Chapter Thirty-Three
Lauren
Three days.
That’s how long it’s been since Pullman Yard.
We drove back before the morning had fully arrived—Nikolai, Hannah, Timur, and I—back through the pale early light to the mansion on the outskirts of the city.
His mansion.
The basement of it, which is where we’ve been, existing in the particular quiet of people who have been through something together and are still finding their way back to ordinary language.
The first thing we did when we arrived was get Nikolai a specialist medic—one of his, a man who came without being asked and worked without asking questions.
The wounds were serious. The thigh especially.
He’s been off his feet more than he’d like, which means he’s been difficult in the particular way he gets when his body won’t cooperate with his intentions.
But he’s healing. Slowly, and under protest, but healing.
It doesn’t feel like we’re hiding anymore. That’s the difference I keep noticing. This is something else—slower, more deliberate. The beginning of something that hasn’t been named yet.
Today is not slow.
Nikolai’s men found Claire two days ago. She didn’t run, which surprised me—apparently she made it easy for them, almost as though she’d been waiting to be collected. She’s been in the basement since last night, and this morning Nikolai told me she was ready to be questioned.
He wanted to be there.
I told him no.
There’s something I need to understand about what she did—not just the mechanics of it, the corrupted footage and the questions she filtered through Hannah, but the reason underneath all of it.
Why she did it. And I think if Nikolai is in the room, whatever fragile thread of honesty Claire might still have access to will close off entirely.
He doesn’t have to do anything. He simply has that effect on people.
So I’m doing this alone.
I push open the door.
She’s tied to the chair—Timur’s work, I assume, efficient and without ceremony.
The room is plain: bare walls, a single overhead light, nothing on the table between us.
Claire looks smaller than I remember. The composure she always carried, that particular ease of a woman entirely at home in any room she entered, is gone.
What’s left is something diminished and frightened and very, very still.
Her eyes find mine the moment I step in.
The apology is already on her face. She’s been rehearsing it, I can tell—the expression worn in at the edges, like she’s been sitting here arranging it since they brought her down.
She glances at the space behind me as I enter.
“It’s just me.” I close the door softly behind me, pull out the chair across from her, and take my seat. I don’t soften my expression. I let the silence do its work first.
She looks so small, diminished, so entirely unlike the woman who moved through Nikolai’s penthouse with quiet competence. But that doesn’t matter. She needs to understand the weight of what she did to my daughter before she gets anything from me.
She’s braced for something. I can see it in the set of her shoulders, the way her whole body has gone rigid, waiting.
I fold my hands on the table and look at her.
"Why?"
One word. It moves through her visibly—a shudder she can’t contain, starting at her shoulders and moving down. Her mouth opens twice, closes twice, like she’s reached for an answer and found it inadequate each time.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. Her voice is barely there.
“I didn’t ask for an apology. I asked why.”
She flinches.
It’s harder than I expected, holding this line.
Claire has always been slight—the kind of woman who seems to take up less space than she actually does—and whatever composure she had when she arrived here has been replaced by something so stripped and frightened that looking at her directly costs me something. I feel the pull of it and push it down.
She betrayed us.
She betrayed Hannah.
I wait.
“I didn’t have a choice.” The words come out barely above a whisper.
I keep my face still and say nothing.
“Ronan Aslanov.” She swallows with difficulty. “He… his men took my sister. And her daughter.” She looks up at me for the first time, her eyes red-rimmed and certain in a way the rest of her isn’t. “They said if I didn’t do what they asked, they would kill them both.”
The room shifts.
I sit back slowly.
Of course. It’s exactly what he does—reach into the space between a person and the people they love and make a weapon out of it. He did it with Hannah. He did it with Nikolai. Why would Claire have been any different?
I look at her—really look at her—and see it now for what it is. Not a woman who chose to betray us. A woman who was given no choice at all, and has been living inside that impossible fact ever since.
“I’m so sorry, Lauren.” Her voice breaks on my name. Tears slip down her face and she doesn’t move to wipe them, hands still bound. “I’m so sorry.”
I say nothing. But the shape of what I came in here believing is already quietly rearranging itself.
The box of tissues on the side table catches my eye. I’m out of my seat before I’ve decided to move, pulling a few free and passing them across the table.
She takes them without a word. Her hands are trembling.
“I never wanted to hurt Hannah.” She presses the tissue to her face. “I want you to know that. Whatever else you think of me—I never wanted that.”
I believe her. I’m not sure I should, and I believe her anyway.
There was a time when I held firmly to the idea that there is always a choice—that people who say otherwise are reaching for an excuse.
I’m less certain of that now. Aslanov had Hannah.
He had Nikolai’s mother. He had four years of Nikolai’s life, and mine, and our daughter’s.
The architecture of what he built was designed specifically to leave people with no good options.
Blaming Claire for the corner he put her in feels less like justice and more like misdirection.
The door opens.
I don’t need to turn around. The room changes in a particular way when Nikolai enters it—a shift in the air, a subtle recalibration of everyone in it. Claire’s eyes go to the doorway and the colour drains from her face.
“He’s not here to hurt you,” I say.
I glance back at Nikolai. He’s leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed over his chest, making no move to come further into the room. His expression gives away nothing. His left eyebrow lifts a fraction when he meets my eyes.
I turn back to Claire.
“Aslanov’s men—do you know where they’re holding your sister? Your niece?”
Claire shakes her head, the movement rapid and desperate. “I don't know. They never told me—I only ever had a number to call, and it’s been disconnected since—” She stops. Presses the tissue to her mouth. “I don't know where they are.”
The room settles into a heavy quiet.
Even now, Ronan Aslanov’s reach extends into this basement, into this woman’s face, into a sister and a child somewhere we can’t locate. Even in his death, the man is still finding ways to damage people.
I look at Claire—her red eyes, her bound hands, the specific exhaustion of someone who has been carrying an impossible thing alone for too long—and feel the last of my anger lose its shape.
This is not what I imagined this conversation would be.
I came in here wanting answers and instead I’ve inherited another problem, another person pulled under by the same current that almost took all of us.
I’m out of my depth and I know it, and the interrogation I thought I was conducting has quietly become something else entirely.
I glance up and find Nikolai watching me from the doorway. His expression gives nothing away. He holds my gaze for a moment, then tips his head almost imperceptibly toward the corridor.
I push back my chair and follow him out, pulling the door closed behind me.
The hallway is dim and quiet. He stands with his back against the wall, arms folded, the corridor light catching the bruising still visible along his jaw.
Three days out from Pullman Yard and the damage is still written all over him—the careful way he distributes his weight, the arm he hasn’t lifted above the shoulder since we got back.
“I have news,” he says.
“Me too.” I lean against the opposite wall. “You first.”
“Timur called this morning. He and two of our men found Claire’s sister and her daughter.” He pauses. “They’ve been handed over to the police. They’re safe.”
Something loosens in my chest.
“So she was telling the truth.”
“Da.” His jaw tightens. “Does that change what she did, and what it nearly cost us? Not at all.”
I nod. I know it doesn’t. But I’ve been sitting across from her for the last twenty minutes knowing exactly what it nearly cost us, and feeling two entirely contradictory things at once.
“Her fate is in your hands,” he says. “Whatever you decide, I’ll stand behind it.”
I look at him. There’s no performance in it—no angle, no preferred outcome he’s steering me toward. He means it.
I think about Hannah in that room, bound and terrified.
I think about Claire at the table, her hands shaking around a mug of coffee she’d loaded with sugar because her nerves had already given her away.
I think about what it would take to make a woman like that—careful, warm, someone Hannah loved—into a liability.
What kind of pressure would have to be applied, and for how long.
“Let her go,” I say. “No harm done to her. She was being blackmailed, Niko. If the situation were reversed, I can’t say either of us would have done differently.”
Nikolai looks at me for a long moment.
Then he gives a single nod.
We go back into the room together. Claire looks up at both of us, her face beyond bracing for something—she’s past that now, just waiting, whatever composure she arrived with long since spent.
“You’re free to go,” I tell her. “Your sister and your niece are safe.”
The sound that comes out of Claire is involuntary and entirely undone. She presses the tissue to her mouth and squeezes her eyes shut, her shoulders shaking with something that has clearly been held at enormous cost for a long time.
I watch her and feel the last of my anger dissolve into something quieter and considerably sadder.
“I meant what I said in there,” I tell Nikolai, once Claire has been escorted out by one of his men and the hallway has gone quiet again. “I don’t blame her.”
“I know.”
We make our way to the sitting room. The late afternoon light comes through the bay windows in long warm bands, falling across the couch, the floorboards, the ordinary surfaces of a house that is slowly becoming something it hasn’t been before.
Hannah is upstairs sleeping, one of Nikolai’s staff checking in on her.
Through the window, the willow trees move against the lake, their branches trailing the surface of the water.
Nikolai sits beside me, and I pull my knees up and turn toward him the way I always do—instinctively, without deciding to.
“There’s something you need to know.” he says. “About your mother. I’m sorry for not telling you earlier, but—”
“I know,” I say quietly.
He looks at me.
“I was close enough to hear. Before I took the shot.” I turn toward the window. “Collateral.”
Nikolai says nothing. He doesn’t offer comfort or explanation and I’m grateful for both absences—there’s nothing to say that would change the shape of it, and he knows that.
I watch the willow branches drag through the water and let myself sit with it.
My mother. A name I’ve been pulling at for years, a question I thought I’d never get to finish asking.
The answer, when it finally came, arrived in the worst possible way, in the worst possible place, from the worst possible man.
And now he’s gone too, and the question is closed, and I’m still here.
I spent so long believing that knowing would be the thing that finally let me breathe. I’m not sure it works like that. But I’m breathing anyway—steadier than I expected, in a room full of afternoon light, beside a man I thought I’d lost and didn’t, with our daughter asleep upstairs.
Time teaches you to carry things differently. It teaches you to let some of them go.
“Are you okay?” Nikolai asks.
I turn back to him. His blue eyes are steady on mine, patient in the way he’s learned to be patient with me—without pressure, without filling the silence before it’s ready.
“Yes,” I say. And I mean it in the way I haven’t been able to mean it for a long time.
He reaches over and tucks a strand of hair back from my face, his hand coming to rest against my cheek. Outside, the willows move. Upstairs, Hannah sleeps.
I lean into his hand, and he draws me in, and the chapter of what we were to each other before all of this—the grief, the distance, the years of not knowing—closes quietly behind us.
What comes next is ours to write.