Chapter 021 Viktor
She had not been gone three hours, yet the silence in my study already felt like a lifetime.
I sat at the desk, the security feeds cycling on the screen in front of me, trying to decide which of my men still deserved my trust. The vodka bottle stood open beside my elbow, condensation sliding down the crystal and pooling on the mahogany. I had poured a glass. It remained untouched. My throat refused anything except the taste of doubt.
Three hours since she walked out the gates to meet her blood family. Three hours of wondering whether she would choose them over me.
My phone vibrated again. Katya. Another call from Moscow I would not answer. Her messages had grown shorter, sharper: Mother is asking for you. Mother has days, not weeks. I stared at the screen until it went dark, then set it face-down. I could not explain to my sister that I was waiting for a Moretti woman the way a starving man waits for bread.
Isabella had every reason to stay with them. Real family. Real power. A life she had been born into, not stolen into. What did I offer? A compound full of men who wanted her throat cut, a dead brother whose ghost still walked these halls, and an obsession that had rewritten every rule I lived by.
I pulled up the guard rotation again. Something was wrong tonight. Pavel posted to the wrong corridor. Boris took his break ten minutes early. Small discrepancies. Normally I would have had them both in the basement by now. Tonight I only noted them and moved on, too raw to think straight.
The Prague shipment report sat open, cursor blinking. The words refused to resolve into meaning. Nothing existed except the question of whether that black SUV would ever return.
Headlights swept across the window.
My heart slammed once, hard, then raced. I was at the glass before I registered moving. The SUV rolled through the gates, slow and deliberate. She was here. She had come back. She had chosen me.
I paced once, twice, then forced myself still. If her family had tried to keep her, there would be consequences. I opened additional security protocols, fired off texts to the few men I still trusted. Twenty minutes crawled by before her footsteps sounded in the corridor.
The door opened.
Isabella stood framed in it, and the sight of her gutted me. Makeup flawless, hair brushed, silk dress unwrinkled—yet she looked as though someone had taken a blade to her insides and left the outside untouched. Her eyes carried the wreckage of whatever had happened at that dinner table.
“You came back,” I said. My voice came out rougher than I intended.
“I said I would.”
We stared across the room. I wanted to demand details—who had said what, who had hurt her—but she was here. She had chosen this. Chosen me. That was enough.
“You could have stayed,” I said.
“I know.”
Three strides and she was against me, mouth finding mine, desperate and bruising. Salt on her lips. Need sharp enough to cut. My hands fisted in her hair, pulling her closer, needing proof she was real.
This was not gentle. This was reclamation. Her nails scored down my back through the shirt, drawing thin lines of blood. I bit her lower lip, tasted her gasp, walked her backward until her spine met the door with a thud.
“They wanted you to stay,” I growled against her throat.
“Yes.”
“But you came back to me.”
“I came back for answers,” she said.
The words struck deeper than any blade. Still, I hiked the silk of her dress up her thighs and found nothing beneath but bare, wet skin. The discovery tore a sound from my chest.
Her hands worked my belt open, shoved fabric aside just enough. I lifted her, thrust in hard, no patience for preliminaries. She wrapped her legs around my waist, heels digging into my back, urging deeper.
“Harder,” she demanded, teeth closing on my throat.
I gave her what she asked, each thrust slamming the door in its frame. Let the entire compound hear. Let them know she had returned to me.
“Mine,” I snarled against her ear. “You’re fucking mine now.”
She did not answer with words. Her body answered, clenching around me, pulling me over the edge with her. She cried my name as she came; I followed, emptying myself deep inside her with a guttural sound I did not recognize as mine.
We slid down the door to the floor, breathing ragged, clothes twisted, still joined. Sweat cooled on our skin.
Later, in bed, she traced the scratches she had left down my back while I threaded my fingers through her hair. Silence stretched, fragile and dangerous.
“Sleep, kotyonok,” I said. “You’re safe here.”
The lie tasted like ash.
The sound woke me first—a footstep that did not belong.
Three AM. Isabella warm against my chest. I registered the wrongness a heartbeat before the door exploded inward.
Two shots cracked through the dark, tearing into the mattress where her head had been a second earlier. Feathers drifted like slow snow. Gunpowder burned my lungs.
I had already rolled her off the bed, onto the floor, my body covering hers. The assassin expected disorientation. Instead I launched low, shoulder driving into his gut. We crashed into the dresser; wood splintered. His gun skittered across the floor.
Moonlight caught his face as my hands closed around his throat. Pavel’s younger brother. One of my own.
Betrayal flared hotter than rage. I twisted. The snap was sharp, final. His body dropped, blood beginning to pool.
“Isabella.”
She crouched beside the bed, knife already in her hand. Of course she had a knife.
“Are you hit?” I demanded, hands running over her, searching for wounds.
“No. You?”
“I’m fine.”
Her gaze fixed on the corpse. “You killed him.”
“He was trying to kill you.”
I stood, mind racing. Inside job. Someone who knew patrol patterns, knew we would be vulnerable at three AM. The irregularities I had noticed earlier clicked into place.
“Next time let me handle it,” she said, knife still ready.
“There won’t be a next time.” My voice dropped to the register that made men piss themselves. “I’m killing anyone who looks at you wrong.”
“That’s not practical.”
“Watch me make it practical.”
Guards poured in, too late. Their eyes took in the body, the blood, Isabella with her blade, me with death on my hands.
“Clear the room,” I ordered. “Dispose of him. Quietly.”
When the door closed again, I stared at the spreading stain on my floor. Someone inside these walls wanted her dead badly enough to burn one of their own to do it.
Kaz’s warning echoed: Don’t expect me to stop them.
The decision arrived fully formed.
“Pack,” I told her.
She did not argue. She moved with the same efficiency I used on missions—clothes folded, essentials only. I pulled cash from the safe, weapons from hidden compartments. We were not relocating. We were abandoning everything: the bratva, the compound, my position as pakhan. All of it.
For her.
My phone lit again. Katya. Another message about Mother fading. Guilt twisted, but the choice was already made. If I flew to Moscow now, Isabella would be dead before I landed.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“The lakehouse. Dimitri’s place. No one goes there anymore.”
She flinched at his name, but kept packing.
“Why not?”
“Too many ghosts.”
She folded one of my shirts into the bag with careful precision. The domestic gesture felt obscene against the smell of blood still in the air.
I watched her slide the knife she held into her boot. “Good thing I kept this.”
“Where the fuck did you get that one?”
“This one’s from home.” A faint, tired smile. “The one hidden in the closet bottom is from your kitchen. You were distracted—talking about how Dimitri used to cook.”
Christ.
We left through the service entrance she knew better than I did. Every shadow felt hostile. We reached the garage unseen, slipped into the car, and rolled out into the night.
Chicago’s lights fell away behind us. My phone buzzed again—Katya—but I sent it to voicemail. Mother might not survive the week. The knowledge sat heavy in my chest, yet Isabella’s life weighed more.
“You’re sure about this?” she asked quietly.
“I’m sure I can’t protect you there.” I tipped my head toward the compound shrinking in the mirror. “And I’m sure you’re not dying on my watch.”
Her hand settled on my thigh, warm and steady. Something wordless passed between us—acknowledgment that we were both cutting ties to everything we had known.
In the rearview mirror, I saw him. Dimitri in the back seat, gentle smile unchanged by death. Watching me drive his killer’s sister toward the one place that had ever truly been his.
I wondered if my brother was horrified, or if—impossibly—he understood.
“How long?” Isabella asked.
“Two hours.”
Two hours until I walked into Dimitri’s sanctuary with the woman I had chosen over duty, over family, over his memory. Two hours to decide whether ghosts could forgive.
I drove into the dark with her hand on my leg and my brother’s ghost riding behind us, leaving everything I had built in ashes for the woman who had burned it all down and become the only thing I could not live without.