10. Rowan
ROWAN
She swallows. “I can attempt to explain.”
My grip tightens around the gun, though my finger does move away from the trigger. I lean back just enough to find the shifter and throw the car into park, easing my foot off the brake pedal.
The rational part of my mind knows she isn’t a threat.
Not in an immediate sense. She’s curled in the back seat of my SUV with her hands lifted, eyes wide and breath coming too fast, looking less like an assassin and more like someone who just realized the consequences of startling an armed man trained to shoot first and process emotions never.
The rest of me does not care. It is still stuck back in the half-second between movement in the mirror and my muscles locking around the only reflex that has kept me alive through ambushes, alley fights, and men stupid enough to test whether Ivan Kuznetsov’s enforcers hesitate before pulling the trigger.
“You have five seconds. Make it good,” I snap.
Her eyes flick to the weapon before moving back to me. “Could you maybe point that somewhere else first?”
“Perhaps you should have thought about that before hiding in the back seat of an armed man’s vehicle.”
Her mouth opens and then closes. A small grunt leaves her, sounding every bit as exasperated as I feel. “Okay. That’s fair.”
“Sofia.”
Thousands of questions collide inside my head, most of them screaming the same two things. How the hell did she get out of the house? And how the hell did she get past her guards?
The estate is not some boarding school dormitory with broken locks and distracted staff.
It is a fortified property with overlapping security rotations, cameras, armed men, controlled access points, and corridors designed specifically so no one moves through the important parts unnoticed.
Sofia is not supposed to be able to vanish from a guarded library, cross the estate, enter the garage, and hide in my SUV without someone seeing her.
Yet here she is.
Alive only because my finger left the trigger in time.
She flinches, though not enough to satisfy the part of me currently trying to crawl out of my skin. “I’ve been doing research.”
There is a moment where I genuinely consider whether my brain misheard her out of self-preservation.
“What kind of research,” I growl out, “requires you to sneak out of a fortified estate, evade half a dozen men trained to notice a blade of grass out of place, hide in the backseat of my car, and almost get yourself shot? Explain. Now.”
Sofia blinks at me from the back seat, those wide blue eyes startled, sure, but not even remotely close to seeming repentant. Her hands are still half-raised, fingers trembling just enough to betray the adrenaline spiking through her veins.
But regret?
None at all.
Her honey-blonde hair is slightly mussed from whatever contorted position she used to stay hidden, strands slipping loose around her face. Her cheeks are pink from the cold or panic or both. She looks soft, disheveled, breakable in a way I know by now is mostly a lie.
A beautiful little catastrophe in my back seat.
She huffs softly under her breath. “Look, I had to. When you told me you were leaving the estate, I knew I had to come with you.”
The sheer audacity of that answer nearly makes me see stars from how pissed it makes me.
For a second, my vision narrows from the searing, volcanic rage that is begging to be uncaged.
I want to grab the steering wheel and shake it hard enough to break it.
I want to drag every guard assigned to her into the interrogation rooms in the estate’s basement and teach them what failure feels like one bone at a time.
I want to put Sofia behind five locked doors and stand in front of them myself until every foolish, reckless impulse in her head finally starves itself dead.
“How did you even get past security?”
She lifts her chin, defiant. “I made friends.”
I swear under my breath—a low, vicious string of curses that would make even Ivan raise an eyebrow at me.
That damn kid in the kitchen.
Dima.
I knew the second I saw him nearly drop those herbs when I walked in earlier that something was off. Now I know why. He helped her, or he gave her enough access to the back part of the estate to help herself.
Either way, the result is the same.
I am going to skin him alive when I get back.
Before I can snap again, Sofia reaches down to the floor and grabs a small bag stuffed under the passenger seat. The motion is quick enough that my hand tightens on the gun before I remember she is not reaching for a weapon.
Probably.
With Sofia, certainty is becoming a luxury I can’t afford. She drags the bag into her lap and unzips it. She produces a notebook, the same one she had been writing in at the library.
I lower my gun slowly.
She flips the top cover open. Highlighted notes line the pages in dense, careful handwriting.
Printed articles are taped into the margins with names circled and arrows linking dates to places, places to people, people to questions.
The longer I stare at the page, the more I realize it’s not a student’s idle curiosity. It is a map.
“What the hell is that?” I ask, incredulous.
“Like I said, I’ve been researching. My father.
My mother. Their marriage. The official story of her death.
I don’t believe my uncle’s attack was isolated.
I think something bigger is happening, and it started years ago.
” Her words spill out fast, breathless, like she’s been holding them in for days.
I blink in surprise at her.
“What?” The question leaves me flatter than I intend.
“Listen. I can’t be the only one to find my father’s disappearance suspicious. I tried looking him up through public records, but there’s nothing. Just his name on my birth certificate. Everything else has been completely erased. How is that not strange?”
Of course it is strange. The answer comes so immediately, I almost say it out loud.
Absence is rarely ever accidental these days.
People leave trails without meaning to all the time, even those with money.
Wealth doesn’t mean a person can disappear by default.
Typically, it makes them even more visible than the average person.
Bank records, property purchases, photographs at high-end events, business filings, travel manifests, the list goes on and on.
There are always traces, even small ones.
You do not vanish from a public-facing family like the Kuznetsovs without someone noticing. But that is by design, just as it is in reverse.
If Ivan went through the trouble of erasing her father’s existence intentionally, then there was a principle behind it that isn’t to be questioned now, no matter how curious the situation presents itself to be.
Clearly, Ivan had his reasons to make sure Sofia would never have contact with her father, or vice versa.
I would never claim to know what went on in the Kuznetsov family before Sofia’s departure and my arrival, nor do I care to know. If Ivan thought it was pertinent to the task at hand, he would have told me.
Otherwise, it is none of my business to dwell on.
Sofia shoves the notebook toward me then, flipping through a few pages at rapid speed, too fast for me to read more than flashes of the contents scrawled on the pages.
“On top of that, my uncle refuses to talk about him. No matter how many times I ask, he dismisses the subject. I think the two are linked. What are the chances my father disappeared because my uncle is part of the Iron Pact?”
My lips part slightly from surprise. Her eyes narrow the second my composure slips, even by that tiny fracture, and I feel a cold little pulse of irritation at myself for giving her anything to seize onto.
I shouldn’t be shocked she knows about the Iron Pact. That was bound to come out eventually. You cannot drop a woman like Sofia Kuznetsov into the same atmosphere as men like her uncle and Nikolai Malyshko and expect her not to notice the invisible hierarchy everyone else lives under.
The Pact is not a fairy tale whispered to frighten children into behaving. It is the skeleton beneath half of Moscow’s elegant corruption that makes it work.
It isn’t a kept secret within the estate. Not in any real sense. But not many bring it up in casual conversation, least of all our Pakhan. If Sofia knows the name, if she understands enough to connect it to her father’s disappearance, then someone has been talking.
“Who told you about the Iron Pact?” I ask.
She huffs at me again like I am the one being unreasonable. “What does it matter? You’re focusing on the wrong point, Rowan.”
The sound of my name in her mouth causes heat to pool low in my gut. I try to hide the reaction on my face by turning around and shifting the car into drive.
Enough of this.
This has gone beyond reckless curiosity and inconvenient defiance.
She has information she shouldn’t have, theories pointed too close to old graves that don’t need digging up no matter how suspiciously it may seem that they got there, and a notebook full of names that could get her punished if it ends up in the wrong hands.
The morgue can wait. Dead men will stay dead. Sofia, apparently, requires more active supervision than I’ve been giving her.
“We’re going back to the estate.” I say.
“What? No! You haven’t even listened to me!”
I ignore her and press down on the accelerator.
The road ahead curves beneath bare winter trees, the estate still close enough to return before anyone notices she’s missing.
I should have done this the second I found her in the back seat, not sat around listening to the theories she’s been concocting inside her head.
My eyes catch her moving in the rearview, and it is my mistake not to shift the car into park and wait for her to tug a seatbelt across her chest before moving again.
One of many where she is concerned.