Chapter 005 Viktor
The phone vibrates against the desk at 6:06 AM. Moscow afternoon. I know who it is before I even look.
“Alyosha.” Katya’s voice is thin, scraped raw. “Mama had a bad night.”
“How bad?”
“Weeks now. Maybe less.”
Outside the window the Chicago sky is the color of wet ash. Eleven years I have carried this debt, and now the clock runs out.
“She keeps asking about Misha,” Katya says. “Whether he’s been avenged. She says she can’t rest until she knows.”
My knuckles whiten around the phone. “Tell her soon.”
“Soon?” A bitter edge slips into her tone. “She’s running out of time, Viktor.”
“I said soon.”
“She wants to die knowing her son’s death meant something.”
I close my eyes. Upstairs, Isabella Moretti sleeps in the bed I put her in. Calm. Untouched. The woman who spoke Dimitri’s name like it belonged in her mouth.
“Today,” I tell Katya. “Tell her today.”
I end the call.
How do I explain to a dying woman that the person who cost Misha his life now costs me my sanity? That I think about her throat under my hand more than I think about her blood on the floor?
The monitors glow in the half-dark. I pull up the live feed from her suite. She lies curled on her side, rough cotton nightdress pulled high on her thighs, breathing slow and even. Peaceful. As if she has any right to peace.
I almost turn away. Then I open the logs instead.
Between 2:12 and 3:58 AM three separate cameras went black for fifteen seconds each. Staggered. Clean. Not a glitch. Someone knows exactly how long the system takes to reboot and used it.
My pulse kicks hard. Someone walked my halls last night. In my house.
I rewind frame by frame. Hallways empty. Her room feed shows her in bed before the blackout, in bed after. But those gaps…
She is not what she pretends to be.
Enough.
Today the debt is paid.
I do not knock. The door hits the wall hard enough to rattle the frame. She comes awake instantly—shoulders squared, eyes already measuring distance and threat. Not the startled flutter of a princess. The alertness of someone who has trained for this moment.
For the first time I see genuine fear flash across her face. Good.
“Get up.”
“Viktor—”
“Now.”
She rises without protest. The nightdress ends mid-thigh; her bare feet land silently on cold marble. She looks fragile like this, small bones, pale skin. I know better.
I seize her upper arm, fingers tight enough to leave fresh bruises over the old ones. She does not resist. We move through corridors lit only by low sconces. Guards look away as we pass. They have learned.
Down the stairs. The air cools with every flight. Bleach and concrete replace the faint scent of wood polish. Her breathing changes—shallow, quick. She knows where we are going.
“Viktor, wait—”
“You have waited long enough. So have I.”
The basement door opens into darkness. I hit the switch. Fluorescent tubes hum awake, washing the room in pitiless white. Drains in the floor. Steel table bolted down. Tools on the wall glinting like surgical jewelry. In the center waits the chair—cold frame, thick leather restraints.
I force her into it. The metal is ice against her bare thighs; gooseflesh rises instantly on her arms. I bind her wrists to the armrests, ankles to the legs. Leather creaks. Her pulse flutters wildly beneath my fingers when I tighten the last strap.
She is breathing fast now, chest straining the thin cotton. The composure finally fractures.
I choose a knife from the wall—slim, precise. The blade drinks the light.
“Do you know why you are here?”
She swallows. “Because of Dimitri.”
“Because you killed my brother.”
“I didn’t—”
“You told your family about the Russian boy sniffing around their princess.” I set the flat of the blade beneath her chin, tip resting against the soft hollow of her throat. “And they carved his chest open with a dagger. That blood is on your hands.”
Tears gather, spill over. They track down her cheeks and I hate how beautiful she looks crying. Hate that my body answers even now.
“My mother is dying,” I say quietly. “She has waited eleven years for peace. Today I give it to her.”
“Will it bring him back?”
The question slices clean through me.
“Will killing me bring Dimitri back?” Her voice trembles but does not break. “He will still be dead. Your mother will still be dying. And you will have one more ghost in this room.”
“You do not get to—”
“I dream about him.”
The knife stills.
“Every night.” Tears fall faster. “A boy calling for his brother in Russian I shouldn’t understand. A garden. Someone shouting Misha, Misha. I wake up crying and I don’t know why.” She draws a ragged breath. “There is something I don’t remember about that night. About before.”
The room is suddenly too quiet except for the buzz of the lights and the wet sound of her breathing.
“You are lying.”
“I am tied to a chair with a knife at my throat. Why would I lie now?”
The logic is merciless. I search her face for calculation and find only raw confusion threaded through grief.
“What do you dream?”
She tells me in fragments. Sunlight on stone paths. A boy’s laugh that aches in her chest like a bruise. Russian words rising unbidden to her tongue. Someone calling a name—Misha—that feels both foreign and intimately known.
The knife lowers to my side.
“What was he like?” she whispers. “Please.”
I should refuse. Instead the words tear free.
“He was gentle in a house that prized cruelty.” My voice sounds distant, as if someone else speaks. “At fifteen he found a stray dog with a broken leg. Father ordered it destroyed. Dimitri drove it to a vet in the middle of the night, paid with money he had saved for a new chess set. Father beat him for disobedience. Dimitri just smiled and said the dog would live.”
Her tears fall harder, but she does not look away.
“He played chess badly because he refused to sacrifice pieces. Said even pawns had value.” A rough laugh escapes me. “He kept Grandfather’s bonsai. Talked to it while he trimmed the leaves. Wanted to be an architect—build things instead of breaking them.”
I pace, knife loose in my hand, memories flooding hotter than rage.
“His laugh filled rooms. Loud. Unashamed. Even Father sometimes smiled hearing it.”
I stop close enough to taste salt on the air between us. “Tell me why you really came here, Isabella.”
“You kidnapped me.”
“You have training your family keeps quiet.” My gaze travels over her slowly—legs forced apart by the restraints, nightdress rucked high, wrists marked by leather.
I slide the tip of my knife between her thighs and lift the hem higher. Cool air kisses newly exposed skin. My pulse pounds in my ears.
There—strapped flat against the outside of her thigh, a narrow professional blade. Matte black handle. Lethal.
“You have a knife.”
She meets my eyes, steady even through tears.
“You have carried this the entire time.”
Silence.
“When I bound your wrists. When I held steel to your throat. You could have cut free. You could have killed me while I stood here spilling my brother’s childhood to his murderer.”
Still nothing.
“Why didn’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
The admission hangs between us like smoke.
I should end it now. Mother is waiting. Dimitri is waiting. The scales demand balance.
But I cannot.
Not until I understand why she dreams of him. Why she disabled my cameras. Why she let me bind her when she could have fought.
I slice through the restraint on her left wrist. Leather parts cleanly.
“Free yourself. Or don’t. Someone will come in the morning.”
“You’re leaving me here?”
“Time to think about what you are hiding.”
I turn for the door.
“Viktor.”
I pause.
“I’m sorry about your mother.”
The door slams behind me. The echo chases me up the stairs.
In the corridor I brace a hand against the wall. My palm is damp. My heartbeat will not settle.
She came armed. Trained. Deadly. She played me while I played the avenger.
And still she did not strike.
What are you, Isabella Moretti?
I return to the surveillance room and bring up the basement feeds. Multiple angles bloom across the screens. She works the remaining restraints with calm efficiency—movements too smooth, too practiced for any pampered heiress.
My cock stirs, traitorous, insistent. I adjust myself roughly and the friction draws a hiss from my throat.
She frees her right wrist, then bends forward to reach the fallen knife and cut her ankles. The nightdress pulls tight across her back, rides higher. I watch every shift of muscle beneath cotton.
She stands. Stretches. Arms overhead, spine arching. Fabric clings to her breasts, outlines stiff nipples. My hand is inside my trousers before I decide to move.
I hate myself for it. Hate the slick heat of my own palm, the way my hips jerk forward into each stroke as I watch her prowl the room.
She examines the tools on the wall with detached curiosity—fingers testing edges, weighing balance. When she looks straight into the camera lens, blue eyes steady and knowing, something twists hard behind my ribs.
I come with her name caught behind my teeth, shame and pleasure searing through me in equal measure.
The screens keep glowing. She settles back into the chair—legs crossed at the ankle, posture straight—as though waiting for tea instead of execution.
I wipe my hand on my thigh and cannot look away.
Whatever game she is playing, I am already deeper in it than I planned.
And I still do not know the rules.