Chapter 10 - Mikhail
Extraction complete. Package returned. Medic on site.
Greger’s communication came through three minutes ahead of her arrival—clipped and precise.
There’s a pressure in my skull that’s been building ever since Gregor used that fucking word.
Medic.
The medic is efficient and thorough and exits the room before I enter it.
She is sitting on the edge of the couch when I see her.
The dress from the morning is gone—she’s in the spare clothing she keeps in the room I designated as hers, practical and dark. Her left arm is dressed at the upper bicep, clean white bandaging against her olive skin, and she is holding a glass of water in both hands that tremble harshly.
Pools of brown look up at me when I enter.
I cross the room without speaking a word, sitting on the low table in front of her. The half-empty glass of water nearly topples over with the motion.
“Let me see,” I say, glancing at the bandaged arm.
She doesn’t argue, which tells me the adrenaline has fully receded and what is left in its absence is exhaustion. She extends her arm, and I take it in both hands carefully.
I peel back the dressing edge enough to assess it properly.
The graze is lateral and clean, exactly how Greger’s report described. To someone else, this might look fortunate that the bullet didn’t go anywhere in the flesh. But to me, it’s the worst possible thing I can see.
I redress it properly, hands oddly gentle and stable. Her gaze stays on my hands working the whole time.
My hands linger over the edge of the dressing, unwilling to let go.
“Where were you?” I ask quietly.
“Meeting Elena Vasquez,” she manages, tone for once not defensive. At least she is not hiding from me.
“The financial compliance attorney.”
“She’s been working the financial threads, the shell designations and the routing codes that tied to the network my parents operated inside.
She found cross-references that I couldn’t access.
” Zara pauses. “She confirmed that what I’m chasing isn’t just a personal disappearance.
What my parents built was important enough that others had interests in it, only that interest didn’t disappear when the network did. ”
I repress the discomfort that races down my spine. Her eyes, finally looking deep into mine, sharpen slightly.
“You already knew some of that,” she guesses.
The answer she wants I am not prepared to deliver tonight, in this room, with her sitting three feet away from me with a fresh wound on her arm. The honest answer is a door I will open, but not now, and not like this.
“I know enough,” I deflect, which is both truthful and incomplete. Her mouth purses in displeasure but, thankfully, she doesn’t push it.
Something bubbles in my gut, climbing up to my throat and sitting on my tongue. It’s been bubbling ever since Greger’s transmission, since I saw her with a bandage on her arm that I’m responsible for.
Scratch that—it’s been looming over my head since the night she told me about being eight years old, about notebooks, and about searching for answers when no one else gives them to you.
“I’m going to help you find them,” I blurt out.
Her lips part, chocolate eyes full of skepticism and hope.
“Why?”
“Because the threat to you is connected to this network. Your investigation is going to continue regardless of what I do or don’t do, and it’s better if I have your back than not. And because—” I inhale sharply, closing my eyes momentarily. “You deserve the answer.”
Her eyes soften, thick eyelashes sweeping over her cheeks, empty of color.
“I’m going to need full access to everything you gather,” she says finally, in a neutral tone, which is neither an affirmative nor a negation. “No filtered versions. Everything.”
“You got it.”
Her glass of water is almost gone. She leans back against the couch cushion, mouth curling with discomfort as much as she tries to hide it.
There’s a knock on the door. At my answering grunt, one of the maids rolls in a tray laden with pasta and a whole grilled filet of fish.
“Not hungry,” Zara grumbles once the maid has left.
“Didn’t ask. Eat.”
She throws her little tantrum for some time before the growling of her stomach gives her away. My stare is flat as I look at her. She rolls her eyes, almost scoffing.
She leans forward as I put the tray on the table in front of her. I hand her the fork, and she takes her first bite.
I am intimately aware of how Zara Khan ignores hunger, exhaustion, all her human needs, thinking of herself as above it.
Tonight it won’t fly though.
I stay in my place, watching her bites get bigger and faster. I should probably leave her be. She’s safe and eating. Nothing will happen to her.
I don’t move.
Once she’s finished, she sits with her legs folded beneath her, rubbing her eyes with her knuckles. She leans back, asking for a new glass of water. I fetch her a glass from the kitchen, feeling an uncomfortable itch at the back of my neck at having left her alone.
When I come back, barely over a minute later, she’s still on the couch, mouth slightly parted open as she snuffles in sleep.
I put down the glass, carefully sliding my hands beneath her knees and behind her shoulder, taking great care to not jostle her left arm as I lift her slowly. She’s drowsy enough that she doesn’t even wake once. Her head lolls to my chest, brown strands slipping from her bun to line her face.
Something pulses in my chest, equal parts pain and equal parts tender.
Her breathing remains slow and even as I carry her to my room, laying her on top of my bed.
I tuck her hair back behind her ear, watching her face as she snuggles into the covers with a small hum.
Protection is a parameter, a function. What I’m doing, having her in my room, doesn’t have anything to do with protecting her.
This is something that has grown inside me without permission. It has been growing since the alley in Dubai, since the Dubai penthouse, since the first time she held her position when I released her wrist.
She has never been afraid of me, which is both profoundly inconvenient and entirely compelling.
This knot inside me has been growing through every confrontation, every negotiation, every time I’m inside her, or about to be.
She stirs slightly, her injured arm resting carefully.
She is looking for her parents because it is the truth she needs, the answer that the eight-year-old girl with the notebooks decided she was owed and has never stopped believing she would find. It is not something she is capable of abandoning.
She will find it, or she will spend herself entirely in the pursuit of it.
What she will find, when she finds it, contains my name.
And sitting in the quiet dark, her scent mingling with my own, I also come face to face with a part of me that I would not have been able to locate a month ago, something that the man I was before this woman entered my life would not have thought possible.
I will do whatever it takes to keep her.
Whatever it takes, even if it means destroying the truth and her world to keep her by my side.