Chapter 25 #2
I pull up Dmitri’s revenue logs for that quarter and lay them beside the Meridian Holdings payment. The timing overlaps. Not perfectly—nothing ever lines up perfectly when people are trying to hide something—but close enough that coincidence becomes an uncomfortable explanation.
Eight hundred thousand out to a Cypriot shell company. A three-week silence from a brigadier who controls northern operations. A twelve per cent dip that corrects itself the moment he resurfaces. And now, eighteen months later, the same man goes dark around the time my father is killed.
I feel the shape of something forming in the dark.
Not the full picture. Not yet. But the edges.
The outline of a transaction that wasn’t supposed to be found, connected to a man who I feel now was closer to Nik than either of them let on.
Alina is wrong. Miro isn’t the accused. It is Dmitri, but I have the sinking feeling this isn’t as cut and dried as it looks.
“Time,” Vik says, poking his head around the door. “You look like shit.”
“Thanks,” I mutter, but he’s not wrong. I’m jittery from too much coffee and not enough food, lack of sleep and finding something that may or may not blow this case wide open.
“Go shower, we’ve got you covered. Elena has a sandwich waiting for you in the bedroom.”
I nod my thanks as he steps back and I brush past him, aiming for the stairs and taking them two at a time.
My brain isn’t connecting the dots. Yet.
I need to decide now whether to keep this quiet from Alina, seeing as I don’t really know anything, and let her carry on with her suspicions, or draw her attention away from Miro, because, whether she knows it or not, she will focus on him without meaning to.
If he is innocent, she could miss something vital.
Pushing open the bedroom door, I strip off on the way to the bathroom, where I find Alina, dressed, applying her makeup. She squints at me from under her lashes as she sweeps the mascara wand over them.
“You look like hell. What happened?”
I step into the shower and crank it to scalding.
The water hits my back like a punishment I deserve, and I stand under it with my palms flat against the tile, letting the heat work through the tension that’s knotted itself between my shoulder blades over the last five hours.
“Nothing and everything,” I say eventually, grateful she didn’t push. “I need you to trust me.”
“I do.”
“Then don’t focus on Miro… Miroslav. Look at him, make him squirm, yes. But I need your eyes everywhere, okay?”
“That was the plan. Why did you feel the need to explain that again?”
“I think you’re wrong,” I say without looking at her. “Something else is going on here, and I don’t think Miro is involved.”
“Like what?” she asks, genuinely interested and not at all pissed off that I’ve shat on her theory.
“I can’t tell you yet. Not because I don’t trust you. Because I don’t have enough to lay it out properly, and if I give you half a picture, you’ll fill in the other half yourself, and it might be the wrong half.”
She’s quiet for a moment. I hear the click of a compact closing, the soft tap of something being set down on the vanity. “Okay.”
I pull my head out from under the spray and look at her through the steam. “Okay?”
“You asked me to trust you. I said I do. So okay.” She meets my eyes in the mirror, and there’s no fight in them. Just clarity. “But when you can tell me, you tell me. Don’t sit on it because you think you’re protecting me.”
“Deal.”
She nods once and turns back to the mirror, tilting her chin to check something along her jawline that I can’t see from here.
The midnight-blue dress clings to her like it was sewn onto her body, and the slit sits exactly where it needs to for the thigh holster Dima rigged.
Her hair is up, the knot severe and immaculate, with a blade sharp enough to take someone’s eye out, holding it all together.
I wash off the tiredness and sweat of the day and then slam the taps off, stepping out as she hands me a towel. I dry off as I move to the bedroom, and she follows me. “Did Dima tell you how to use the gun? It’s different to the Glock. The safety is different.”
“I noticed. And yes, he did.”
“Do you have it on you?”
She shakes her head and points to the box on the dresser. I cross over to it and remove the gun, gathering the holster up as I move towards her. “Lift your dress.”
She does, hiking the midnight-blue silk up past her thigh without a flicker of hesitation.
The skin there is marked with my mouth from last night—a bruise blooming purple against the pale—and the sight of it sends a possessive spike through me that I don’t bother suppressing.
I kneel in front of her, and she goes very still.
“Don’t get any ideas,” she says. “We don’t have time.”
“I always have ideas.” I wrap the strap around her upper thigh, adjusting the tension until it sits snug but not restrictive.
The holster clips into place on the outer side, positioned so the slit in her dress falls directly over it.
I slide the gun in, check the draw angle, and pull it free twice to make sure the motion is clean. It comes out smooth both times. Good.
“Draw it once for me,” I say, standing back.
She lets the dress fall, smooths it flat, then reaches through the slit. Her hand finds the grip on the first try, pulls it free, and holds it the way Dima showed her—high, tight, finger indexed along the frame. Not perfect. But not bad for someone who’s never held a weapon before this week.
“Again,” I say. “Faster.”
She smooths the dress, pauses a beat, and draws again.
Quicker this time. The barrel comes up level, her stance shifting instinctively to compensate for the weight.
She’s a natural. It shouldn’t surprise me—Belov’s blood runs through her veins whether she spent twenty-eight years pretending otherwise or not—but it does.
Something about the way she holds it, the absence of fear in her grip, makes my chest tighten with something that isn’t pride exactly. It’s recognition.
“Safety,” I remind her.
She flicks it with her thumb. Down. Fire. Then back up. Safe. She holsters it and lets the dress fall. The fabric swallows the weapon like it was never there.
“Good,” I say. “Don’t use it unless—”
“Unless you’re dead. Dima already gave me the doom and gloom.”
“Unless I’m incapacitated,” I correct. “Not just dead. If I go down and can’t get back up, you don’t wait to see if I’m breathing. You draw, and you put rounds into whoever’s closest to me that isn’t Vik or Dima.”
She processes that with the same clinical calm she’s been wearing all day.
The weight of that sits between us for a beat. She doesn’t flinch from it. She just nods and turns back to the mirror to check the line of the dress one final time.
I dress quickly. Black suit, black shirt, no tie.
The cufflinks are platinum. Plain. I slot them into my cuffs with the mechanical precision of a man who has done this a thousand times and is using the motion to keep his hands busy while his mind runs through everything that could go wrong in the next three hours.
Alina appears behind me in the mirror.
“Ready?” she asks.
I turn and look at her. The dress does what I knew it would.
The blue sits against her skin like it was mixed specifically for her, and the knot in her hair is so precise it looks carved.
She’s wearing the rings. She’s wearing the blade.
Beneath the silk, she’s carrying a weapon that will keep her safe if this goes sideways.
I grip her throat gently and pull her closer.
“If shit hits the fan, there is an access vent in the laundry room cupboard next to the dryer. Get to it, climb through, and a short tunnel will take you beyond the gate. Then you run. As far and as fast as you can. Call your dad. He will know what to do.”
Her throat works beneath my palm, the delicate muscles shifting against my skin like a bird caught in a gentle trap. She nods, and I brush my lips lightly over hers before stepping back.