20. Aleksandr
ALEKSANDR
Istand at the head of the long table inside the makeshift war room, hands braced on the edges of the blueprints spread before me.
The room used to be one of the estate’s formal meeting halls meant for quiet negotiations and carefully curated diplomacy. Now it looks like the command center of a military operation. Maps blanket nearly every surface.
Satellite overlays are pinned to corkboards along the walls.
Thermal signatures from the last drone pass glow faintly across a tablet screen beside me, red silhouettes marking heat sources scattered across the Borchin estate.
Guard rotation schedules—freshly stolen from Borchin’s private security network after Bashir’s team finally cracked their encryption two hours ago—sit stacked in a neat pile near my elbow.
Every piece of intelligence we’ve gathered tonight has been dragged into this room and laid bare.
A battlefield assembled in paper and pixels.
Snow falls outside the tall windows in slow, relentless sheets, the flakes thick enough to blur the world beyond the glass into a pale gray haze.
Inside the room, however, the air is anything but calm.
Low voices murmur across the space as Sasha’s men and my own move around the room, studying the maps and data points from different angles.
The faint tapping of a keyboard echoes from the far end of the room where Bashir continues to pull data from Borchin’s compromised network, Shkanova hovering close by to supervise.
Lines of code cascade across the monitor in a constant stream of green and white as he navigates deeper through the estate’s internal system.
I drag one hand slowly across the largest blueprint—the structural layout of the Borchin estate pulled from municipal records. The lines of the building stretch across the paper in precise architectural detail—the main house, the east wing, the service corridors.
And beneath it, the tunnel.
A narrow, half-forgotten line carved through the foundation decades ago, running beneath the house before sloping downward through packed earth toward a wooded hillside a quarter mile beyond the property line.
The faded ink marks the final point where the tunnel ends to a storm cellar exit facing east.
Exactly where Katerina said it would be.
My fingers press harder against the table directly over the exit point.
Something shifts in my peripheral vision. I turn just enough to see Sasha moving toward me, the low conversations in the room quieting slightly as he steps closer to the table.
“What are we starting with first?” he asks.
I lean back slightly, grabbing the tablet resting beside the blueprints and swiping across the screen until the tactical overlay appears.
“Our primary breach will have to be at the southeast service gate.” I turn the screen so both of us can see it clearly.
The satellite image sharpens as I zoom in, highlighting the outer security posts.
“Secondary will be at the north wall. We hit both simultaneously, it’ll send the military scattering. The chaos will buy us time to get in.”
He nods silently.
“Bashir,” I call across the room. “What’s the status of the first wave?”
He pauses his fingers, his head lifting from the monitor in front of him. “Everyone’s ready to go. We’ll have the outer perimeter down in ninety seconds. Once it’s clear, then we’ll move to the interior.”
“Good.” I straighten, rolling my shoulders once, the tension that’s been knotted there for days finally beginning to shift now that we’re no longer standing still.
“Who’s taking the tunnel?” Sasha asks.
I glance down once more at the faded line running beneath the estate. The path that leads directly to her.
“You will. I’ll be hunting down her father.”
He nods once with no hesitation.
We both understand what this part of the plan means. While our Bratvas create chaos above ground, I’m trusting him to go straight for Katerina. Six months ago, neither of us would have trusted the other with something like this.
Now I’m trusting him with the most important person in my life, and he knows it.
I know if we were in the opposite positions and he were to ask me to do the same, I would without question.
Sasha’s phone buzzes against the table. He glances down at the screen and goes still.
The shift in his posture is small, almost imperceptible to anyone who doesn’t know him well.
His shoulders lock, his expression flattening in that particular way that happens only when something dangerous has just entered the room.
I don’t need to see the name to know who it is.
Only one person can make him freeze like that.
My tongue runs slowly along the backs of my teeth.
“You could ignore it,” I say.
The suggestion hangs in the air for a moment.
It’s a stupid one. We both know it. Even the tone in my voice makes it obvious I’m not serious.
Maybe if we were a little more suicidal, that might have been something worth considering.
Hell, even a year ago, I might have toyed with the idea purely out of spite.
Recklessness has always come naturally to me, anyway.
But that was before Katerina.
Before Sasha had Alina.
Now the stakes are different. Sasha and I both have far too much to lose by pretending Nikolai Malyshko doesn’t exist and toying with the idea that ignoring his summons, even if by phone call, won’t have massive repercussions. Even if the idea of doing so is… tempting.
He lets out a slow exhale through his nose before lifting the phone up slowly. His thumb hovers over the accept button for a second, weighing whether the call is worth answering at all or if the punishment for not doing so will be far better for him in the long run.
When he finally answers, he doesn’t bother with pleasantries.
“Malyshko.”
I can’t hear the other side, but I don’t need to. I watch Sasha’s face instead. The casual neutrality he’d been wearing moments ago vanishes beneath the quiet intensity that only surfaces when he’s dealing with someone he cannot simply dismiss. His eyes narrow slightly as Nikolai speaks.
Whatever is being said on the other end isn’t friendly.
The muscle in his cheek jumps when he clenches his teeth, a sharp twitch beneath his skin that betrays the irritation he’s trying to keep under control. He exhales slowly through his nose, forcing himself to remain silent while whatever reprimand is being delivered spills through the receiver.
“I’m not asking for Pact sanction,” Sasha says after a long beat. “This is my decision. My resources. That’s all.”
There’s another pause, longer this time.
I can almost picture Nikolai on the other end of the line leaning back in the high-backed chair in his war room, fingers steepled, voice quiet in the way that always makes the temperature in any room drop ten degrees.
Sasha’s shoulders square. “Then consider it a personal matter. Not business.”
Whatever Nikolai says next makes Sasha flinch. Just a flicker, but I catch it all the same. His free hand curls into a fist at his side. “I understand the consequences. You did the same for me once. Neither of us can pretend this is out of the blue.”
Silence stretches so long, I start counting the seconds in my head.
Finally, the call ends without another word. He sets it down carefully on the table, then grips the edge of the table with both hands and leans his weight forward. His shoulders brace as though he’s holding himself steady against something heavier than the conversation I just watched unfold.
Whatever had been said clearly struck a nerve with him.
“Well,” he says simply. “That went as poorly as I thought it would.” His gaze drifts briefly across the maps spread beneath his hands before he adds, “Though, I’m surprised he already knows we’re moving out.”
Before I can stop myself, I speak. “I think he has surveillance on me.”
Sasha’s eyes tick up to meet mine. “He bugged you?”
“I believe so. Yes. For quite some time now. How else would he have known about Katerina?”
Sasha straightens slightly, studying me now with a more focused intensity. His eyes narrow just a fraction, the gears in his head visibly beginning to turn as he works through the implications of what I’ve just said.
No one likes the idea that the Pact’s king might have eyes inside one of our houses. Unfortunately, if he has been watching me, there isn’t much we can do about it now.
Not tonight, at least.
Sasha’s mouth opens as if he’s about to answer, then slowly closes again. A small grunt leaves him instead because there isn’t really anything to argue.
“Keep that in mind when you go home,” I say.
Sasha huffs out a quiet snort.
“I will.”
The conversation ends there, both of us filing the information away for another time when we’re not about to storm a fortified estate.
The next hour and a half passes quickly.
The war room dissolves into controlled chaos as orders are finally issued and men begin to mobilize and move out.
I stand at the edge of it all for a moment, watching the machine come alive around me.
My side throbs under fresh bandages, a dull, persistent reminder that I’m far from whole, but adrenaline has already begun to drown it out.
Outside, the snowfall has gotten worse.
Thick, heavy flakes drift down in slow spirals, turning the estate grounds into a beautiful, almost peaceful, sight. This weather is always perfect for muffling sound and swallowing footprints. It’s the perfect cover to disappear someone right out from under their captor’s nose.
Sasha appears beside me without warning. He doesn’t speak at first, just stands there with both hands in the pockets of his dark coat, watching the flakes drift down in lazy spirals. Then, he claps me once on the shoulder hard, the impact jarring in its sincerity when he squeezes.
“Let’s go get your wife back.”