Chapter Twenty-Seven
Lauren
I wake up in the passenger seat of a moving car.
For one disoriented second there’s nothing—just motion, the smell of leather, and the low hum of an engine pushed hard. Then the second ends and everything comes back at once. My hand shoots out to grab the handle as the realization crashes into me.
Hannah!
“Seatbelt,” Nikolai says from the driver’s seat. “Loop your arm back through.”
I fumble with it, fingers clumsy, the buckle clicking into place just as the car takes a turn that presses me sideways. The speedometer reads something I don’t want to look at. Outside the windows, the city moves past in long amber streaks—low sun, long shadows.
“What time is it?”
“Six.”
Afternoon, then. She’s been gone—I don’t know how long. Long enough for Nikolai to carry me to a car and get us moving. Long enough for someone to take my daughter out of her bed and put her somewhere I can’t reach.
My throat closes.
I press the back of my hand to my mouth and breathe through it. The nausea is physical—the motion of the car, the weight of it, both at once—and I let it roll through me and subside because I cannot afford to fall apart in this seat. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
Claire.
I should have told Nikolai sooner. The moment her hand trembled around that mug, the moment Hannah said she asks questions—I should have gone straight upstairs to speak to him. Instead I filed it away, told myself I was overthinking, and let hours pass.
I didn’t protect her.
I failed my own daughter.
I stare at Nikolai and force the thought down before it swallows me whole. There’s nothing in self-blame that gets Hannah back. Nothing at all.
“Where are we going?” I choke out.
“Private airstrip. Twenty minutes out.” He cuts across two lanes, smooth and deliberate, ignoring the horns. “We need to get to Atlanta.”
Atlanta.
The word lands in my stomach like something cold and sharp.
I slide the window down and press my face toward the gap, pulling air in.
The highway noise floods the car—wind, engines, and the city doing what it always does, entirely indifferent.
I focus on breathing and try not to think about the last time I was taken somewhere I didn’t want to go.
About shipping containers and zip ties and the particular quality of darkness when there’s no way out.
Hannah is four years old. She won’t understand what’s happening to her. She’ll just know that she’s frightened, alone, and her mother isn’t there for her.
I press my knuckles to my mouth.
“It’s not your fault.”
I don’t answer. I don’t have the architecture for speech right now—my throat is locked, my chest is locked, everything has narrowed to the single unbearable fact of my daughter somewhere out there without me.
“We will get to her.” His voice is low, certain. Not the false certainty of someone trying to manage me. Something harder than that. “I promise.”
I look at him.
He catches my eyes briefly and holds them for just a moment before looking at the road again.
“Do you trust me?”
I wipe my face with the edge of my sleeve. Outside, the city gives way to highway, the buildings thinning, the sky opening up ahead of us in long horizontal bands of fading light.
I nod.
Whatever else is complicated between us—and nearly everything is—this isn’t.
He will burn the world down before he lets something happen to our daughter.
I know that the way I know my own heartbeat.
It’s the one thing I’ve never had to question.
But underneath that certainty, there’s something quieter and harder to look at.
What happens after?
We get Hannah back—and then he walks into whatever Ronan Aslanov has prepared for him, alone, the way he always does things alone. He made a promise just now. He made two.
I face forward, watch the road unspool ahead of us and say nothing, because there are thoughts up there that help and thoughts that don’t. And right now I can only afford the ones that help.
Nikolai exits the highway onto an access road I wouldn’t have noticed, and then there’s farmland on both sides and a concrete strip appearing out of nowhere in the flat late-afternoon light.
No terminal. Just a suited man waiting beside a black car, and a small jet taxiing toward us from the far end of the runway.
I follow Nikolai out of the car as fast as my legs will carry me.
The wind hits hard out here, open land with nothing to break it.
I pull my sweater tight and keep moving.
Nikolai exchanges a few words with the suited man—low, quick, nothing I catch—and then we’re climbing the steps and I’m inside and dropping into the nearest seat before I’ve properly registered any of it.
Nikolai sits beside me and doesn’t ask how I’m doing. I’m grateful for that more than I can say.
The engines build. The jet begins to move and I press my shoulder blades back into the seat and breathe. Nikolai’s hand finds mine on the armrest and I take it without looking at him—without thinking about it at all, the way you reach for the one solid thing in the room.
Takeoff comes and goes.
I watch the ground fall away through the window—the flat farmland shrinking, the highway becoming a grey thread, the sky opening up in long bands of pink and fading gold. It’s evening already. The day is almost gone.
I think about Hannah waking up in a strange place, calling for me, and getting silence back. I think about Mr. Brummy on the floor, one button eye facing up, abandoned in a way she would never leave him voluntarily.
I tighten my grip on Nikolai’s hand and say nothing.
He doesn’t let go.
I drift somewhere that isn’t quite sleep and isn’t quite waking, and then Atlanta is below us through the window—city lights scattered across the dark, the plane already descending through a low ceiling of cloud.
I watch it come up to meet us and feel nothing warm about it.
This city has taken things from me before.
The landing, the transfer to a car, the drive—it all moves past me in pieces, unconnected. Nikolai puts me in the back and tells me to rest. I don’t, but I close my eyes and let the time pass, and somewhere in the dark between one moment and the next, dawn begins seeping into the edges of the sky.
By the time we pull into an industrial estate, the sun is just clearing the horizon, throwing long pale light across corrugated metal and chain-link fencing. Old warehouses, scrap metal catching the early glare. The engine cuts out.
“Where are we?”
“Outskirts.” Nikolai is already out of the car, opening my door, taking my hand.
A small group of men are approaching from across the lot. I pull in a breath—and then Timur’s face comes into frame and something in me loosens fractionally. He looks at me the way people look at someone they’re not sure is going to hold together.
“It’s going to be okay, Lauren.”
“Just tell me what I can do,” I say. “How I can help.”
“By staying back.” Nikolai’s voice is even, but final.
“She’s my daughter.” I hear the edge in it and don’t pull it back. “Don’t ask me to stand on the sidelines.”
He gives me a look—not unkind, but absolute.
Before I can push further, another voice cuts in from the side.
“Listen to him, Miss Watson.”
The man approaching is older—salt-and-pepper hair combed back with precision, well-dressed in a way that reads as habit rather than occasion.
He moves like someone who has never lost a room, and his eyes are the kind that calculate before they’ve finished looking.
My gut registers something before my brain does—a low, sourceless warning, there and gone.
I’m exhausted and running on adrenaline. I don’t trust my instincts right now.
“This is Sergio Popov,” says Nikolai. “He’s with us.”
Popov’s gaze holds mine, level and unhurried. “I have more reason than most to want Aslanov finished. Your daughter will come home.” A pause. “But only if you let us work.”
I look at him—the composure, the cold certainty behind his eyes—and feel that warning move through me again, quieter this time, easier to dismiss.
I’m exhausted and running on nothing. I don’t trust my own instincts right now.
I don’t trust his either.
But I have nowhere else to put my faith this morning, so I hold my tongue, stay where I am, and watch the men gather.