. They were realizing what I was only just beginning to understand myself.
Anya Voronov—Anya Antonov—wasn’t just my temporary wife or my reluctant responsibility.
She was the woman who’d thrown away every principle she claimed to hold because she couldn’t bear the thought of losing me.
And God help us both, because that changed everything.