Chapter 25 – Dimitri
The extraction is brutal. Adrenaline pulses through me like electricity as we slip out of Zurich, Deveraux’s encrypted drives secured, Vivian’s mother under medical care. The city falls away beneath the jet’s engines, lights blinking out like distant stars.
Yet my instincts—sharp as ever—refuse to rest. Something is off.
The Kovals are…silent. Too silent. Not a trace of pursuit, not a single attempt to intercept. No chatter, no warning, no interference. It’s as if they’d vanished entirely.
I stare out the window at the darkening European skyline. Something about this feels deliberate, calculated. The absence of chaos is worse than its presence.
Sylvester notices my tension. “You’re thinking it’s a trap?”
I don’t answer right away. My jaw tightens. My fingers drum against the armrest. “Not a trap,” I murmur finally. “A message. They want us to feel safe. To think we’ve won.”
Vivian watches me from across the cabin, her hand brushing against her mother’s. She doesn’t speak—she knows better than to break the quiet—but I can see the worry in her eyes mirror my own.
I lean back, closing my eyes for the briefest of seconds. The Rusnak code is simple: never let your guard down, never assume victory, never underestimate the enemy.
The jet hums steadily beneath us, carrying us home—but I know better. Something waits, and when it strikes, it’ll be designed to hurt…and to make us pay.
But I won’t be caught off guard. Not again.
***
Back in New York, everything moves fast.
The moment the jet touches down, I call the family doctor. He arrives within the hour, a discreet man who’s patched up half the Rusnak line without ever speaking a word to the wrong ears.
Vivian refuses to leave her mother’s side. She helps settle her in one of the guest suites, hovering with a tenderness I’ve never seen from her before. When the doctor arrives, she stays in the room with him, arms folded, protective, unblinking. I don’t blame her.
While she tends to her mother, Sylvester and I hole up in the study.
The lights are low; the only illumination comes from the monitors spread across the desk. Lines of code flicker across the screens—Deveraux’s encrypted drives. He was arrogant enough to think we’d never get them. He forgot who he was dealing with.
Sylvester cracks his knuckles. “He used a double-layered cipher,” he mutters. “Old-school. Complicated. But doable.”
I take a seat, my mind already shifting back into battlefield mode. “Start stripping the shell. I’ll work through the internal locks.”
For hours, we work in silence—furious, methodical, relentless. Every firewall we break, every layer we peel back, every corrupted file we salvage tells me one thing. We’re about to uncover a secret that may change our lives.
Hours later, we find it.
A folder buried so deep it shouldn’t exist.
A series of mirrored backups meant to wipe in case of breach.
But Sylvester catches the fail-safe before it detonates, and we decrypt the final layer together.
What appears on the screen freezes the room.
Names.
Dates.
Wire transfers.
Encrypted call logs routed through burner networks tied to the Kovals.
But the signature—
The signature is what stops my breath cold.
Not Deveraux.
Not Koval.
Not even any of the usual European intermediaries.
No.
All the coordination, all the leaks, all the intel that kept hitting us before we moved—
It all traces back to one person.
Someone inside the Laurent network.
Someone who has been feeding intelligence to the Kovals for over a year.
A traitor.
Sylvester curses under his breath, stepping back from the screens as if distance might make the truth less venomous. “This…this is big,” he whispers. “Whoever this is, they’re not small. They had access to everything. Movements. Contracts. Vivian’s travel history. Even her mother’s medical files.”
My jaw tightens until my teeth ache.
Deveraux was just the banker.
The puppet in front of the curtain.
But the puppeteer?
Someone standing right beside the Laurents the whole time.
Someone who knew exactly how to break them from the inside.
And I feel it—
That old, terrible cold settling in my bones.
“We’ve been hunting the wrong man,” I say, voice low, lethal. “And whoever this traitor is…they’re still out there.”
“Who does this signature belong to?” I ask. “I think these names are aliases. But this—” I tap the looping digital seal, the encrypted sigil embedded in the comms route— “this is a Laurent signature. Find out who it belongs to.”
Sylvester’s jaw locks.
He starts typing, fingers flying over the keys.
The room fills with the soft hum of processors, each layer of encryption peeling back like rotting skin.
A minute passes.
Then another.
Then—
Sylvester freezes.
His throat works once before he speaks.
“Dimitri…only three people had clearance to use this route.”
My pulse slows to something cold and murderous.
“Who?”
“Me,” Sylvester says quietly. “You. And one other.”
I feel it before he says the name.
The dread.
The impossibility.
The betrayal Vivian will never recover from.
Sylvester turns the screen toward me.
Henri Laurent.
For a moment, I don’t breathe.
The world narrows to a single, vicious point of clarity.
Vivian’s father.
The man who claimed all he wanted was to protect his family.
The man who let his daughter believe her mother funded the laundering.
He worked with the Kovals.
For months.
He leaked Vivian’s movements.
He leaked Laurent financials.
He leaked Dimitri’s operations.
And worst of all, his betrayal is what allowed them to take her mother. His betrayal almost got Vivian killed.
The rage hits me like a blade tearing through my ribs.
I stand.
Something inside me—something I’ve spent years burying under refinement and control—breaks free like a snapped chain.
When I speak, my voice isn’t calm. Not polite. Not civilized.
It’s a promise soaked in blood.
“I’ll find him.”
Sylvester straightens. “Dimitri—”
“Keep quiet about this,” I snap. “Not a word to Vivian. Not yet.”
“She’ll ask—”
“And you’ll say I’m handling something. That’s all.”
Sylvester swallows, nodding.
I grab my coat. My gun. My keys.
The study door slams behind me, rattling the frame.
I move fast, methodical, every step guided by rage and purpose.
By midnight, I’ve tracked Henri Laurent to one of his properties on the outskirts—a secluded estate meant to hide him from prying eyes.
Guards are posted, but they’re no match for the precision I’ve honed over decades. By the time I reach him, he’s alone.
The moment I step into the room, my calm, cultured veneer evaporates. I feel myself melt into the soldier I warned myself I never wanted to become. Henri’s eyes widen when he sees me, but there’s no fear—just the arrogance of a man who believes he’s untouchable.
“How did you get in?” he asks.
“Shut up!” I grab him, drag him against the wall, and the first words out of my mouth are cold, lethal. “Tell me everything. Now.”
At first, he tries to maintain composure. Haughty, measured, practiced. But the weight of the evidence, the inevitability of the confrontation, crushes him. Slowly, grudgingly, he confesses.
“I…I worked with the Kovals,” he admits, voice tight, almost pleading. “I thought it was the only way…the only way to restore the Laurent empire.”
My hand tightens around his collar. I can smell the fear now. I can feel the contempt rising like fire.
“Your empire?” I hiss. “Your legacy? Is that more important than your daughter? Your wife? Everything you swore to protect?”
He meets my gaze, pale but defiant. “My name…my legacy…it will always matter most.”
Disgust, cold and sharp, seeps into my bones. I realize in that moment that some men are monsters, not because they crave power, but because they’ve decided that love and loyalty are liabilities.
I step back, letting him slide down the wall, trembling. My gun rests loosely in my hand, but I don’t need it right now. He’s already defeated—not by violence, but by the weight of his own betrayal.
While Henri tries to bribe me with expensive offers and connections, I pull out my phone and call Niko and Lev, filling them in.
They arrive within thirty minutes, flanked by our men. Henri looks up at them, pale, defeated, still trying to hold on to the scraps of his dignity. Lev doesn’t even spare him a glance—just waits for my order.
“Burn it,” I say.
And that’s it.
No hesitation. No questions.
We burn the entire system down.
Every shell company Henri funneled money through? Gone.
Every broker who signed off on the deals? Disappeared from every database that ever existed.
Every account? Liquidated, frozen, or buried so deep it might as well be ash.
I tear apart years of careful laundering and pristine public image until there is nothing left but scorched earth. The Rusnak empire’s spotless reputation will fracture—but I don’t care. I would raze every continent twice over if it meant Vivian was safe.
When we finish, Lev drags Henri up by the collar and leads him out.
“Put him in a holding cell,” I say. “Treat him like a traitor. Nothing more.”
Niko nods, eyes hard.
Henri doesn’t fight. He just goes limp in their grip, stripped of power, stripped of legacy, stripped of the arrogance that made him think he could gamble his daughter’s life.
Later that night, when the world outside finally stills, I sit alone in my office. The lights are dim. The city glows against the window like a distant fire. My reflection stares back at me: cold eyes, tight jaw, blood still drying on my shirt collar.
This marriage started as leverage.
A transaction.
A weapon.
But it doesn’t feel that way anymore.
As I sit there, breathing hard, a truth I’ve tried to avoid sinks its claws into me:
The vengeance that dragged me into this life—the wars, the pride, the power—none of it means anything compared to the terror I felt today.
The terror of losing her.
Vivian Laurent Rusnak.
My wife.
My disaster.
My undoing.
I press my palms to my eyes, exhale, and let the admission settle in my chest like a brand.
I’m in too deep now.
And there’s no going back.
The door opens softly.
Vivian steps inside—barefoot, drowning in one of my shirts, eyes still bruised from everything the last twenty-four hours have stolen from her. She looks at me like she’s been searching for me all night.
For a moment, I can’t breathe.
“How’s your mother doing?” I manage.
She smiles. “She’s recovering very well. Where were you? Sylvester said you had to go handle something urgently. I was worried.”
“I wanted to destroy you,” I say before I can stop myself. My voice comes out low, raw. “But I think I destroyed myself instead.”
She doesn’t flinch.
She doesn’t run.
She just walks to me, slow and certain, like she’s approaching something dangerous she’s already accepted as hers.
Her palms slide up my jaw, warm and steady.
She tilts my face toward her and whispers, “Then maybe we build something new…from the ruins.”
The words hit something deep, something unguarded. I close my eyes for a second, steadying myself—because I feel too much.
When I look at her again, I force out the truth. “Vivian…there’s something you need to know.”
She freezes.
“It’s about your father.”
Her breath catches, but she doesn’t pull away. I tell her everything. Her eyes water, but the tears don’t fall. She’s brave, my girl.
“So I found him.” I pause. “I didn’t kill him. I tried not to hurt him—because of you.”
Her fingers tighten around my jaw.
“He’s alive,” I add quietly. “Where he goes from here…what happens next…that choice isn’t mine. It’s yours.”
The room goes silent.
She stares at me like she’s seeing the monster and the man at the same time—and deciding which one she wants to touch.
And for the first time since this war began, I let her see everything.
No masks.
No armor.
Just the man who would burn an empire for her…and did.