12. Rowan
ROWAN
The apartment complex is a crumbling tomb.
One glance at the boarded-up windows, sagging balconies, and the strategic placement of lookouts posing as bored loiterers on the front steps tells me everything I need to know. This isn’t a home, it’s a hideout. A rat’s nest dressed up in peeling paint and broken concrete steps.
I don’t even consider parking on the main road like an amateur.
Instead, I turn down a narrow alley across the street and park in between the buildings.
I kill the engine and let the heavy quiet swallow us.
It’s broken up only by distant traffic on the next street over and the occasional echo of someone shouting from several blocks away.
Sofia turns toward me just as I lift the file to settle it into her lap. My hand brushes over hers, finding it warm and soft against my own cold, callused one. My entire body freezes for less than a second, but I know she’s caught me by the small noise she lets out under her breath.
I quickly retrieve my hand and force myself to toss the file at her before leaning across the center console to pop open the glovebox. A pair of battered binoculars sits nestled inside, the strap worn from years of use and being moved from vehicle to vehicle within the fleet.
The glove box clicks loudly when I slam it shut, and I ignore the way Sofia flinches slightly from it.
For the next two hours, we simply sit back and watch.
I lift the binoculars in slow, methodical sweeps, murmuring updates under my breath like I’m narrating combat footage.
“Two on the northeast balcony. Rotation is every fifteen minutes.”
Sofia’s pen scratches across her notebook with each new piece of information.
“Third-floor window… someone’s watching the street below. Possibly waiting for a drop-off.”
And on and on it goes.
I don’t know when watching criminals through cracked windows became its own kind of intimacy, but strangely, it has.
The quiet rhythm of her pen catching up to my murmured insights, the subtle alignment of our bodies as we track movement in unison, feels like partnering.
Real partnering. The kind I’ve never allowed myself to have with anyone before now.
I keep my gaze trained on the apartment complex long after we’ve gathered all the intel we need. But the truth is I’m no longer watching the building. I’m watching her out of the corner of my eye.
Sofia’s honey-blonde waves are tucked behind one ear, her blue eyes narrowed in concentration as she scribbles more notes.
She absorbs everything without flinching in a way that is beginning to impress me.
At the coroner’s office, she didn’t recoil when I threatened him into handing over the file, nor did she pale when I promised if word got out to anyone, I would be coming back for him.
Now, sitting in a forgotten alley observing an armed cell, she remains completely focused.
Most people raised far from this life would have crumbled by now. Even seasoned allies sometimes blanch at the gritty machinery that keeps Moscow’s underworld running. But Sofia? She takes it in stride.
If she were driven purely by obsession or grief, I would see her the same way I do her uncle. But her composure isn’t desperation. It is instinct.
A true Kuznetsov.
The realization settles heavily in my chest. Ivan sent her away to keep her sheltered, to protect her from the violence that forged the rest of us.
Yet here she is, walking through the same darkness we all have like she has always belonged.
It seems the empire her family built recognizes its own blood and has done everything it can to welcome her home.
She is a woman who hasn’t just stepped into my world by accident. She walks through it like she was born to rule it.
By the time I start the engine and carefully pull out of the alley without being spotted, the sky has dimmed to a soft gold.
We make it onto the main road before she finally finishes whatever she’s writing. Her hand slaps the paper in her lap as she straightens up in her seat.
“Okay, hear me out. There are at least three possibilities—no, four—that make sense, given what we’ve seen and what we learned from our stakeout.”
I glance at her from the corner of my eye. My lips threaten to twitch upward. “I’m listening.”
She grins at me.
As she talks, she gestures around with her pen. I sift through her ideas one by one as she replays them, quietly testing them against my knowledge of Moscow’s underbelly. Some are off-base, some are good, others are uncomfortably accurate.
I hear myself offering small hums of agreement and low, thoughtful grunts when she hits on a detail I overlooked.
Still, beneath my calm exterior, unease coils tightly in my gut.
While Sofia’s logic is sound on most points, the core assumption unsettles me.
A rival syndicate upending the status quo.
A mid-tier outfit targeting Ivan just as he suspected in the beginning? Committing an assassination attempt on a well-connected Pakhan with the full weight of the Iron Pact behind him?
It’s practically suicide. Not to mention statistically unlikely, as I already told him.
“Even if the evidence points that way, the motive doesn’t,” I tell her. My finger flicks the turn signal on to merge as I guide the car back toward the estate.
Sofia tilts her head at me. “What do you mean?”
I lift one shoulder. “Starting a war with the Kuznetsov syndicate isn’t just reckless. It’s suicide. Especially when he has the Pact behind him. No mid-tier gang would risk that. The cost outweighs the gain a thousand times over.”
Sofia falls silent, absorbing that.
I don’t say what I’m really thinking, though. That everything we uncovered today could be intentional misdirection. That we might be chasing a carefully planted lie, and the real threat could be much closer than either of us realizes.
Though what the actual threat is, I can’t even begin to guess at this point.
When the estate gates appear ahead, the guards at the front wave us through without question.
I barely have time to pull the car into the garage and park it before enforcers swarm us. No one speaks as we are both escorted inside and through the halls, past watchful staff who pretend not to stare and straight toward Ivan’s private wing.
I feel the weight of what’s coming in every step.
Sofia walks beside me, still clutching her bag to her chest as confusion flickers clearly across her face the closer we reach Ivan’s office. She still thinks Ivan will be irritated but ultimately tolerant, and I almost envy that level of innocence.
Ivan is sitting behind his desk when we finally step inside his office. His dark eyes find Sofia first, and though they do not soften like usual, they do not hold the same cold fury I know will soon be turned on me.
“Sofia. Are you all right? Did the outing clear your head?”
She nods, offering a small smile. “It did help. Rowan was a big help. Thank you for letting us spend the day in town.”
Ivan’s gaze flicks toward me briefly before settling back on her again. “I’m glad to hear it. Is there anything else I can do for you before dinner?”
She shakes her head.
He inclines his own at her. “We’ll speak later, then. I will see you in a few hours.”
Sofia hesitates at the clear dismissal. Her eyes flick to me with concern that makes my chest tighten.
It is small, so small, no one else in the room might notice, but I do.
I see the way her fingers tighten around the bag in her hand.
How her mouth presses together as if she is biting back a protest. The way she searches my face, looking for some sign of what is coming, or worse, some sign that I want her to stay.
I swallow around the lump in my throat.
That is the last thing I want.
As flattered as I am to see her outwardly concerned about me, the last thing I want is for her to stay and witness what is about to come. Ivan’s anger has never been something I wanted spectators for. Not even when I was younger and had less experience handling it.
If she stays, she’ll see too much.
She’ll see the boy still buried under the blade.
I keep my eyes forward and my expression blank. It takes her nearly another minute before she steps away from my side and follows the two guards waiting for her by the door. As soon as it clicks shut behind her, the atmosphere inside the room changes instantly.
The study contracts around us. The fire in the grate pops once, the sound too loud in the silence. Ivan’s desk sits between us, polished and immense, its surface neat except for the documents he had been reviewing before we arrived with a single black fountain pen resting parallel to the papers.
He rises slowly from his chair.
A small tightening near the eyes, and the faint drag at the corner of his mouth tells me his stitches are tugging at his skin uncomfortably. He ignores it and takes in a slow breath while he stares at me.
It’s a long time before he speaks again.
“You disobeyed a direct order,” he says quietly.
I don’t deny it. “I did.”
Ivan’s voice hardens at the admission. “You took the one person whose safety I entrusted to you with into the city without my permission after an attempt on my life. After I explicitly told you she is to stay on the property because of the target on her back. Do you have any idea what could have happened?”
I meet his eyes. “Yes.”
I know exactly what could have happened.
Every possibility circled my brain the moment I realized she was in my back seat.
I could have shot her. We could have been followed.
The coroner’s office could have been watched.
Someone could have seen her face, recognized her name, decided Ivan’s hidden niece was worth the price tag of retribution.
Moscow could have opened its mouth and swallowed her before I had the chance to put myself between her and its teeth.
I know.
That’s the torment of it.
I knew, and I kept driving anyway.
He steps around the desk, then. “You risked her life by doing something so reckless. You risked everything I’ve built to protect her.”
For one second, guilt flashes hotly through my veins, and it almost pulls me back into line. Because I know that grief is real. I know he loved Irena. Whatever else he has hidden away, whatever sins he has tried to bury, the pain at her death is not theater.
But real pain can still be used to bury real truth.
That is exactly why I can’t stop now.
Ivan exhales, and when he speaks again, his tone is sadder than I’ve ever heard it before.
“Oh, Rowan… You have disappointed me immeasurably today. What am I to do with you now?”