Chapter Thirty-Nine
Arkady
The alert comes through as a single vibration against my thigh.
Not a call, not a text—a distinct pulse pattern I programmed days ago and prayed I’d never feel.
Mirabel’s panic button.
My body is moving before my brain catches up.
Chair kicked back, laptop abandoned mid-sentence, the meeting notes I was reviewing for tomorrow’s Empire Royale board presentation scattering across the desk.
The wedding planner’s color swatches flutter to the floor—ivory, champagne, pearl—pretty words for white that now seem ridiculous and small and utterly fucking irrelevant.
Pizdets.
Yobanyy ublyudok!
I’m sprinting down the corridor of my downtown office, thumbing my phone open, pulling up the tracking app as I take the stairs two at a time because waiting for the elevator would cost me forty seconds I can’t afford.
The stairwell amplifies my footsteps, setting my teeth on edge and ramping my adrenaline levels even higher.
The app loads. GPS coordinates. Panic button activated at 15:47. Three minutes ago.
Three minutes. One hundred and eighty seconds during which anything could have happened to my pregnant fiancée while I sat in my office going through notes.
I hit Yanis’s number as I burst through the parking garage door, the concrete swallowing the daylight behind me. My car is sixty feet away. Fifty. Forty.
He picks up on the second ring. “Arkady, we’re at the—”
“Where is Mirabel?” I bark.
“We’re at a restaurant on Lexington. Waiting for her. She went into a shop to grab some dresses. Should be back any minute. What’s—”
“Nyet, mudak!” The words explode out of me. I wrench open the car door, throw myself behind the wheel. The engine fires before the door is fully closed. “I told you to keep an eye on her! Both eyes! Every fucking second!”
“Why, what’s up, Arkady?”
“Her panic button.” I reverse out of the space fast enough that the tires scream against the concrete. “Mirabel’s panic button has been activated.”
“Blyad!” Yanis spits out. I hear movement on his end—chair scraping, his footsteps quickening. “I’m going to check the boutique. Hold on.”
“Don’t hold on. Move.”
I tear out of the parking garage and merge into traffic, cutting off a delivery van whose driver lays on the horn for three solid seconds.
I don’t register it. The road ahead is a sequence of obstacles between me and the person I need to reach.
Every red light, every dawdling sedan, every pedestrian who takes one second too long in a crosswalk makes me want to tear someone to shreds.
My phone sits in the dashboard mount, Yanis’s call on speaker. I can hear him moving, the ambient noise shifting from restaurant chatter to the bustle of a busy street. Then his voice, sharper now, directed at someone nearby: “Excuse me, has anyone seen a woman—pregnant, dark hair, green dress?”
Muffled response. Nothing useful.
“She’s not in the boutique,” Yanis says, back on the line. “I’m checking with the security detail—”
“How the fuck did we lose her, Yanis? We had six men on her!”
“Big crowd. The place is heaving. She was only going two stores down—”
“Two stores is enough. Two seconds is enough. You know this. I know this. We’ve run ops where the gap was less than five feet, and we still lost people.”
I hear the guilt land. The type of silence that means my brother is swallowing something he wants to say and replacing it with something more productive. Good. I don’t need his apologies. I need his brain.
Then realization dawns on me.
“Give the phone to Debra.”
“What?”
“The phone, Yanis. Hand it to Debra. Now.”
Shuffling. A murmured exchange I can’t make out.
Then Debra’s voice, tentative. “Arkady?”
“Debra, listen carefully.” I weave between two lorries, the gap narrow enough that my wing mirrors nearly kiss their flanks. The speedometer reads seventy in a forty zone. “Are you sure—absolutely sure—that my father does not know about Mirabel? That you have an identical twin?”
“I never told him,” she says. Her voice is steady, but I don’t think it will stay that way. “I wanted to protect my sister. I didn’t want Gavriil to know about her. Unless he did his own investigation, he doesn’t know. Not from me, anyway.”
My thumb is pressing so hard into the leather of the steering wheel that the nail bed has gone white. I force myself to ease the pressure before the tendon cramps.
“So when he crashed the engagement party,” I say, fighting to keep the words from rushing out, “he thought I was proposing to you?”
“Could be,” Debra says.
I blow through a red light. A taxi swerves. Someone screams something I don’t catch and don’t care about.
“Oh God,” Debra husks out. She’s beginning to understand, too.
Fuck.
Fuck!
I pull up the security app with my free hand, thumb jabbing at the screen while my other hand holds the wheel steady through a roundabout at a speed the engineers never intended.
The panic button GPS shows coordinates. I know these coordinates.
I’ve memorized every property my father owns, every safe house, every bolt-hole registered through his web of shell companies and offshore trusts.
I tracked them two years ago with Stefan, plotted them on a wall like surveillance targets, because that’s exactly what they are.
These coordinates belong to Gavriil’s primary residence.
Mirabel is in my father’s house.
The same house where my father kept trafficked women.
The house where I once stood outside a door and listened to him abuse a woman who looked exactly like the one now carrying my daughter.
My brain assembles the rest in microseconds.
Father’s people took Mirabel from the shopping center.
Professional extraction—a team, probably three or four, using the crowd as cover.
They brought her to him. And he looked at her face—at Debra’s face—and saw not Mirabel McLeod, not the mother of his grandchild, but his escaped property.
He thinks she’s Debra.
He thinks that I’ve been keeping her for myself. That the pregnancy is the result of—
Bozhe moi.
Sweat breaks cold at my temple. Not rage. Fear. The kind that comes from knowing that the person you love and the child she’s carrying are in the hands of a man who doesn’t see women as human.
A man who kept Debra in a cellar and called her Princess while he broke her.
A man who will look at Mirabel’s pregnant belly and see betrayal. Defiance. A possession that dared to breed without permission.
“Arkady?” Debra’s voice, small and distant on the speaker. “Arkady, what’s happening? Where is she?”
“She’s at Gavriil’s house.” The words come out expressionless. “He has her. And he thinks she’s you.”
Debra makes a sound of distress. I hear her breathing grow faster.
Yanis takes the phone. “Talk to me,” my brother says. All business now.
“Mobilize everyone. Stefan, the twins, Yuri, Mikhail—everyone. Full kit. I want them at Gavriil’s perimeter in thirty minutes.”
“Arkady, are you ready to—?”
“She’s pregnant, Yanis.” My voice cracks. “Pregnant, and our father thinks she’s the woman he kept as a sex slave. He doesn’t know she’s carrying his grandchild. He doesn’t know she’s mine.”
The implications hang between us.
“I’m fifteen minutes out,” I say. “I know the property. I know the rotations, the blind spots, the access points. I’ll go in quiet, ahead of the team. Same approach as last time—eastern wall, service entrance.”
“I’m not going to change your mind about this, am I?” He exhales.
“No.” I check the rearview. “Get Debra somewhere safe. Take her back to Ashwater. Put her in the Left Wing and lock it down. She doesn’t need to hear about what might be happening inside that house.”
“She’ll want to—”
“I don’t care what she wants. I care that she’s alive and away from the blast radius when I tear that place apart.”
“Blyad.” Yanis exhales. “Be careful, bratok. He’ll have doubled security since we hit the underground complex.”
I consider this for less than half a second. “Doesn’t matter. I’m getting her out. Both of them. Sara and Mirabel.”
I end the call, then dial Stefan.
He picks up immediately. “Boss.”
“Code Blackout. Gavriil’s primary residence. Mirabel’s there.”
No hesitation. No questions. I hear the distinct sound of a weapons cabinet opening—the heavy metal catch, the pneumatic hiss of the seal releasing.
“Team?”
“Full roster. Yanis is coordinating logistics. I’m going in ahead—solo entry, eastern approach.” I weave through a stream of cars. “I need real-time comms, thermal overlay of the house interior, and Mikhail on the security feeds. Kill the cameras when I give the word.”
“Thermal will take ten minutes to get airborne.”
“Then get it airborne nine minutes ago.”
“Da.” A pause. The sound of a magazine being loaded, the crisp metallic snap of rounds seating into place. “Arkady. Is she hurt?”
The question opens a door I’ve been keeping shut with both hands.
Behind it lives every image my mind has been generating since the GPS coordinates resolved: Mirabel on the floor of my father’s sitting room, hand to her cheek where he struck her; Mirabel backed against a wall, arms wrapped around her belly, protecting Sara from a man who views unborn children as leverage; Mirabel hearing the same words Debra heard for six years, beg, Princess, beg, except she doesn’t know those words, doesn’t know the script, doesn’t understand that compliance is the only currency that buys time in Gavriil Laurov’s house.
My woman’s a fighter. And I’m terrified that that’s the thing that will get her killed.
“I don’t know,” I say. “But if she is, there won’t be enough of him left to bury.”
I drop the phone onto the passenger seat and drive.
The city thins as I head north. Shops give way to suburbs give way to the kind of countryside that looks pastoral until you notice the homes are set back behind walls and gates, and the kind of landscaping designed to maximize security. Gavriil’s territory.
Twelve minutes.
I use them to breathe. Not the meditative bullshit wellness influencers peddle on Instagram—actual tactical breathing, the four-count inhale-hold-exhale-hold cycle that Spetsnaz instructors teach before urban assaults.
It works. The fear doesn’t leave but it sharpens into something useful. Something directional.
I am going to enter my father’s house.
I am going to find Mirabel.
And then I am going to do what I should have done through the Dragunov scope on the day he attacked our gate.
I should have pulled the trigger then. Should have ignored the boy who still cared for his father.
That boy is dead now.
He died somewhere on the road between a boutique where his pregnant fiancée was abducted and a country estate where his father is holding her hostage, mistaking her for the woman he tormented for years.
What’s left is the man.
The one who doesn’t miss.
Gavriil’s property appears through the trees ahead, stone walls rising behind a screen of mature oaks, the iron gates visible at the end of a curved gravel drive.
I park off-road, killing the engine behind a hedgerow thick enough to swallow the car’s silhouette. Check my weapons—the Makarov PM at my hip, round chambered, safety off. The knife at my ankle. The compact in my jacket’s inner pocket, cold against my ribs.
No flak jacket. No assault rifle. No backup in position.
Just me. And the fury I’ve been carrying for too damn long.
I move silently toward the eastern wall, staying below the sightline of the perimeter cameras.
The wall is the same—twelve feet of stone.
I find my grip. Pull myself up. The stone is cold and slick with recent rain, and my fingers bite into the crevices with the trained desperation of a man who cannot afford to fall.
At the top, I pause. Scan the grounds. Two guards visible at the front, a third near the service entrance, smoking, his weapon slung low on a strap that would cost him two full seconds to bring to ready position.
Amateurs. Gavriil’s B-team. The real operators must be inside, close to the prize.
Close to her.
I drop over the wall, absorb the impact through bent knees, and begin to move.
Hold on, zaychik.
The words form and dissolve without sound.
I’m coming.