Chapter 21
Arkady
Iclose the laptop and follow her out of the office.
She’s already halfway up the stairs by the time I reach the hallway, the vodka bottle swinging from her fingers, bare feet silent on the marble.
I watch her go and feel something seize in my chest. It’s a violent, possessive hunger.
It burns through me like a brand, searing itself into bone and blood, marking territory I conquered.
I turn off the kitchen light and check the security panel by the front door. Everything green. Vik has the overnight rotation covered. The gate is sealed. The house is as locked down as it gets.
I take the stairs.
She’s already in the bathroom when I reach the bedroom. I can hear the tap running, hear her moving around with the unselfconscious ease of someone who has decided this is her space now.
Tomorrow is going to be brutal. Thirty men, most of whom are calculating the exact weight of my inexperience as pakhan against the leverage they’ve spent years accumulating under Nik.
Some will come to offer loyalty. Some will come to remind me of their leverage, their experience and their indispensability.
At least one of them will come to find the crack in my armour.
They will look for it the way men like that always look—not at the obvious places, not at the hands or the eyes, but at the periphery.
What you reach for. What you look at without meaning to. What you protect without being asked.
They’ll find her.
They’re meant to.
That’s the plan. But knowing it’s the plan and standing in a room full of Bratva men while they assess my wife like a vulnerability are two different things, and I’m already calculating how many of them I can afford to remove from the board before it becomes a political incident rather than a statement of intent.
The tap shuts off. She appears in the bathroom doorway with her face scrubbed clean and her hair brushed. I can’t tear my eyes away from her, and she knows it.
“You’re doing it again,” she says.
“Staring.”
“Yes.”
“Do you want me to look away? Because I’ll tell you the truth, krasotka. I can’t. Looking at you, especially like this, burns the fire in my blood.”
“You are obsessed,” she says, stripping off and climbing into bed.
“You’re just learning this?” I strip off as well and join her. “Obsession isn’t just a feeling; it’s the air I breathe, the fire in my veins. Without you, I’d be nothing but smoke.”
She goes still beside me, and I watch the words land in her. The way her lips part slightly, the way her throat moves when she swallows. She looks up at me from the pillow, blue eyes catching the low light, and for a moment neither of us says anything.
Then she says, “That’s either the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me, or the most unhinged.”
“Why can’t it be both?”
She considers this with the seriousness it deserves, which is to say she pulls the sheet up to her chin and stares at the ceiling for three seconds. “Fair point.”
I reach over and switch off the lamp. The room drops into the dark grey of a London night, the city’s ambient glow bleeding faintly through the bulletproof glass. I lie back and feel her shift beside me, settling into the mattress, her shoulder warm against mine.
She doesn’t move away.
Neither do I.
“Arkady.”
“Mm.”
“If I’m right about your uncle. About Miroslav.” She pauses, and I hear the careful architecture of what she’s building before she says it. “What will you do?”
The question sits in the dark between us for a long moment. Long enough that I think she might let it go, fall asleep, and save us both from having to navigate it tonight. She doesn’t. She never does.
“Whatever needs to be done,” I say.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only answer I have right now.” I stare at the ceiling, tracking the faint line where the cornice meets the plaster.
“If it’s him, I need to be certain. Not almost certain.
Not probably. Certain. Because if I move on Miroslav Saranov without proof that holds up under scrutiny, I don’t just lose an uncle.
I lose half the old guard who remember him at Nik’s right hand for thirty years.
They’ll fracture. Some will fall in line. Some won’t.”
“And the ones who won’t?”
“Become a problem I deal with separately.”
She is quiet for a moment. I can feel her thinking, the particular quality of her stillness when she’s working something through. “And if it turns out that he did it at Nik’s request?”
I blow out a breath, having expected this. “Then Nik’s ghost had better be lingering so he can tell me himself.”
She presses her lips together and then turns on her side, her back to me.
I move in closer, taking that as an invitation, not a snub.
She snuggles into me, and I smile. This woman has changed my world in such a short space of time, it’s mind-boggling.
Her hair fans out across the pillow, and I press my lips to the back of her neck, just above the tattoo.
She makes a small sound and pushes back against me, already half asleep.
I wrap my arm around her waist and hold her there, feeling the rise and fall of her breathing slow and deepen.
I don’t sleep.
I don’t expect to. Sleep has been a courtesy I extend to myself once the work is done, and the work is never done.
But this is different. This isn’t the wired, grinding wakefulness of a man running threat assessments and contingencies in the dark.
This is something quieter and more dangerous.
I lie in the dark with my wife breathing against my arm, and I think about my father.
Not the crime scene. Not the open eyes or the single round or the alarm code that someone entered without duress.
I think about the man. Nikolai Saranov, who gave me three seconds of grief and a lifetime of preparation, who sat at the head of every table I ever ate at and made silence feel like a weapon by proximity alone.
Who taught me to read a room before I spoke in it.
Who never once said “I love you” but showed up to every fight I had from the age of eight onwards, and never explained why.
I think about the phone call.
Three seconds.
The line opening, the silence, then the shot that came through the speaker like a door slamming in a house I’d lived in my whole life. I’ve been treating it as evidence. As data. As a piece of the puzzle I’m assembling with cold hands and colder logic because that’s what he taught me to do.
But it wasn’t data.
It was goodbye.
The thought arrives without warning and sits on my chest like a fist. I don’t move.
I don’t let it show because Alina is asleep, and she doesn’t need to hear the sound a man makes when something like that finally lands properly.
I stare at the ceiling and let it settle into me the way cold water settles into stone. Slow. Permanent.
He called me so I would hear it. So there would be no ambiguity.
No body found days later, no notification from Morrison, no gap between the moment it happened and the moment I knew.
He called me because he wanted me to start moving immediately.
Because he knew that every second I spent waiting for confirmation was a second that whoever did this had to consolidate. Strengthen. Disappear.
He didn’t call me because he was afraid.
He called me because he trusted me to move faster than his killers expected.
I close my eyes, not to sleep but to contain it.
The grief is there. It has been there since the shot cracked through the speaker.
But grief is a luxury I haven’t earned yet.
Grief means it’s over. It’s not over. It won’t be over until I’ve put the person responsible into the ground and stood over them long enough to be certain they aren’t getting back up.
Then I’ll grieve.
Alina shifts in my arms, murmuring something that doesn’t form a word, and I pull her closer without thinking. She settles immediately, her body trusting mine even while she sleeps, and the fact of that does something to me I don’t have a name for yet.
I’ll find one eventually.
I close my eyes and force my mind to slow. Tomorrow, I need to be sharp. Tomorrow, I sit in a room full of men who are waiting to see if I crack, and I show them what Nikolai Saranov built when he had nothing left to build with except the ruins of everything that came before.
He built a pakhan.
I let the thought settle into the dark and breathe out, slow and even, until my pulse drops back to something that won’t wake her. Then I open my eyes, stare at the ceiling, and start building tomorrow in my head, brick by brick, the way he taught me.