Chapter 42
NIKOLAI
The question comes at Infinity, two weeks after the pregnancy test changed everything.
I’m nursing a whiskey at the bar, watching Jenna pick at her salad.
Theon’s been monitoring her like a hawk—blood work twice weekly, custom vitamin supplements, strict dietary guidelines.
She tolerates his hovering because she knows it comes from care, but I catch her rolling her eyes when he starts lecturing about folic acid again.
My phone buzzes. Client call.
“Vex.”
“I need an acquisition.” Andrew Holloway’s voice carries that particular tension of a man used to getting what he wants immediately. “Brunette, late twenties, athletic build. Clean background, no family ties. The specifications are in the file I sent.”
I glance at Jenna, who’s looking out the window at the Chicago skyline. Her profile shows the slight changes pregnancy has brought—a new fullness to her face, the way she rests her hand protectively over her still-flat stomach.
“Timeline?”
“Two weeks maximum. The buyer’s waiting in Monaco. Price isn’t an issue.”
“I’ll review the file and get back to you.”
“Make it soon, Vex. This client doesn’t wait.”
I end the call and down the rest of my whiskey. Fifteen years of acquisitions. Fifteen years of perfecting the hunt, the capture, the delivery. It’s what built my reputation, my wealth, my position in The Labyrinth’s hierarchy.
Jenna’s watching me now. Her expression tells me she heard enough to understand.
She walks over slowly and settles onto the barstool beside me. “Work call?”
“Client inquiry.”
“For what work?”
I could deflect, change the subject, pull her into a kiss that erases whatever she’s thinking. Instead, I meet her eyes.
“Acquisition.”
Her jaw tightens almost imperceptibly. “The kind where you hunt down an innocent person and sell them to someone who wants to own them?”
“It’s not that simple—”
“Isn’t it?” Jenna’s voice stays level, controlled. “Someone calls, describes a human being like they’re ordering furniture, and you go shopping for them. Find someone who matches their specifications, study their habits, take them from their life, and deliver them to a buyer.”
I signal the bartender for another whiskey. “I don’t deal in children. Never have. That’s the line I don’t cross.”
“But innocent adults?” Her gray-green eyes hold mine steadily. “People like me, who were just trying to survive their quiet little lives? You hunt them down and sell them to the highest bidder?”
The bartender sets down my drink. I don’t touch it.
“My targets are carefully vetted. I only work with certain types of clients. I have rules about—”
“Rules.” Jenna’s laugh carries no humor. “What rules? No killing them during transport? Making sure they’re physically intact when delivered? How generous.”
“Jenna—”
“The other Architects run businesses that are morally gray at best.” Her voice gains intensity without rising in volume.
“Darius manipulates people’s emotions for corporate advantage.
Raphael runs a BDSM club that skirts the edges of consent.
Ezra manipulates financial markets. All of them exploit systems, bend rules, operate in shadows. ”
She pauses, lets the silence stretch.
“But you literally steal human beings and sell them into captivity.”
Her words are a verdict, and she delivers it with the calm of someone who has already decided.
The thing is, she’s wrong. Not about the shape of it—the hunting, the taking, the cold machinery of all of it.
She’s wrong about the one thing underneath, the thing that would either damn me further in her eyes or change the color of everything, and I don’t know which, and that not-knowing is the only thing that has ever kept my mouth shut.
“It’s not what you think,” I say.
“That’s what every man says about the worst thing he does.” She doesn’t move from the window. “I was one of them, Nikolai. If you hadn’t decided to keep me, you’d have handed me to whoever was paying. You don’t get to soften that now.”
She believes it, and why wouldn’t she—I built that man on purpose and let her believe that version of me.
The truth was never something I could give a captive; she’d have used it to survive me.
But she’s not a captive now. She’s free to walk out that door, and the only thing keeping the truth behind my teeth is cowardice.
So I tell her.
“The women I sell aren’t women like you.
” The words come out flat, because flat is the only way I can get them out at all.
“Not one of them ever was. You think they were innocent,” he says.
“Women like you. Pulled out of quiet lives and handed to men who wanted to own something.” A pause. “Not one of them was.”
“Then who were they?”
“The ones who built us.” He says it without weight, which is worse than if he’d loaded it.
“Project Architect didn’t run itself. There were women who signed for the children.
Ran the conditioning rooms. Kept the files, mixed the compounds, made the schedules, then went home at night and slept fine.
” His jaw works. “I find them. I’ve been finding them for fifteen years. ”
“And the auctions?”
“Real.” He doesn’t look away, which is how I know he’s giving me all of it now.
“The buyers in Dubai. Munich. Every one of them real. I sell them, Jenna. I find the women who turned children into property, and I make them into property. I hand them to the kind of men they spent their careers serving, and I let those men do to them what they let be done to us.” His eyes are steady and terrible.
“Seventeen years I’ve told myself there’s no cleaner justice than that.
They built a market in human beings. I merely made them an active, though unwilling, participant on the opposite side of the bars”
I should feel relief. They earned a reckoning. Maybe they earned exactly this one. That’s not the feeling that comes.
What comes is the cell. The cold concrete.
Ninety nights of belonging to someone else with no end I could see.
I know precisely what he sold those women into, because I learned the shape of it from the inside, in the dark, in my own body.
And I can’t make myself glad that anyone is living it right now.
Not even them. That’s the thing I can’t get around.
“And me,” I say. “I wasn’t one of them.”
Something crosses his face I’ve never seen there.
Not guilt—closer to repentance, and a little like grief.
“No. You’re the only one who never was. In seventeen years, I’ve taken exactly one person who didn’t earn it.
I watched you for eleven days knowing you weren’t on any list, knowing you’d done nothing but survive—and I took you anyway, because I couldn’t watch you and not.
” His voice doesn’t change, which is how I understand what it costs him.
“Every other acquisition had a file before I ever saw their face. A name that earned the cage. You had nothing. No file, no sentence, no justice owed. Just a woman who checked her locks like she already knew the world was hunting her.” His jaw works.
“I told myself I was studying a target. I wasn’t.
I was already keeping you. That’s the only time the work was ever a lie—and it was a lie I told myself, not a buyer. ”
I sit with all of it. He’s spent seventeen years taking the people involved in the same project that built him and feeding them into a similar situation—one at a time, and calling it the only clean justice there is.
I won’t stand here and tell him the people who did that to a child deserve gentleness.
But he didn’t do that to me. He took me because he couldn’t help it.
“I’m not comfortable with it.” It comes out quietly, but my voice doesn’t shake.
“I want to be. It would be easier to look at what they did and decide they had it coming and leave it there. Part of me does. But you’re not killing them, Nik.
You’re handing them to men who’ll keep them alive for years, owned—and you know exactly what that is, because it was done to you.
And I know exactly what it is, because it was done to me.
” My hand presses flat to my stomach. “I can’t be glad about it.
I can’t raise a child in a house that runs on it. ”
He doesn’t argue.
“Okay,” he says.
“Okay?”
“Okay.” Quieter. “It stopped feeling like justice a while ago. I just never had a reason to set it down that I trusted more than the reasons to keep going.” His thumb moves over my knuckles. “Now I do.”
“Now you do,” I echo, and put my hand over the one he has spread across our child, so he knows I understand exactly what he means by it.
Nikolai nods and moves close enough that I feel the heat of him, far enough that I get to choose whether to close that last bit of distance between our bodies.
I lean into his side, letting him take some of my weight, and he doesn’t say anything, because there’s nothing left that needs saying tonight.
Somewhere out there, in rooms I haven’t seen yet, children are learning what he learned. I can’t carry that for them. But he knows where every one of those rooms is, and tomorrow we start pulling them out—one child at a time, until there are none of them left.