On the nightstand: three books.The Secret Historyby Donna Tartt,In the Woodsby Tana French, and a battered copy of Seamus Heaney's collected poems. She mentioned Tartt to Finn at the meeting — I heard her across the room, which means I was listening to her instead of the alliance briefing, which means I was already compromised before I said her name. The French novel is a guess, but an educated one; she reads crime fiction, and this is the best of it. The Heaney is because she's Irish and he's the best of that too, and if I'm wrong she'll tell me, and I'll learn something.
I chose these weeks ago. Before the meeting. Before I said her name in front of twelve men and changed both our lives.
I don't examine what that means. I close her door and walk to the kitchen.
The penthouse stretches behind me — three thousand square feet of glass and stone and silence. I built it to be a fortress, not a home. The furniture is expensive and uncomfortable by design; no one lingers in a space that doesn't invite lingering. The art on the walls is investment, not taste. The kitchen has a six-burner range I've used twice. Every surface is polished, every angle sharp, every detail chosen to project control.
It's the loneliest place in Boston.
My father's scotch. I keep a bottle of Macallan 25 because he kept a bottle of Macallan 25 — same label, same amber weight in the glass, same way the first sip burns going down and settles warm in the chest. He used to pour two fingers after every meeting, stand at the kitchen window of the old house, and watch the street like he was counting the hours until something came for him.
Something did.
I pour. I drink. I stand at my own window and watch the city below and I look nothing like my father, and everything like him.
He loved my mother. That's the thing nobody talks about at the family dinners and the strategy meetings and the long nights of planning — Alexandros Konstantinos loved Thalia with the kind of devotion that made other men uncomfortable. He brought her flowers every Friday. He danced with her in the kitchen when he thought no one was watching. He called her agápi mou — my love — and meant it the way most men mean their own names, like it was the truest thing about him.
And look how that ended.
She's alive. My mother is alive. I call the security detail at the compound every night at eleven, tonight is no different. "Status?"
"Quiet, sir. She attended vespers. She's sleeping." Good. She attends church. She sleeps. She speaks mostly in Greek and rarely leaves the property, and she looks through her sons like we're windows instead of people. She hasn't said my name with recognition in three years. The doctors say it's dissociative. The priests say it's grief. I say it's what happens when you love a man in this world and the world takes him from you.
Dmitri Reznikov gave the order fifteen years ago. I was twenty-two. I watched. I don't remember the sound of the gunshot — my therapist, the one I saw for six months before I stopped going, said that was normal. Trauma edits the tape. What I remember is my father's hand letting go of my shoulder. The weight of it leaving. The way the absence of his grip felt heavier than the grip itself.
I remember what came after. The silence in the house. Lex, eighteen, standing in the hallway with blood on his shirt that wasn't his, eyes already hardening into something I'd spend the next fifteen years watching harden further. Dimitri, sixteen, smiling at the funeral because he didn't know how to doanything else, and everyone thought he was cruel when he was just broken. Stavros, barely ten, asking when Dad was coming home a full week after the burial because no one had explained it to him properly. Because I hadn't explained it. Because I was too busy becoming the thing that would keep the rest of them alive.
I finished the scotch that night — my father's scotch, from his bottle, standing at his window. I became the boss. I cut out every soft thing inside me because soft things get people killed, and I have three brothers and a ghost of a mother who depend on the version of me that feels nothing.
Fifteen years. I've maintained the lie for fifteen years. I don't feel. I don't want. I don't need. I run the empire and I protect the family and I sit in the chair at the head of the table and I make the decisions that no one else can stomach and I do it all from behind a wall so thick that sometimes I forget there's a man on the other side of it.
And then Siobhan O'Brien sat in my chair without invitation and looked at me like I was a problem worth solving, and something I thought I'd killed started breathing again.
I set the glass down. My body is tight, wound up, restless, and angry in a way that has nothing to do with Viktor Reznikov and everything to do with the memory of her skin under my fingertips. The warmth of her. The way she held still when I touched her hair, the deliberate choice not to lean in, and all I could think waslean in. Lean in and let me…
I stop.
This is what happens when control slips. The body takes over. My hands remember the silk of her hair when I should be reviewing security protocols. My chest remembers the tightening when our eyes met across Elysium when I should be planning for Viktor's next move. I think about her voice — the way she saidbullshitin my office without blinking, the way she saiduntil I decide otherwiselike she was already makingdecisions about my body that I hadn't been consulted on — and the wanting is so sharp it has edges.
I could make a call. There are women who would come discreetly, professionally, and with no complications. I've done it before. The body has needs; I'm not a monk. It would be easy. It would mean nothing.
I don't reach for the phone.
I stand at the window and let the frustration burn through me because the truth is, I don't want a body in my bed. I want HER in my bed — her sharp mouth and her steady eyes and her refusal to be afraid of me — and I don't know what to do with that. Tomorrow, she moves into this penthouse and sleeps behind a door I promised not to open and the only barrier between us is a wall and a promise and whatever self-control I have left.
I should be thinking about the war. About Viktor and the Bratva and the four dead men in a warehouse. Instead, I'm standing in my kitchen at midnight, hard and furious and thirty-seven years old, and the most dangerous woman in Boston is about to sleep thirty feet from my bed.
I go to bed. I don't sleep.
At 2am my phone lights up on the nightstand. I reach for it expecting Lex, expecting a security update, expecting the war.
Elena:Last chance to change your mind. Everyone would understand.
I stare at the message. There's nothing wrong with it — it reads like a friend checking in, the kind of thing she's said a hundred times over the years.Are you sure about this deal? Everyone would understand if you pulled out.The language of loyalty disguised as concern.
But it's 2am. And there's something in the phrasing —last chance— that sits wrong. Like a door closing.
I delete the message. I don't respond.