Chapter Twenty-Six - Dimitri
I don’t leave anything to chance.
The estate doubles in size overnight, not in bricks or land, but in muscle and vigilance.
Guards flood the gates, patrols overlap until no shadow goes unchecked.
Every vehicle that crosses the threshold is stripped down and rebuilt in front of my eyes—engines opened, trunks gutted, tires rolled until my men swear nothing is hidden.
No courier, no guest, no ally enters unless my word clears them.
Moreno is dead, but the blood he spilled stains deeper than one grave.
His network breathes still, gasping, ready to lash out like a dying beast. They will come for what they think is mine.
They are right to. Annie and Henry live under my roof now, which makes them more than guests, more than liabilities.
They are mine. Anyone who threatens them signs their own death warrant before they even reach my gates.
I move them into the private wing. No one questions me, not out loud, though I catch the flicker in a lieutenant’s eyes, the tiny pause of surprise before he bows his head.
No one but I have ever lived in that wing.
It has always been my silence, my solitude, my proof that even power requires walls within walls. Now it is theirs too.
Annie stiffens when she realizes what I’ve done.
She tries to mask it with that sharp chin of hers, that stare that pretends to weigh me and find me wanting.
But her fists clench at her sides, her mouth presses tight.
Defiance is her armor, and she wears it even when the steel bars around her gleam too bright to ignore.
Henry doesn’t see the prison yet. He touches the curtains, marvels at the polished floors, asks questions with a smile that hasn’t learned fear. Innocence is the cruelest currency.
I watch them adjust. Watch Annie pace, restless in a gilded cage, watch Henry settle into the bed like it’s another new adventure. I tell myself I’ve done this for safety, that I will keep them alive because I am the only one who can.
I know the truth. The truth is heavier, sharper: I do not trust the world with them, and I do not trust myself to let them go.
War isn’t on the horizon. It’s here, already clawing at the gates, breathing hot against the glass.
I feel it in the silence between calls, in the coded messages that arrive at dawn, in the restless pacing of my men when night falls.
This isn’t the chess game I’ve played for years.
This is slaughter waiting for direction.
So I give the order. Eradication. Factions that lifted Moreno’s name, that whispered his protection, will burn until ash is all that carries them. Their families, their allies, their ghosts—I will salt the ground they stood on.
***
Retaliation is a language I speak fluently.
My men move like knives in the dark. Warehouses go up in smoke before dawn, flames swallowing steel beams and stacked crates until nothing remains but twisted skeletons of iron.
Shipments vanish mid-transit, drivers pulled from cabs and left alive only long enough to spread the fear.
Informants who thought themselves untouchable disappear, their silence louder than their whispers ever were.
Each strike carries my signature—precise, merciless, impossible to ignore.
Every phone call brings news of another loss for them. Every report tastes like ash on my tongue, because it isn’t enough. It won’t be enough until every man who raised a glass to Moreno has been reduced to nothing but memory.
I direct it all with the precision of a surgeon.
Names, addresses, bank accounts—I strip them clean.
My captains follow me without hesitation, though I see it in their eyes, the awareness that something has shifted.
This isn’t the usual calculus of profit and risk, not the measured game I’ve always played.
This is vengeance. It leaks from my voice when I give orders, coils in my chest like smoke every time I watch another building crumble.
They don’t question me. Not when my fury is their shield. Not when my enemies’ corpses pave the road they walk.
Still, the nights are worse.
I stalk the halls of the estate long after the last call ends. My footsteps echo against marble, down corridors gilded with silence. More than once, I find myself standing outside her door. The guards in this wing avert their eyes, as if my shadow might swallow them if they look too long.
I tell myself I’m checking for threats, that my instincts drag me here because the enemy could breach these walls. When I stand in the stillness, listening, I know that’s a lie.
I hear her moving inside—soft footsteps, the shift of fabric, sometimes the faint creak of a bedframe when she turns restlessly.
Once, I hear Henry stir, a cry muffled against her shoulder, and her voice follows, low and soothing.
The sound is too intimate. It reaches past the armor I’ve built, hooks into something buried deep.
I never open the door, but the pull is magnetic, heavy enough that my hand hovers near the handle more than once. I imagine stepping in, watching her eyes widen, hearing her sharp breath when she realizes she isn’t alone. I imagine the tension, the defiance, the heat of it.
Instead, I turn away. Always away.
Back in my study, I pour vodka. The bottle empties too fast, the glass refills without memory of my hand moving. I tell myself this is control, not obsession—that keeping her behind locked doors, within my private wing, is strategy. I need her where I can see her. I need her contained.
The truth stalks me the way I stalk her door.
It isn’t control. It’s hunger.
Every time I close my eyes, her face rises unbidden—the stubborn tilt of her chin, the fire in her eyes when she dares to argue, the softness she doesn’t realize slips through when she soothes Henry.
I remember the way she looked at me that night in the corridor, fear trembling against defiance, both refusing to yield.
Vodka burns, but it doesn’t cleanse her from me.
War has already begun. Moreno’s allies will bleed until their networks are nothing but ghost lines in forgotten ledgers. Yet even as I build a campaign of eradication, my thoughts return to her.
Annie.
She is the one variable I cannot calculate, the one weakness I cannot excise.
I stare into the glass, the clear liquid trembling with the shake of my hand, and I admit the truth only to myself.
I don’t trust the world with her. I don’t trust myself, either.
***
The office is quiet but for the hum of the computer. I sit behind the desk, sleeves rolled back, cigarette untouched in the tray, the air heavy with anticipation. Milan places a flash drive between my fingers and leaves without a word. His eyes tell me enough—whatever is on it matters.
I plug it in and begin the slow work of peeling back layers of encryption.
The files open one by one: ledgers, shipment schedules, coded lists of payments and names buried under aliases.
My eyes skim with practiced indifference.
Numbers, numbers, numbers. Money always leaves a trail, and I’ve learned to read the ink as easily as blood.
Then I see it.
Richard Vasile.
The name freezes me where I sit. For a moment, the room itself feels colder, smaller.
I scroll back to be sure, but it doesn’t change.
His name is here, not in passing, not hidden at the edge of some ledger, but woven deep.
Account codes, signatures, payments funneled through shell corporations that only exist for men like him.
I lean forward, the chair groaning under the shift. My fingers tighten on the mouse until the plastic creaks. Richard Vasile was no ghost accountant. He was central. Trusted. One of the men who made families like Moreno’s possible.
I drag the files wider, eyes sharp, tracing connections. Dates. Transactions. Cross-referenced meetings in cities where blood still stains the streets. And then—an image.
The resolution is poor, black-and-white, but the face is unmistakable. Richard, older than the last photo I ever saw, shoulders squared, eyes hollow but alive. Two men flank him, men whose corpses now rot in the dirt because I put them there. He is in custody, not hiding. Not dead by chance.
The timestamp sears itself into my mind. It matches the year he vanished, the moment the rumors began. They said he’d run. They said he’d stolen. They said he’d been cut down for betrayal. All of it was noise. The truth is clearer than any myth: he was executed. Not for weakness. For secrets.
I sit back slowly, drag a hand over my mouth. Smoke curls upward, the cigarette still burning untouched. The image glares at me from the screen.
Richard Vasile wasn’t random. He was marked. Annie—her breaking into my office, her restless curiosity, the way her eyes narrowed at ledgers she wasn’t meant to see—it wasn’t idle rebellion. Blood pulled her there. Blood demands answers, even when the questions can kill.
The weight of it settles deep in my chest. Annie isn’t caught in my world by accident. She was born into it, tied to it by a man who played with fire until it consumed him.
I close the files, but the name lingers in my head like a wound that won’t clot. Richard Vasile. Father. Traitor. Ghost.
Annie, whether she knows it or not, is chasing his shadow.
The screen burns my eyes, but I don’t look away. Richard’s face lingers there, grainy, ghostlike, and all I can see is Annie holding that photo in my office, clutching it as though it might speak if she stared long enough.
I thought it was trespass, arrogance, maybe betrayal. Now I know better. It was desperation. It was blood calling her into shadows she didn’t choose.
She was never naive. Never clumsy enough to stumble into danger by accident. She was already in the web, born into it by the choices of a man who sold his life to the same darkness I walk in.
The weight presses into me like stone. For a moment—brief, unwanted—I feel pity. Pity for her father, for the girl who grew up never knowing the truth, for the inevitability that brought her to my door. It’s a poison I haven’t let myself taste in years. Like all poisons, I burn it out quickly.
There are no innocents here. Not Richard Vasile, who thought himself clever enough to play with money that wasn’t his. Not Annie, whose curiosity has already dragged her into a war she doesn’t understand. Not me. Especially not me.
Still, something shifts. Her trespass wasn’t malice.
She wasn’t searching for leverage, she was searching for answers.
Scraps of the same truth I now hold in my hand.
I tell myself that changes nothing—that she crossed a line, and in my world lines are carved in stone.
But the fire I carried that night, the fury that drove me to cage her, cools in ways I don’t like.
It complicates what I should keep simple.
I shut the files. The name sears itself into me anyway, echoing with every blink: Richard Vasile. Annie’s father. That blood runs in her veins, whether she accepts it or not.
The war already burns, flames rising higher with each body my men leave in the street. But now it sharpens into something crueler. Annie isn’t outside of it. She never was. She was born in the ashes of betrayal, and whether she wants to or not, she carries the stain.
I pour vodka, the liquid clear as glass, and let it settle heavy in my chest. A second glass waits across the desk, untouched, a shadow of a gesture I won’t allow myself. I stare at it longer than I should.
One day soon, I’ll put the truth in her hands. I’ll show her what her father was, what his choices cost, how deep the roots of his betrayal run. When I do, it won’t be to soothe her. It won’t be comfort.
It will be a lesson. A reminder that in my world, there are no clean escapes. Not for her. Not for anyone.