Chapter Eleven
Nikolai
Lauren is more beautiful than I remembered.
Four years of watching her through glass, and I still wasn’t prepared for this.
For proximity. For the way the light catches her hair when she laughs at something Hannah says, or the unconscious grace with which she moves through a space.
Childbearing has softened the angles I knew and given her a fullness that makes it difficult to think clearly.
Blyad.
I’ve noticed, of course. I noticed the first night, and every morning since. There’s no point pretending otherwise—I know my cock’s responses as well as I know my enemies’ patterns. The difference is that I can control my dick.
I have to.
I watch her from across the room as she sits on the floor with Hannah, the two of them bent over a collection of dolls.
I requested those specifically—Hannah’s preferences were one of the few things I could learn from a distance.
Small mercies. Lauren arranged them in a semi-circle on the rug, assigning each one a voice, and Hannah’s laugh fills the penthouse in a way that makes something tighten behind my sternum.
Hannah is Lauren’s image. Dark hair, the same angular jaw, her mother’s stubbornness written into every expression. But her eyes are mine. Blue and watchful, taking in the world with a seriousness that’s too old for four.
I wonder how much those eyes have cost Lauren. How often she looked at her daughter and saw the ghost of me looking back.
I push the thought aside and move to the windows.
Every ten minutes. That’s the rhythm I’ve settled into—a circuit of every room, every sight line, every potential entry point.
The alarms are checked, the security feeds logged into and verified.
Aslanov’s operations have never extended this far into Illinois, but I don’t make assumptions based on what I know.
I make them based on what the bastard’s capable of.
And what he’s capable of is considerable.
Since I handed over my empire four years ago, he’s had time to grow even bigger.
To consolidate. The organization I built over a decade is his now, fed and expanded by a man with fewer scruples and more appetite.
He will have informants in places I haven’t anticipated.
He will be methodical, and he will be patient, and he will eventually find us—which means I have to be ready long before that happens.
I chose this building deliberately. Quiet street, residential, no pattern of Bratva movement within fifty miles.
Good sight lines. One elevator, two stairwells, both monitored.
The penthouse is defensible. But defensible is not the same as safe, and I’ve never been foolish enough to confuse the two.
Lauren glances up from the floor, catching me mid-circuit near the window. Something passes between us—brief, charged, quickly suppressed on her end.
She’s been doing that all morning. Meeting my gaze and then pulling away from it, like she’s disciplining herself.
Blyad.
I know that look. I’ve earned the right to recognize it.
I also know better than to reach for it.
She has made her position clear without saying a word. Hannah is her priority. Everything else—including whatever still exists between us—is a complication she can’t afford. I respect that. I even agree with it, on a practical level.
That doesn’t make it easier to stand in the same room with her.
I finish the window check and head upstairs, phone already in hand. Timur hasn’t called, which is either good news or bad news, and I need to know which.
I close the bedroom door behind me.
The distance helps. Marginally.
I hit dial.
Timur picks up on the second ring.
“We made it to Chicago,” I say.
“Thank fuck, bratan.” His relief is audible, unguarded in a way that would have embarrassed him once. “I was half-convinced I’d get a call telling me they’d found you in a ditch.”
“I didn’t survive four years to end up in a ditch.” I move to the window, scanning the street below out of habit. “Especially not now that Lauren and Hannah are with me.”
A brief pause.
“Speaking of,” he says, and I brace myself. “Hannah. Does she know who you are?”
The question lands exactly where it always does. “She will.”
“Khorosho, bratok.” He exhales. “Sophia hasn’t stopped worrying since we got the call. About both of them.”
“Look at you,” I say, the corner of my mouth pulling into a smirk. “Domesticated.”
“He says, from a safe house with his family.” A beat of silence. “And speaking of Sophia—" Timur starts.
“What about her?”
“She’s pregnant.”
"Blyad." I close my eyes briefly. “Congratulations, bratok. Ty stanesh' ottsom.”
“Lauren didn’t tell you?”
“Nyet.” The word comes out flat. “She didn’t.”
I can’t be angry about it. Lauren speaks to me when necessary and not a word more. That’s the quiet arrangement we’ve settled into, unspoken and mutual, and I understand it even when it costs me. But this—learning something this significant secondhand—sits differently.
“I’m happy for you, bratan,” I say. “I mean it.”
“You don’t sound it.”
“Things are tense here. Lauren and I are...” I search for the right word. “Navigating. She’s talking to me, but only just. Sometimes I think she’d prefer it if the funeral four years ago had been real.”
“Da,” Timur says, without judgment. “I can understand that.”
The honesty is something I’ve always valued in him. He’s never told me what I wanted to hear.
“Anything on Aslanov?”
“Nothing concrete yet. But you and I both know it’s a matter of time.
Now that Lauren and Hannah are settled, we need to think about our next move.
” I watch a cab slow at the intersection below, then pull away.
“Can you still find loyal men? People who didn’t fully cross over when he took the empire? ”
“I’ll make some calls.” His voice shifts into the something I know—focused, certain.
“Good. Stay in touch.”
I end the call and pocket the phone.
Downstairs, I find Lauren at the kitchen table.
She has an apple in one hand and a small knife in the other, cutting it into pieces small enough for Hannah.
Precise, careful cuts—the kind of unconscious attentiveness that comes from years of doing something for someone you love.
Hannah is talking, a continuous cheerful monologue I can’t quite make out from the stairs, and a small smile has found its way to Lauren’s mouth.
I stay where I am.
I always knew she was strong. I knew it from a distance, through glass, over four years of watching. She rebuilt herself after what I did to her—rebuilt her career, built a life, raised our daughter—and somewhere in the process she became something even more formidable than the woman I remembered.
I’d told myself that was enough. That knowing they were safe and whole and flourishing was enough.
Watching her now, I’m not sure I believed it even then.
Hannah has her mother’s mouth. The same way of talking with her whole face, every thought visible before it becomes a word.
But her eyes are unmistakably mine.
I’ve found myself grateful for that, in a way that borders on selfish. That small proof I existed in their lives even when I wasn’t there.
I think about what I wanted this to be, once.
Not the empire, not the power—I mean this.
What it meant to sit at a table with people who were yours.
I spent years being taught that family meant the Bratva—loyalty sworn in blood, preserved through violence.
And there was a time that felt like enough.
It doesn’t anymore.
It hasn’t for a long fucking time.
Lauren laughs quietly at something Hannah says, and the sound travels across the room and does something to my chest I don’t have a name for.
I want to be sitting at that table. I want Hannah to look up and see a father, not a stranger.
I want Lauren to laugh like that because of something I said, not despite everything I’ve done.
But she’s right. She was right in the cabin kitchen, and she’s right now, even if she hasn’t said it since.
Danger doesn’t stay behind when I leave.
It follows. It has always fucking followed.
And if staying near them makes them a target, then the most protective thing I can do is finish this—take Aslanov down, remove the threat permanently, and give them back the life they built without me.
Even if I’m not in it.
I stand on the staircase a moment longer, watching them.
Governing an empire had never felt like this. Brutal decisions made in cold rooms, violence as currency, survival as the only metric that mattered. I told myself it was necessary. For years, I believed it.
Blyad.
Maybe this is what reckoning looks like. Not a bullet. Not a blade. Just this: standing at the edge of a life that should have been mine, watching it happen without me, understanding with complete clarity that I have no one to blame for the distance but myself.
A death by a thousand small mercies.
Hannah holds up her apple slice, showing it to Lauren like it’s a discovery.
I turn and head back upstairs.