24. Rowan #3
“Thank you, Sofia.” I whisper, choking on the words as a single tear trails down my cheek. “I will let you know after the meeting what is discussed and our next steps.”
“I will be waiting for you, Rowan. Always.”
The final confrontation begins long before I reach Ivan.
It begins the moment I step back onto the familiar grounds of the Kuznetsov estate as night cloaks the property in cold black silk.
For years this place was more than a residence.
It was proof that I had risen above the fighting pits and the starving for food and love and a place to belong.
These walls gave my life meaning. Now it looks like an enemy compound that I know every weak point to.
And this time the enemy is the one inside these very walls that I have spent years protecting.
The darkness around me reminds me of a hundred other raids and a hundred other nights I’ve slipped through barrier walls and shadows, moving silently with men at my back while we cut our way into some other bastard’s safe place.
I remember the old rhythm of it too easily.
How the adrenaline pulsing through my veins would feel.
Behind me, the coordinated assault is already underway.
Men loyal to all three Iron Pact members move across the estate in tight formations, black shapes cutting through the dark with ruthless discipline.
Malyshko’s men take the perimeter first while Volkov’s own soldiers move faster toward the front of the house.
Sokolov’s people fill the seams in between, covering blind spots and locking down exits to make sure panic doesn’t turn this into a slaughterhouse before the real target is reached.
Their teams breach the outer gates with almost no fanfare, sweeping through the grounds to neutralize any guards before alarms can properly spread through the compound.
I know every inch of where they’re moving through.
The angle of the cameras, the dead zones between the floodlights, the guard rotations I helped refine over years of paranoia and protocol—all of it is being used now against the very house I once swore no one would ever breach.
That irony should make me sick.
It does, in a way.
But layered beneath the sickness is something else. Sofia helped build half our plan from inside. That knowledge fills me with a deep, aching sense of pride so fierce it almost burns.
I feel it even now as I move through the darkness behind the other soldiers as we breach the foyer. Despite being locked inside that house with only one singular access point to the outside world, Sofia managed to help in every way she could.
The whispered strategy meetings with her and the Iron Pact over the last week have been a true testament to that clever brilliance.
Coupled with Volkov’s own strategist wife, all six of us had come together to develop an ugly little war council stitched together out of necessity, mutual distrust, and the undeniable fact that Ivan Kuznetsov had become too dangerous to leave unchecked any longer.
Things moved quickly after I’d given them the bones of the estate—the private hallways, the routes to all the major landmarks, the security bypasses, the popular bottlenecks, the best place to cripple communications without plunging the entire house into chaos too early.
I handed them the blueprint of my own home and watched them turn it into a kill map.
That still feels surreal when I think about it.
And yet the pride remains because Sofia is part of this.
Even now with my former home waking up to violence, I can feel the shape of her mind in the operation unfolding across the grounds.
She is there in the rerouted guard team near the southern entrance.
In the timing of the east-wing breach. In the fact that the staff quarters are to be avoided at all costs to keep innocent blood from being spilled.
She helped make all of this possible.
That is both beautiful and horrifying.
Gunfire erupts somewhere near the east wing.
The crack tears through the main part of the home as guards begin to flood from their posts. Without warning, my entire body tries to pivot toward it, toward her, to find her and keep her safe from all of this.
I catch myself before I can and force myself to keep moving.
I have to trust that she is staying safe.
This is the plan.
I move through the familiar corridors like a ghost, every step guided by years of instinct. The layout is etched into my bones—the blind corners, the narrow hallways meant for the staff to disappear down when guests are being entertained.
The first set of guards appear at the end of the hallway near the library. They hesitate when they recognize me but lift their guns anyway to aim at my chest.
“Don’t—” one of them starts to say.
The words are cut off by the bullets from my gun catching them both in the chest before they are able to flex their fingers over their triggers.
They collapse together in a heap and I move forward, stepping past them without looking down.
Another guard rounds the corner seconds later, dropping just as the last two did from another round from my gun’s chamber.
Ivan is already waiting for me when I arrive.
Perhaps, in his own way, he always knew this was how it would end too.
The study looks exactly the same as it always has. The heavy desk sits near the tall windows overlooking the dark gardens, shelves of leather-bound books line the walls, and the faint scent of cigar smoke lingers in the air like the ghost of countless late-night strategy sessions we had together.
Ivan stands at the windows with his hands clasped behind his back. The only source of light is a lamp in the far corner of the room, casting long shadows across the space. In his reflection, his expression is calm, almost resigned, as he stares out at the chaos unfolding below.
Ivan breaks the silence first. “I wondered how long it would take for you to come.”
My hand finally eases from the door handle, my fingers aching from how hard I’d been gripping it. I close it quietly behind me, the lock engaging with a soft click that echoes like a final punctuation mark.
When he turns away from the window, he studies me with an expression that is hard to nail down. It isn’t quite anger. There is a deep line between his brows that suggests how disheartened he feels, how tired, maybe. Though I know better than to mistake weariness in a man like him for weakness.
He looks older at this moment.
Though the same silver is at his temples and the same faint lines mar his skin, something in him has aged.
His voice is quiet when he speaks again. “Of all the people who might come through that door… I had hoped it wouldn’t be you.”
My grip tightens around the gun in my hand. “Why would you expect anyone else?”
I’m asking because some part of me still wants to know if he imagined I would come back to him eventually.
If even now with his house being dismantled around him, and everything he’s ever built now crumbling, he still believed in the back of his mind that I would turn up at the last second and stand where I always stood.
Beside him, not against him.
Ivan’s gaze tightens suddenly. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have. You betrayed me just as my own sister did.”
I say nothing.
Truthfully, there are no words left in me for him. They have all but dried up just as my tears have since I have been out from under his heavy hand. I tried to warn him of this outcome, that the Pact would retaliate in the only way it knows how to, by crushing its rebellious factions.
What exactly is left to say after that?
The awful thing is he already knows what it has cost me to walk through this door and face him for the last time. I can see it in the way he looks at me now as though he’s examining the very wound he inflicted himself and can’t decide whether he regrets it or not.
Ivan takes a slow step closer to me. “I gave you everything, Rowan.”
“And I have never forgotten that,” I say. “I still haven’t.”
His eyes dart down to the gun in my hand before finding mine again. “Then explain this.”
Love in his world will never be enough. There will always be a debt, waiting for the day the bill finally arrives to be paid. His care has always carried a quiet hunger for ownership underneath it.
That is the thing I finally understand about him, then.
About all men like him.
They give and give and give but never without an invisible ledger taking in every expense and calculating the final total at the end.
They tell themselves it is love because that word is easiest to twist into control.
Somewhere along this long, brutal road, I have realized something Ivan never allowed himself to understand.
Loyalty without conscience is not strength.
It is merely tyranny.
“I will always serve my Pakhan without question.” I pull in a breath, and then I raise my gun, aiming it directly at his chest. “But that man is no longer you.”
Ivan’s face hardens.
My finger flexes on the trigger at the exact moment that he lunges forward.
He collides with my body at an angle, driving his shoulder into my chest and knocking the breath from me in one violent burst. Then my back slams into the floor.
The impact rattles through my spine so hard my vision whites for half a second.
The fist that catches my jaw stuns me for a split second, long enough to knock the gun from my hand.
Pain detonates bright and hot across the side of my face as another one comes.
My head whips sideways into the carpet as copper floods my mouth from where my teeth slice the inside of my cheek.
Somewhere to my left the gun skids across the floor and out of reach.
I don’t bother fighting for it. I know Ivan too well to do something stupid like that. The second my eyes leave him to lunge for the weapon, he’ll break my nose, my throat, my ribs, whatever piece of me he can ruin fastest to stop me from standing up again.
So I stay where I am and hit him with my own fist.