Chapter 4
SERGEI
The alarm that means someone is inside my house tears me out of my chair. That sound—sharp, rising pulses that catch under the skin—is wired for only two internal conditions—fire or breach. The perimeter, for all that matters, still holds.
Dawn breaks somewhere in the east, far from the west wing office where I’m already standing.
The siren drives down the corridor while I grab my gun and push through the door.
Red light strobes along the walls. I take the stairs two at a time.
A storm has gathered outside, its roar threading beneath the alarm.
The house, my house, has a different voice when it’s afraid.
“Report,” I crack into the radio clipped at my belt.
Static breathes back at me, then a voice.
“East guest floor,” Kirill answers, breath ragged. “Alert at suite twelve. Two guards not responding. Cameras are cycling on that sector.”
Suite twelve. Raina.
“Thermal?” I ask.
“Glitch on that sector,” he says. “Someone looped half the feed before the alarm tripped. We’re working on it.”
Inside job. Or someone good enough to ghost us from outside.
My chest clenches and I move faster. A maid presses herself against the wall to let me pass, her eyes wide, her hands clutching fresh linen.
The air gets hotter as I near the east wing, the radiators working against the cold seeping through old stone.
The east corridor is narrower, lined with closed doors and paintings that mean nothing compared to the men who are supposed to be standing outside one of them.
Alarm lights flash, washing everything in red.
Two guards should be at her room.
There’s no one.
I stop at her door. The lock indicator shows green. Inside, a thin line of light under the threshold. I listen. Nothing. No movement, no voices, no scrape.
“Yuri, Anton,” I say into the radio. “Status, suite twelve.”
Silence.
The carpet shows a dark smear near the baseboard, half hidden in shadow, dragged toward the far end of the hall. My pulse climbs, but my hand stays steady on the gun.
“Kirill, kill the siren,” I say. “Keep the lights.”
The noise cuts mid-wail. The house falls into a strange void of soundlessness, a retreat before a strike. The red light still pulses, turning the smear on the floor a darker, heavier black. I follow it. At the bend in the corridor, I find Yuri.
He lies on his back, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. There’s a neat hole in his forehead. No powder burns. The blood has soaked into the carpet around his head, turning the pattern viscid and dark. I crouch and touch his throat. Warm, but nothing underneath my fingers.
“One guard down, it's Yuri.” I say into the handset. “Headshot. No sign of Anton.”
“Copy,” Kirill says. His voice is tighter now.
“Rewind that feed. Let Vlad have a look,” I say into the handset. “Last minute. Before the loop.”
“Already running,” Kirill replies.
I scan the floor. No shell, no footprint in the blood. The camera at the junction blinks green in the corner, aimed just a fraction too high to have caught the shooter’s face. Kirill and another recruit come running. He grips a handset in one hand and forces his cap back into place with the other.
“Pakhan.” He snaps to attention for a brief second.
I motion for Kirill to fall in beside me.
We follow the blood trail. It thins, then vanishes near the service door at the end of the hall.
There is a faint scuff on the lower panel, as if someone hit it in a hurry.
No obvious drag, no body. Either Anton walked after being hit, or he walked someone else.
I try the handle. It opens on bare stairs that drop toward the staff floors. The light is out.
“Secure the east stairs,” I tell the men behind me. “No one uses this route without my eyes on them.”
They nod and take positions, one facing the stairwell, one watching the corridor with his gun up, shoulder brushing the wall.
Raina’s room comes next. My hand is on the gun as I push the door and step inside.
Empty. Sheets are kicked back on the bed, boots on the rug, lamp on, bathroom door open.
No overturned furniture, no broken glass, no struggle.
The air holds the faint trace of her soap and a sharper tang of sweat and chill.
If someone pulled her out of here, they did it fast, or she went willingly.
Or she ran.
The thought sits sourly in my throat. If she decided to bolt into a compound under lockdown, with a possible shooter inside, I will wring her neck myself.
I move to the console where Vlad, my head of security for the estate, stands scanning the feeds.
“Negative,” he says. “But I have one female outline in the service corridor behind the kitchen. Small, crouched position, hands empty. Looks like her.”
The tightness in my chest eases half a degree. Enough to keep me from shooting the next thing that moves. “Pull a still,” I say. Her. It has to be.
There is a pause, then the faint click of a key. “Confirmed. It’s Raina.”
Relief slides over the anger for a second. I swallow hard. “Good. Keep eyes on every other corridor. We had at least one inside shooter.”
I leave the suite as I found it and head for the service stairs at the far end of the hall.
The house changes character as soon as I slip through the unmarked door.
The space smells like hot water and bleach.
Narrow steps drop toward the staff floors, lined with scuff marks from deliveries and late-night runs.
Halfway down, another alarm indicator flashes above a metal door, not red this time. Amber. Kitchen.
“Pakhan,” Kirill says, just as I reach it. “We have a new problem.”
“Make it quick.”
“North service entrance, ground floor.” The mouthpiece cackles. “The door opened three minutes before the alarm. No code logged. There’s a box on the kitchen counter. Same size as the first.”
My hand tightens on the railing. “I'm on my way,” I say. “No one touches it.”
The kitchen at this hour should hold only two night staff and a security runner. When I walk in, all three stand near the far wall, eyes on the island where a black box sits on the stainless steel.
“Who opened the door?” I ask.
The head cook, Galina, lifts her hand halfway. She’s older. Her knuckles are red from scrubbing.
“It was already unlocked when I came in,” she says, voice tight. “The box was on the counter, no note. I called him.” She nods at the security runner.
“We cleared the bay,” the man says. “No one in the loading bay. The exterior camera shows the door open, then nothing, then closed again. Loop in the feed. Same as upstairs.” He's sweating.
I turn my focus to the box. It is identical to the first—matte black, no markings. The cardboard is dry. I pull gloves on, step to the island, and lift the lid. Inside lies a single photograph.
Raina, tied to a chair.
She's younger, hair shorter, face thinner, arms pinned behind her, ankles lashed to the legs. Tape covers her mouth. A thick rope bites into the skin at her throat hard enough that I can see the strain in her neck. Her eyes are wild. There is a line of blood at her wrist where she fought the ties.
The room behind her is what freezes my breath.
Pale tile, cracked at the corner near the floor. A metal shelving unit with a bent middle rack. An old service sink with a particular rust stain on the left side, like someone once poured out a bucket of diluted paint and never cleaned it properly. I know this room.
Years ago, before renovations, there was a storage area in the north service wing that looked exactly like this. We replaced the shelving, retiled the floor, and moved the plumbing. But the pattern, the dimensions, the way the light hits from the high window—all of it is my house.
The photo isn’t new. The edges are slightly worn, the color a touch faded. This was taken years ago.
The weight in my chest grows heavier by the minute. This isn’t about starting a war. The war was already happening under our noses.
“Out,” I say to the kitchen staff.
Galina starts to protest, then shuts her mouth and ushers them out, pulling the door.
I take the box and the photograph and head into the service corridor behind the kitchen.
Pipes drone and pulse above, carrying heat.
Storage doors are on both sides, some open, revealing cleaning supplies, linens, crates of bottled water.
Halfway down, near a turn, she crouches in the shadow of a fire extinguisher cabinet.
Bare feet on cold tile, knees pulled to her chest, thin shirt clinging to her back. Her hair has come loose from the knot, strands stuck to her cheek. Her arms are wrapped around her legs, hands gripping her ankles.
“Raina,” I say, the word breaking out of me before I can temper it.
Her eyes are wide, fixed on the far end where the corridor hooks toward the laundry. When she hears my steps, her head snaps toward me. For a second, she looks like she might bolt. Then she recognizes my voice.
“Stay where you are,” she says. Her voice scrapes.
I stop a few steps away, my hand open at my side, gun tucked at my back. She stares past me, down the corridor, as if expecting someone else to step from the shadows.
“There’s no one else here,” I tell her. “He’s gone, if he was ever inside.”
“You don’t know that,” she replies, eyes wild and voice shrill. “You didn’t know last time, either.”
I take one step closer. Her skin has gone pale, but there is a flush high on her cheekbones, fear or anger or both. The small scar on her wrist stands out, white against the tight grip of her own hand.
“Look at me,” I murmur.
She lifts her chin. The tile is cold under us. I can feel it through my socks. The storm outside hums through the pipes. I hold the photograph where she can see it. Every muscle in her body goes rigid. “Where did you get that?” she says. Her voice is paper thin.
“Kitchen,” I answer. “In a box with no return address.”