"Does Viktor know?"
The question is careful. Layered. She's asking about security details. The surface question: does Viktor know her routines, her vulnerabilities, her whereabouts. The answer I give: "I don't know. Elena shared movements and schedules. How much Viktor has put together beyond that — I can't say."
But there's another question underneath. One I don't hear. One the reader does.
"What do we do with her?"
"That depends on what you want."
She stares at me. The fury is cold now. Controlled. Worse than heat.
"I want her to look me in the eye and explain how she could smile at me every day while selling me to a man who would have killed me."
The laptop screen goes dark. The cursor stops blinking. The penthouse is quiet with the particular silence of two people sitting in the wreckage of a trust they didn't know was built on sand.
Elena's betrayal answers every question that has haunted me for weeks. How Viktor stayed one step ahead. How the safe house was compromised. How Sergei knew where to find Siobhan at Elysium. The pattern resolves into a face I've known since childhood, and the resolution is worse than the mysterybecause at least the mystery allowed for the possibility that I wasn't blind.
I was blind. I was blind because I trusted the world I grew up in, and the world I grew up in betrayed me through the hands of a woman I never thought to suspect.
But one question remains. The one Siobhan asked with two words and a hand on her stomach and a voice that carried more weight than I understood: does Viktor know?
Does Viktor know what Elena saw in that restaurant? Does Viktor know what Siobhan is hiding? Does Viktor know what I still don't?
Chapter 30
Nico
The Dark Moment
* * *
Ican't sleep.
Siobhan is beside me.Ourbed. The bed where she knocked, where she stayed, where I said "wife" and meant something I didn't know I was capable of meaning. She's asleep. Her breathing is even and slow, and her hand rests on her stomach the way it does every night now, curled, protective, holding something I can't see.
I stare at the ceiling and see Finn's hand. The bandage had gone dark with blood. The ring finger is missing. The pliers on the table in that back room, the ones someone used while Finn was conscious and restrained and making jokes to stay alive.
I superimpose Siobhan's face onto the chair.
Her wrists were in restraints. She’s screaming. Viktor's voice, pleasant and calm, the way it was on the phone,"Your husband hides you well. But not well enough."
I see the intelligence maps at the harbor facility. Siobhan's photograph circled in red. Priority target. Viktor doesn't want to win a war. He wants to destroy me by destroying what I lovemost. Elena proved that the walls I built aren't enough. Someone inside. Someone trusted. If Elena could betray us, anyone could.
The fear is specific: if Viktor takes Siobhan, he wins. Not the war. Everything. Because the man I become without her is a weapon with no handler. A man with no reason to be careful is a man who will burn the world, including himself.
I get up. Go to my office. Make calls.
A property in New Hampshire. Mountain. Remote. Defensible terrain, single access road, clear sight lines for a quarter mile in every direction. Off every grid that matters. The security team: four men, ex-military private contractors, people who don't know the Greek world and can't be compromised through it. Wire transfer. Authorization codes. Seventy-two hours of preparation compressed into three phone calls at 4am.
I don't tell her. I don't ask. I decide.
The way my father decided. The way Cormac decided. The way Padraig O'Brien decided from a prison cell. The way men in this world have always decided: by choosing safety over partnership, protection over trust, control over everything.
I tell myself it's different. I tell myself I'm saving her life. I tell myself the difference between me and her father is that I love her, and he loved only the alliance and that distinction matters.
It doesn't. The bag is identical. The decision is identical. The woman who walks out the door walks out the same way regardless of whether the man who packed her bag did it with love or strategy. She still didn't choose.
I don't see this yet. I will. Too late.