37. Vadim
VADIM
Anton walks up beside me only after the car disappears from sight. For once, he doesn’t wait for me to speak first.
“The man tailing Petrov reported in,” he says quietly, low enough that none of the others hear. “He was on him from the moment Petrov entered the hospital grounds.”
I don’t look at him. Every part of me is still fixed on the empty exit where the car vanished, on Sloane’s face through the rear window, on the way she looked back as though she couldn’t decide whether I had saved her or abandoned her.
“And?”
“Petrov received a call shortly before he reached the garage.”
My head turns then. Anton’s expression gives nothing away, but his eyes do. He understands the weight of what he’s suggesting.
“Looked like he was expecting trouble,” he says simply. “We don’t know what was said on the call. We don’t know who called him. But someone may have warned him.”
I turn to look at him. I know what he’s trying to say. “One of us.”
For a few seconds, neither of us speaks.
The hospital garage hums around us, too bright, too still after the burst of movement.
One of my men is speaking into a phone near the entrance.
Another checks the cameras. Iosef stands a few feet away, one hand pressed close to his side as if the old wound still bothers him when he moves too quickly.
A mole. Again.
Or perhaps not again.
Perhaps we were wrong the first time around.
Marek arrives from the stairwell with blood on his knuckles and fury across his face. “You shouldn’t have let her go.”
I look at him. He doesn’t retreat, which means he’s either brave, loyal, or too angry to remember that I’ve broken his nose once already over Sloane.
“Petrov walked out of here with her,” he says. “With her. In front of all of us.”
“I saw.”
“You should have taken the shot.”
“And risked hitting her?”
“You know I don’t mean that.”
“I don’t care what you mean.”
Iosef steps closer, his expression mild in the way that has always made men underestimate how much he sees. “She manipulated you.”
The words turn the air colder.
Anton shifts slightly beside me.
I don’t move.
Iosef continues, either because he doesn’t notice the warning or because he thinks his loyalty gives him permission to ignore it.
“She stood exactly where Petrov needed her to stand. She made herself the only reason we couldn’t harm him.
Whether she intended it from the beginning or not, she understood your weakness and used it. ”
Marek exhales harshly, but he doesn’t disagree.
Another man, Kirill, mutters, “Petrov knew she would protect him.”
“She didn’t protect him,” I say.
“No?” Iosef asks carefully. “Then why is he gone?”
I turn my head toward him. He goes silent. For a moment, the only sound is the engine of one of our cars idling near the exit.
“She was confused,” I say.
Iosef says, “She’s always confused when it saves her from choosing. Is she confused about whose child she carries?”
The garage goes very still.
I turn fully toward him. “Be careful what you say next.”
Iosef’s eyes flick once toward Anton, then return to me. He knows he has gone too far.
He continues anyway. “I’m saying what nobody else wants to say. She disappeared with Daniel and Mila. She reappeared under Petrov’s protection. She withheld your sister’s location. She stood between you and your enemy tonight, and when he dragged her away, she looked betrayed by you, not by him.”
Each sentence is a blade placed carefully on the table. I hate that none of them are entirely false.
Marek’s voice comes lower this time. “We all saw what seeing her did to you.” I say nothing. “That’s what worries us.”
The men around us don’t look at me directly, but none of them contradicts him either. I look from one face to another and understand exactly what has been growing quietly beneath their loyalty.
They think Sloane has already beaten me.
Not with a gun. Not with Petrov’s men. With tears, exhaustion, a swollen belly, and my own inability to stop caring whether she breathes.
Iosef says, “If she is working with him, even partly, then every decision you make around her becomes compromised.”
“Careful,” Anton says quietly.
Iosef’s mouth closes, but the damage is done. Because the question beneath all of it is not spoken, and still every man here hears it.
How much of Sloane belongs to Petrov?
My hand curls once at my side. “Nobody goes against Sloane.”
Marek’s eyes flash. “Vadim—”
“Nobody.”
This time my voice cuts hard enough that even he stops.
I look at Iosef. Then at Kirill. Then at the others. “You won’t touch her. You won’t threaten her. You won’t speak a word about her. You won’t decide she is acceptable damage because Petrov put his hands on her and walked out breathing.”
No one answers. Good.
I step closer, just enough that the warning becomes personal. “If anyone forgets that, I will remind him myself.”
Marek looks away first.
Iosef doesn’t, though something unreadable passes across his face.
Anton remains beside me, silent for several seconds before he asks, very quietly, “No matter what?”
I know what he means.
No matter what she knows. No matter where Mila is. No matter what Petrov has made her. No matter whose child it is.
I hear Sloane’s voice again, small and broken in the hospital corridor. How easy would it be to kill me?
I gave her cruelty because it was easier than giving her the truth. Now Petrov has her, and the truth is the only thing left standing.
“Yes,” I say. “No matter what.”
Anton holds my gaze for a moment. Then he nods once.
Not agreement. Acceptance.
I turn away from all of them because I’m finished listening to men explain Sloane Mercer to me as though she’s a weakness I have failed to identify.
I know what she is. That has never been the problem.
“Do we have a lead on where he took her?” I ask.
Anton already has his phone in his hand. “Yes,” he says. My attention snaps to him. “We have eyes on her.”
The words enter me like oxygen after drowning. “How?”
“Tracker in the car.”
For the first time since the garage exit swallowed her, the rage has somewhere to go. “Why are we wasting time?”
“Cars are ready.”
“Then move.”
The first car is already waiting when I reach it.
Anton gets into the front without another word, and I slide into the back seat while Marek takes the other side, his jaw still tight from our earlier conversation.
I know he disapproves; he probably didn’t understand the depth of my feelings for Sloane—no one did, least of all me—but now it’s all out in the open.
For one moment, I feel almost relieved. But even then, I know he would never go against me.
Outside, men move quickly around the other cars, voices low, engines starting one after another until the hospital garage fills with that restrained, predatory rhythm I know better than any prayer.
Anton turns slightly from the passenger seat. “Tracker is still moving east.”
“How far?”
“Three minutes ahead if traffic holds.”
The driver pulls out hard enough that the tires complain against the concrete, and as we climb toward the street, I look down at my hands and realize they are steady.
I gave the feeling other names because they were easier to survive.
Suspicion. Possession. Obsession. Anger.
I stood outside her apartment and called it surveillance, watched her enter hospitals and cafés and pharmacies and told myself I was studying a target rather than starving for one glimpse of a woman who had carved herself so deeply into me that even betrayal could not remove her.
It’s almost amusing now, how much effort I wasted lying to myself.
I love Sloane Mercer.
I love her when she looks at me as if I’m the worst thing that ever happened to her. I love her when she cries and still refuses to bend. I love her with all I have in me.
The world tries to seep in, poison me slowly as it has done since the moment I took over from my father. I crush it.
Whoever she claims belongs to that child, Sloane leaves with me.
That’s the only truth I can afford.
Marek looks at me from the corner of his eye, but wisely decides not to speak.
Anton checks his phone again. “They’re turning off the main road.”
“Where?”
“Industrial stretch. Warehouses, service lanes, old distribution yards.”
I reach beneath my coat and take out my gun. The weight of it fits into my hand with the familiar certainty. Just metal, purpose, consequence. And Petrov’s reckoning is coming tonight. I check the magazine, slide it back in, and lock it with a soft, final click.
Marek’s gaze drops to the weapon. Then to my face. “This is going to be ugly.”
I look out at the road ahead, where the city is already thinning into gray buildings and dead lots under the morning light.
“No,” I say. My thumb brushes once over the grip. “This is going to be simple.”