Chapter 025 Viktor
Three hours. Three goddamn hours since I found her gone, Dimitri’s room torn apart, the back door yawning open like a betrayal carved in wood.
I sweep the flashlight through the gloaming, the beam slicing across trees that claw at my sleeves. My shirt hangs in ribbons, knuckles raw and bleeding from forcing my way through underbrush that has no right to be this thick. Every shadow taunts me. Every rustle could be her body crumpled in the dirt.
“Isabella!”
My voice cracks, hoarse from shouting her name into the void. The forest swallows it and gives nothing back.
I move in grids, the way I hunt men who believe distance can save them. Broken branches here. Disturbed leaves there. Bare footprints pressed into the soft earth—small, delicate, hers. She came this way first, then circled back. Clever. Always clever. A thread snags on a low branch: pale cotton from the shirt she slept in. My shirt. I pluck it free, the fabric still carrying the faint warmth of her skin.
She was here. Running blind.
The dock next. The planks creak beneath my weight, still slick with morning dew. Yesterday she sat here, legs swinging over the black water, sunlight catching in her hair while she spoke of Rocco’s stupid pact of honesty. “I forgive you,” she’d said, tracing the scar my father left across my ribs. As if forgiveness could erase what I am.
I sweep the light across the lake. Mist clings to the surface like a shroud. I wade in to my knees, water flooding my shoes, cold enough to burn. Searching for ripples that do not belong. For the pale gleam of skin beneath the surface.
The image slams into me: Isabella floating face-down, hair fanned out like spilled gold. My chest locks so tightly I cannot breathe.
Nothing. No body. She is still out there. Still mine to find.
Back to the house. Dimitri’s room reeks of chaos—boxes overturned, photographs scattered like fallen leaves. One of his architecture books lies open, pages marked with his precise notes on acoustics, sight lines, the mathematics of beauty. She sat here. Read his dreams.
Then I see it.
Two tarnished silver halves of a heart on the floor, chains tangled like a snare.
My hand does not shake when I pick them up. It should. The metal is cold, older than sin. One half bears initials in Cyrillic—M.V. My brother’s. The other—S.R.
Whatever truth these pieces unlocked drove her out into the night. After I cracked myself open on the porch and spilled every ugly secret at her feet. After I sobbed against her throat like a child. After I let her see the wreckage beneath the pakhan.
She ran.
The highway to Chicago unrolls ahead, black and endless. The passenger seat is empty, yet her scent lingers—jasmine and sex and the lie of safety. My hands on the wheel are ruined: cuts from thorns, dirt ground into the creases, blood dried in dark crescents beneath my nails. I have called her twenty-three times. The silence answers clearly enough.
Every contact in the city receives the same command: find the woman walking alone, disheveled, possibly bleeding. Hospitals. Precincts. Bus stations. Train depots.
Nothing.
Then the phone rings. My informant inside the Moretti compound.
“She was here. This evening. Met the eldest brother in his study. Left maybe an hour ago.”
The words are ice water poured straight into my lungs. She went to them. After everything.
“How did she look?”
“Like someone had hollowed her out.” A pause. “Matteo lost it after she left. Glass breaking. Sounded like he put his fist through a cabinet.”
Twenty minutes. Whatever she confessed in that study took twenty minutes to burn every bridge behind her.
“Direction?”
“East. On foot. Barely upright.”
The next call comes before I can process it. Gleb.
“Sir. Problem.”
The steering wheel groans beneath my grip. “Speak.”
“Kaz took a team out this morning. No clearance.”
“Where.”
“Chicago. They pulled someone off the street.”
Every cell in my body goes still.
“Who.”
A beat of silence that lasts an eternity.
“The Moretti girl.”
Time fractures.
“Where is he taking her?”
“The old warehouse. The one with the drains.”
The place where traitors go to die screaming. Where my father taught me the sound a man makes when he realizes mercy is a myth.
I jerk the wheel, tires screaming as I skid onto the shoulder. My fist goes through the side window in one clean explosion of rage. Glass rains across the leather seats. Blood runs hot over my knuckles, dripping onto Italian wool. The pain is sharp. Welcoming.
She is there. In that warehouse. With Kaz.
My mother died calling Dimitri’s name while I was buried inside the woman who helped kill him. I chose Isabella over my mother’s last breath. The guilt is acid eating through bone.
I gave her everything. My shame. My grief. The way I broke on that porch, tears soaking her skin while she held me together with lies. And the moment memory returned, she fled.
Now Kaz has her.
The rage does not scatter. It sharpens into something surgical.
I dial Gleb again. “How many men answer only to me?”
“Thirty certain. Forty if I pull every marker.”
“Pull them all. Armed. Forty minutes.”
“Sir—this is open war against Kaz.”
“He touched what is mine.”
“That could fracture the family beyond repair. The old guard still sees him as blood.”
“Then let it fracture.”
Silence. Then, quiet: “Is she worth it? Everything your father built?”
I think of her in my kitchen yesterday, burning eggs while wearing nothing but my shirt, laughing when I tried to salvage them with too much salt. How we ended up eating cold Chinese takeout in bed while she told me about Gianni nearly torching the garage with a failed chemistry experiment.
My father built an empire on terror. It can burn.
“She is the only thing worth saving from the ashes.”
The calls go out like bullets.
Sergei answers on the second ring. “Viktor. My condolences about your mother.”
“I need your men. All of them.”
A long inhale. “Against whom?”
“Kaz.”
The silence is heavy. Then: “You pulled my son from that fire in Minsk when everyone else wrote him off. My twelve are yours.”
Dmitri next. His daughter is promised to one of Kaz’s maternal cousins.
“I can’t, Viktor. I can’t choose.”
“Then stay neutral.”
“This woman—she’s worth civil war?”
I picture Isabella standing in Dimitri’s room hours ago, fingers tracing my brother’s handwriting as if she could bring him back. The way she pressed against me when I showed her how to prune the bonsai, her body soft and trusting.
“Yes.”
“You’ll lose good men today.”
“I know.”
Pavel answers before I finish explaining. “Whatever you need. The entire cache if you want it.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve watched you since she arrived. You were almost happy. If someone can make you human enough to feel that, she’s worth keeping alive.”
Happy. The word lands like a blade between ribs.
The convoy forms on the highway shoulder behind me—black SUVs lining up like a funeral cortege. Forty-three vehicles. Men who chose me over blood, over fear, over the old ways.
Chicago rises ahead, glass and steel glinting in the weak morning light. The warehouse district waits beyond, all rust and concrete and perfect acoustics for screaming.
My phone pings with final updates. Kaz has fifteen men inside. No word on her condition.
The not-knowing tastes of copper and ash.
One last call. Sasha, head of medical.
“Full trauma kit at the warehouse. Ninety minutes.”
“Who’s down?”
“No one yet.” I watch the skyline sharpen. “But someone will be.”
“Viktor—grief makes men reckless.”
“This isn’t grief.” It is grief for my mother, for my brother, for the version of myself I almost became in her arms. “This is ownership. Kaz took what belongs to me. Now I take it back.”
The convoy rolls off the exit ramp in perfect formation. Forty-three vehicles full of men who believe I will win.
They are right.
The warehouse looms ahead, surrounded by Kaz’s smaller ring of cars. He is probably inside right now, explaining to Isabella how justice works in our world. How blood answers blood. How the guilty pay in pieces.
He is not wrong.
But her blood is already spoken for. Her pain is mine to deliver or withhold. Her breath is mine to allow.
I step out. Glass from the shattered window crunches beneath my shoes. Blood trails from my knuckles as I walk forward, leaving crimson prints on concrete.
Behind me, doors open in unison. Bolts rack. Magazines seat. The quiet, practiced sounds of men preparing to kill family.
I do not know what the bracelet meant to her. Do not know what she confessed to Matteo that left her hollow. Do not know why she ran instead of driving a knife into my heart while I slept.
But I know this:
She is inside those walls, likely believing she deserves whatever Kaz has planned.
She is wrong.
The only thing she deserves is me. My rage. My obsession. My ruined promises. My violent, inescapable love.
Time to remind my cousin why they call me pakhan.
Time to paint those drains red.
Time to take back what is mine.
Even if she hates me for the rest of her life.