Chapter Forty #3
Gavriil slides to his knees. The motion is graceless, the body surrendering to physics while the mind fights to maintain its last fragments of control.
He looks up at her from the floor, blood on his lips, and in that final glance between them, I see the entire arc of their history—the captor and the captive, the monster and the girl he kept in captivity.
“Princess—” The word comes out wet, drowning.
“Don’t—” Her voice breaks on the word, the first crack in that terrible composure. “Don’t fucking call me princess.”
She pulls the trigger a third time.
Gavriil Laurov falls forward onto his own Persian rug, next to the guards who died in his service, and doesn’t get up.
The room holds its breath.
Nobody moves. Nobody speaks. The gunshot echoes fade into the plaster and the wood and the silk curtains, absorbed by the house that held so many secrets that one more barely registers.
Debra lowers the gun. Slowly. Carefully.
Setting down something impossibly heavy that she’s been carrying for too long.
The Beretta dangles at her side, her index finger slipping off the trigger and onto the guard, and then Yanis is there, crossing the room in three strides, his weapon abandoned, his hands reaching for her, catching her as her legs give in.
She doesn’t scream. She doesn’t cry. She just folds into him—small, shaking now, the tremors finally arriving as her body acknowledges what she’s done—and Yanis wraps himself around her completely, desperately, as if the pressure of his body can hold together what’s threatening to come apart.
“I’ve got you,” he says into her hair. “I’ve got you, Debra. It’s over.”
I watch them. I watch Yanis holding the woman who just killed our father, his face buried in her hair, his shoulders heaving with something he’ll never admit to later.
I watch Debra’s hands—empty now, the gun on the carpet, her fingers twisted into the front of Yanis’s tactical vest like she’s trying to climb inside him and hide.
Then I turn and look at Gavriil.
He lies on his side, one arm beneath him, the other reaching toward something—the desk, maybe, or the chair, or some phantom version of the power he wielded for decades.
His eyes are open and glassy. The dove-gray suit is ruined—blood, carpet fibers, and other body fluids.
The final indignity of a man who believed he was untouchable, discovering that he wasn’t.
I feel nothing.
That’s the strangest part. I expected rage, or satisfaction, or grief, or the complicated tangle of all three that defines most of my life. Instead, there’s just—absence. A blank space where the fear of him used to live, now vacant, waiting for something else to move in.
“Stefan.” My voice sounds almost normal. “Secure the house. Find the rest of his men. Nobody leaves.”
Stefan is already moving, one hand to his earpiece, relaying orders without hesitation. “Leo, east wing clear? Copy. Hold position. Andrei, report.”
The earpiece crackles. Andrei’s voice, clipped and professional: “We have her. South sitting room. She’s conscious, minor facial injuries. Asking for Arkady.”
My chest seizes.
Mirabel.
“Stay with her,” I say into the mic. “I’m coming.”
I holster the Makarov. Step over Gavriil’s body without looking down. Cross the room in four strides, driven by the desperate need to reach her before another second passes.
At the doorway, I stop. Turn back.
Yanis is still holding Debra. She’s quieter now, the shaking subsiding into something steadier, deeper. My brother meets my eyes over her head.
No words. None needed. Between us passes the understanding that what happened in this room tonight will live in both of us for the rest of our lives. The moment we discovered that the thing we couldn’t do, the trigger we couldn’t pull, had been waiting for someone else’s finger all along.
I nod once.
He nods back.
Then I run.
Through the hallway, past the sitting room, past the stairs to the cellar, where twenty-eight girls were held like livestock. Past all of it, all the signs of my father’s cruelty, moving toward the only thing in this building that isn’t contaminated by his legacy.
The south sitting room door is open. Aleksei stands outside, weapon at his side. He steps back without a word as I approach.
Inside, Mirabel sits on a settee, a blanket around her shoulders.
Her left cheek is swollen, the bruise already darkening toward purple.
Her lower lip is split. Her dress is wrinkled, her hair tangled, and she has both hands pressed flat against her belly in the posture of a woman shielding her child from a world that’s given her every reason to.
She looks up when I enter.
“Hi,” she says.
And something inside me—something that’s been holding its breath since that panic alert went off—lets go.
I cross the room. Drop to my knees in front of her. Take her face in both hands, avoiding the bruised cheek, thumbing the tears she hasn’t noticed she’s crying.
“Hi,” I say back.
She laughs. It’s wet and broken and the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard.
“You came,” she whispers.
I press my mouth to the crown of her head, inhaling the essence of her. The thing I can’t describe and can’t live without.
“Always,” I say.
Against my palm, where my hand rests on her belly, Sara kicks.
Strong. Furious. Alive.
I close my eyes and let her daughter tell me that the worst is over.