Chapter 10 Ivy
IVY
The hallway smells like old takeout containers and freshly brewed coffee. It’s a tired, human smell, clinging to the peeling paint and worn carpet, soaked into the air like secondhand smoke.
I trail my fingertips along the wall as I move toward the living area, the drywall cool and slightly rough beneath my touch.
Katya’s burner phone is still clutched tight in my hand, the cheap plastic digging into my palm.
My thumb keeps brushing the edge of the keypad over and over, using it to distract myself from my conversation with Lettie.
What I find at the end of the hallway is what I can only describe as a makeshift security hub.
Katya and Andrey are shoulder to shoulder at a long dining table that’s been stripped of anything resembling domesticity.
The surface is buried under tablets and laptops, loose maps with circles drawn in red ink, and pieces of paper covered in hastily scribbled notes.
A tangle of extension cords snakes across the floor, feeding power into an army of devices.
More cords wind toward two overloaded power strips taped to the baseboard on the opposite wall, their little red lights pulsing like warning beacons.
Four forty-five-inch monitors flicker in the far corner, throwing a rainbow of shifting color across Matvey’s face as he clicks through security footage.
His expression is focused and unblinking behind his thick-framed glasses.
Above it all, a larger TV is mounted to the wall, playing a muted news broadcast. Subtitles scroll across the bottom of the screen like a silent scream while the anchor’s lips move without sound about some scandal somewhere else.
For one strange, dizzy second, I’m profoundly grateful Mikhail didn’t put a camera on me before I left. He could have easily. A button lens hidden in a coat, a pendant that isn’t actually a pendant, a microdrone disguised as jewelry.
He could have forced me to record everything I’ve seen since stepping into this safehouse, all of it piped back to him in real time like some macabre livestream. Instead, all he gets is audio.
My face heats up at the thought—hot, mortifying shame creeping up my neck as a memory flashes in my head of what Maksim and I did last night.
God… and no doubt, Mikhail heard it all.
Whatever.
It wasn’t like I promised not to sleep with him before I left Mikhail.
Thankfully, his foresight hadn’t extended that far into the future.
Mikhail had been cautious in the tools he’d embedded in me.
The earrings fed him my small whimpers in the dark after a nightmare, and the soft croon of a lover.
But they didn’t show him the realization dawning over his enemies’ faces after catching me in a lie.
They didn’t capture the sly twist of a plan forming silently behind my back.
I’m so damn torn.
One half of me aches to blurt the truth out to Maksim in a raw confession, lay everything on the table and let him see the position I’ve been forced into.
Last night changed something in me.
It wasn’t just the feel of his hands or the way his breath caught mine as we kissed.
It was the sudden, brutal clarity that being in his arms was the only real time I’ve felt truly protected.
For the first time since I was taken, I didn’t feel like a thing to be traded. I felt like someone to fight for.
I want him to know that.
I want to tell him how hollow I felt when I shook Mikhail’s hand, what it cost me to say yes to him, and how every lie I tell now is from fear for Leo’s safety. I want him to understand the choice I made so that when he looks at me, he sees motive and desperation rather than betrayal.
But the other half of me is terrified.
If even a single word slips back to Mikhail that I’ve said anything about this plan, Leo dies.
Mikhail set the rules that way for a reason, so there would be no nuance for me to hide behind if the time ever came where my loyalty to him was questioned.
He would have every right to punish me for fucking him over, and I would be given no room to argue.
That is why a confession to Maksim is a luxury I can’t afford. That is why truth is a weapon I can’t wield no matter how badly I want to.
I love Maksim but I love my child more.
So I stand in the middle of those two impossible truths and try to find a third way out.
The only way I can think of is to get Maksim to see things himself.
But how do you get a man to distrust you without asking you any questions?
How do you ask him to check you, to test you, to play the skeptic in order to figure out what’s going on behind the scenes while still trusting you enough in the end not to throw you to the wolves too?
How do I feed Mikhail enough crumbs to get him to understand I’m being blackmailed into betraying him and that the man behind it is using our son’s life as leverage against me?
Part of me thinks there must be small ways I can get Maksim to notice because he knows me better than anyone. Little tests we could do in private without anyone else, namely his inner circle, questioning me too deeply.
But even that could be dangerous.
Mikhail might not have eyes on my face, but he has me bugged twenty-four, seven. He’ll know if I’m trying to prod Maksim into figuring out what the hell is going on or if I start to refuse to gather intel on the operation that’s being run here in order to double-cross and help Maksim take him down.
Then there’s the other temptation… a sick, lucid fantasy of the plan that has been in the back of my mind for a long time now.
One that would end all of this cleanly—actually convince Maksim to step down, hand over the Bratva to Mikhail, and walk away with Leo, completely untethered to the Mafia world altogether.
Mikhail never promised to kill Maksim at the end of all this.
He simply wants the Bratva. If Maksim agrees to abdicate his position as Pakhan for our child and accepts exile rather than death, then maybe this would all end happily.
Maybe Leo will be able to grow up without the stress of being a future heir.
Maybe we could be anonymous and raise our little family somewhere stupidly far away from the sins of the Antonov name.
That fantasy is sweet and monstrous all at once.
It would require me to ask something of Maksim that might be impossible.
For him to give up his legacy, his family’s legacy, and throw it all away for just me and our child.
After everything he was forced to do to pull his Bratva out of a civil war, asking him to hand it over to the same enemy is not just selfish.
It would render everything he’s done, and the lives that were lost along the way, completely pointless.
I don’t know what to do anymore.
I’ve never been so lost before in my whole life. Even after I believed Maksim was dead and I was carrying the only remaining piece of him. It feels like balancing on a thin wire over a long, dark drop, and every step could be the one that sends us all falling over the edge.
“You planning on standing there all day, or were you serious when you said you wanted to be useful?” Katya says dryly.
I jump.
Three sets of eyes snap toward me—hers, Matvey’s, and Andrey’s.
My skin flushes hot, the shame immediate and reflexive. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt. I was just returning this.”
I cross the remaining distance on legs that feel strangely disconnected from my body. My fingers tighten slightly around the burner phone as I hand it back to her. Katya doesn’t move at first. She watches me with the same practiced stillness she always has.
Whatever she sees on my face, it has Katya’s mouth tilting up at one corner.
She takes the phone out of my hand without breaking eye contact, her fingers cool against my fingers where they linger there for a second longer than they need to be.
I know it’s not intentional, but it feels like the same kind of power play a predator would use when it leans in close and dares you not to flinch away.
“You can just admit you were trying to eavesdrop,” she says casually.
I stiffen. “I wasn’t—”
I stop myself.
There’s no use lying to someone like her.
Lying to people like them, for that matter.
They are not the types who miss the tightening of a throat or the shift in a gaze.
They’re professionals. You can’t out-bluff someone who’s lived their entire life surrounded by liars and knows exactly how to spot them and punish them for it.
“I didn’t want to be in the way,” I admit.
Katya’s eyes narrow. Her gaze slices over me like a scalpel, dissecting the layers beneath the words.
Measuring what the hell I mean by them and figuring out what I’m not saying.
It isn’t the truth she seems to be after, more like what I’m not saying or why I chose that particular admittance.
It makes me look more like a martyr, urges them to show me more sympathy if I pretend that I’m trying to behave and keep out of eye sight.
Katya can see right through it. Of course she can. Out of the three of them here, I’m scared of her the most.
Behind her, Matvey clears his throat quietly before returning his attention to one of the monitors in front of him.
Andrey does the same, his eyes glancing back down to the laptop he’s typing on.
I feel the shift in the room’s temperature, subtle, but there.
The tension is suspended in the air like a held breath.
Finally, Katya moves again.
With a quick flick of her wrist, she tosses the burner phone onto the table. It hits the wood with a loud clatter, bouncing once before skidding to a stop near a half-empty mug of stale, cold coffee. The sound makes me flinch, even though I try not to let it show.
“You want to help? Then help,” she says, already turning her attention back to the maps and screens in front of her.