Chapter 26
Ivan
Days after Callum was at the house, I was in the security hub buried beneath the west wing, behind a door that looked like a linen cupboard and required three separate codes.
Maeve joked when she asked where I was going, calling it the murder basement, which was inaccurate because we did not murder people there.
Usually.
I was at the steel worktable with a whetstone and my favorite combat knife, running the blade in long, steady passes.
The rhythm of it was meditative. Steel on stone.
The whisper of an edge getting sharper. The monitors on the far wall cycled through their feeds, from the front gate, to the service road, east woods, nursery corridor, garages, south terrace, and the green lights told me everything was as it should be.
Then Maeve's scent drifted down the corridor. Champagne, storm-clouds, caramel. My body ached for her. My teeth ached more.
I could smell her from thirty feet away now.
The bond sharpened everything. When Artem's teeth had broken her skin, something in my own chest had clicked into place with an almost audible sound, like a bolt sliding home.
I hadn't been the one to bite her. Didn't matter.
The claiming had rolled through the pack bond and settled in my bones anyway.
Gregor had been humming all morning.
He denied it, of course. He'd been polishing the same Sig Sauer for twenty minutes, making a low sound under his breath that was either another Taylor Swift tune or an electrical fault, and when I'd pointed it out he'd looked at me like I'd accused him of watercolor painting.
"You’re content," I said.
"I am operationally satisfied."
"You’re humming."
"There is no humming."
Maeve walked in, kissed his scarred cheek on her way to the nursery, and the alleged non-humming stopped so abruptly I nearly injured myself laughing.
He'd glared at me for a solid ten seconds.
I'd grinned back. It was the most entertainment I'd had all week, which said something grim about my recreational options.
She was ours. The house felt it. The guards felt it. Fergus, who had taken to sleeping on Gregor's tactical vest like it was a personal dog bed, definitely felt it. No one would ever take her again.
There was a dangerous arrogance in that thought. I knew it. Artem knew it. Gregor definitely knew it because he treated arrogance like an exposed wire in wet weather.
But after months of watching Maeve flinch at ghosts, after Prague and Edinburgh and childbirth and councils and her father in our sitting room calling her currency with a straight face, I wanted to believe the world had learned its lesson.
The world, apparently, was a slow learner.
My phone buzzed on the table.
I set the knife down and picked it up. It was an encrypted message from Yuri's network in Moscow.
Yuri, who was now technically running the European corridor and celebrated his promotion by sending me intelligence reports with the same smug tone he'd once used to try to steal Artem's seat. Family was complicated.
I read the message twice.
Then I read it again because the first two readings had made me want to put my knife through the wall and I needed to be sure I wasn't overreacting.
I wasn't.
Callum McCarthy hadn't just left Surrey and licked his wounds. He'd made a call to Belfast. Pride had found pride. One weak man had handed another weak man a story about ownership and insult, and it turned out the past was now moving toward our gates with guns and an opinion.
Finn O'Shea.
The name had been an abstract shape in my head for months.
The scar he’d left on my mate's throat was something that made me want to hunt him myself.
I'd imagined killing him in more ways than I could count.
Most of them efficient, some of them creative, all of them satisfying, and all while Maeve slept beside us unaware.
“We have a visitor on his way.”
Gregor turned to look at me. “Who?”
“The man who hurt our omega.”
Now Finn had a direction. He wanted what was never his.
“Good. Come to me bastard,” Gregor said, moving to leave the room.
I glanced at the message once more and replied.
Me: Thanks. I’m ready to slice his nipples off his chest and feed them to him.
Yuri: Send me pictures.
I locked the screen and reached for my phone to call Maeve.
"Lock the bedroom. Is Fergus with you?"
"Yes, but why—"
"Lock it. You, Mac, Fergus. I'll come get you when we're done talking."
I hung up before she could argue. She'd be furious later. I'd survive.
I walked out of the hub and down the corridor toward Artem's office. The house passed in a blur of dark wood and low lighting.
Gregor reached the office at the same time I arrived.
He leaned against the far wall with his arms crossed.
Artem was at his desk, reviewing something on his tablet.
They both looked up when I entered. They'd smelled me coming—the sharp edge in my scent, the adrenaline threading through the caramel and storm.
"You smell like you're about to shoot someone," Artem observed.
"I’d prefer to use my knife.”
"What is it?" Artem's voice was low and even, the way it got when he was already calculating responses before I'd finished speaking.
"Yuri's network." I stopped in front of the desk. "Callum didn't go home to Dublin. He took a plane to Belfast and now Finn O'Shea knows Maeve is alive. He knows about the marriage. He knows she's with us."
Artem's face did not change.
That was how I knew it landed.
My brother had many faces for violence. Cold amusement. Polite boredom. The faint smile that made sensible men remember pressing appointments in other countries. But when something threatened the center of the pack, everything was armed and waiting.
"How long?" he asked.
"Yuri’s intel says he's gathering men. No doubt Callum told him about our set-up."
Gregor made a sound and then said, "Let him come. I've wanted to kill him since I saw what he carved into her throat."
"We don't just kill him." The words were out of my mouth before I'd thought them through. "We dismantle him. We make sure every criminal enterprise in Europe knows what happens when you touch a Petrov omega."
"We could do both," Artem said mildly. "Kill him first. Dismantle after. The order is flexible."
I liked this plan enormously. I opened my mouth to say so.
Then Gregor said, "Maeve decides."
I closed my mouth.
He was right. I hated that he was right.
I loved that he was right, because that was the difference between us and every man who'd ever hurt her.
We could burn Finn O'Shea alive in the driveway and sleep like babies afterward.
Oh, the want was there, hot and eager under my skin, but the choice belonged to Maeve.
Her fear. Her scar. Her peace. Her ending.
"Fine," I said. "But if she asks me to kill him, I'm calling dibs."
"You can't call dibs on an assassination," Gregor said.
"I just did."
"That's not how dibs work."
"I'm expanding the definition. It's called growth."
Artem stood up and buttoned his jacket. "We tell her now. She deserves to know before he gets any closer."
We walked down the corridor together, three men moving in the synchronized rhythm of people who'd been fighting alongside each other since adolescence.
The house was quiet. The guards straightened as we passed.
Somewhere upstairs, Mac was napping and Fergus was probably standing guard over the bassinet like a furry little gargoyle.
I knocked on the nursery door. "It's me. You can unlock it."
A moment. The click of the bolt. Then the door opened and Maeve was standing there with Mac in her arms and Fergus at her heels, and her green eyes went from curious to sharp in the space of a breath.
The bond meant she could feel us now. The adrenaline, the banked violence, the thing we were bringing her.
"What happened?" She didn't sound frightened. She sounded like a woman who'd spent her whole life receiving bad news and had learned to meet it standing up.
Artem didn't soften it. "Finn O'Shea knows you're alive. Callum told him. He's gathering men and he'll be here within the week."
I watched her face.
I'd been prepared to flood the room with calming pheromones, to catch her if the name sent her somewhere dark.
I'd seen what Finn had done to her. I'd traced the scar with my fingers in the dark and felt the old damage beneath the new claim.
A name like that could be a trigger or a cage or a ghost, depending on the day.
Maeve looked down at Mac.
Then back up at Artem.
Her face went very still. It was as if all the softness drained away, leaving only the hard, unbreakable core of the woman who'd survived the worst the world could offer and then married it.
"Good," she said.
I blinked. So did Gregor, which was more or less the equivalent of someone else falling off a chair in shock.
"Good?" I repeated.
"I've been waiting three years to be done with him." Her voice dropped into a register I'd only heard her use once before. When she was in the sitting room, telling her father she wasn't currency. "Let's be done with him."
The pride that hit my chest was so bright and sudden I nearly laughed out loud. This was our mate. This was the woman who was going to stand beside us and run the European underworld with an iron fist and a perfectly timed insult.
"As you wish," Artem said. He pressed a kiss to her forehead and I saw the pride in his face too, banked but burning.
I looked at Gregor. The massive enforcer was smiling, but it was a terrifying, savage smile that promised absolute destruction and punctual delivery.
"So," I said, turning back to Maeve. "Quick question about the dismantling. Are we thinking public execution, or something more creative? Because I have ideas. Several ideas. I've been workshopping them for ages in what I'm now realizing was a very healthy and productive use of my imagination."
"Define ages?" Maeve raised an eyebrow.
"Since Prague, approximately."
"You've been fantasizing about killing my ex since the night we met."
"In my defense, he made a very bad decision claiming you. "
Maeve looked at me for a long moment. Then she moved Mac to her other shoulder and said, "Tell me the ideas. But if any of them involve a pit and a pendulum situation, I'm vetoing on grounds of impracticality."
"Noted. The pendulum was option four anyway. Option one is much cleaner."
Gregor sighed. "There's a list."
"There's always a list, Gregor. That's what makes me fun at parties."
Gregor arched one scarred eyebrow.
I just smiled because Finn O'Shea was coming to Surrey to collect a debt. He was going to find a graveyard, a woman who wasn't afraid of him anymore, and three alphas who'd been waiting a very long time to have this particular conversation.
I couldn't wait.