She was suspended—wrists bound with rope that ran up and over the arm of the chandelier, her feet barely grazing the top of the barstool beneath her, the whole arrangement deliberate in its cruelty. Her face was wet. She was crying without sound, and the sight of it broke me in ways I couldn’t explain.
Nico was standing by her side. He heard me come in—or felt the shift in the room, the change in pressure—and turned with a smile that had been waiting for me.
“There he is,” he said. “Let’s see how much you love her, huh?”
I crossed the room.
He met me before I reached her, which was what he wanted—to keep me away from her, to use the distance between us as its own kind of weapon—and the fight that followed was not clean. It was never going to be clean.
“Stay back,” he said, low and sharp, already moving, already closing the space I needed. He’d had time to prepare this room, and he used it; I barely got my guard up before he drove me sideways and I took a chair to the ribs in the first ten seconds. I felt something crack, sharp and bright, and filed it away as irrelevant.
“Is that all?” I managed, breath tight, and swung back.
He blocked, fast, the impact reverberating up my arm. Then we were too close for anything clean—hands, elbows, the brutal efficiency of it. Glass came apart under our feet as I drove him into the table, a side table went over with a crash that split the air, and the sound of it was enormous in the high quiet of the penthouse. He pivoted, caught my wrist, twisted; I felt the pull in my shoulder and slammed my forehead forward in response. It connected. He staggered half a step, and I followed, because hesitation would get me killed.
He was good. Whatever grief had hollowed Nico Calderon out in the weeks since his father’s death, it hadn’t touched the part of him that knew how to hurt people. He then drove his knee up hard enough to make my vision blur at the edges. He fought like a man with nothing left to protect, which made him more dangerous than a man fighting to survive.
I caught his collar, dragged him down with me, and slammed him into the edge of the counter. Something broke—glass, bone, I couldn’t tell—and he didn’t even flinch properly before he came back at me. We went down together for a second, a tangle of force and momentum, then separated just enough to reset into something worse. My side screamed when I moved; I ignored it.
“Move,” I snapped, trying to angle past him, toward her.
He didn’t. Of course, he didn’t. He shifted instead, fast, precise, cutting me off again. “No,” he said, and there was something final in it.
He got me down.
I don’t know exactly how—a shift in weight, the glass-slick floor, the cracked rib making my left side slow by a fraction—but I went down hard, breath punched out of me, and he was across me before I could recover. My hand came up, caught his wrist, but he already had a shard of glass from something we’d broken, long and jagged and pressed to my throat with the particular steadiness of a man who had done this before and knew how little pressure it took.
“Don’t,” he said quietly, like a warning I should take seriously.
His face was very close to mine. His mouth was almost calm.
“Say goodbye,” he said.
I looked past him at Sofia. Her eyes were on me. She had stopped crying. She was watching me with an expression I couldn’t name. Her arms were still above her head, wrists bound. She was alive.
I thought of all the words I wouldn’t get to say to her, of the child I wouldn’t raise with her, of everything that would end here, unfinished and unsaid.
Then the door came apart.
Not the service entrance. The main door, off its hinges in one impact, and then Yegor was through it with two of Matvey’s men at his shoulders and Luka at the back, guns raised, the collective presence of them filling the room instantly. I hadn’t told them where I was going. I hadn’t told anyone—I’d driven here alone because Nico had said alone, and something in me had resolved into a single point, and I hadn’t stopped to think about tactics or backup or anything except the distance between me and this room. But this was the brotherhood. This was what it meant. They hadn’t needed me to tell them. They never did.
Nico registered the guns. Registered the math of the room shifting entirely out of his favor. I watched it move across his face—the calculation collapsing, every remaining option closing—and then he made the last decision he would ever make.
He lunged toward Sofia.
The gun was in my hand. I fired once, then twice, then a third time—one was enough, the second wasn’t operational, and the third lived in the part of me that had heard him say the word pregnant on the phone in Matvey’s office and felt the world tilt permanently on its axis.
He went down.
The apartment was very quiet. The ringing in my ears and underneath it the quiet, and Sofia still suspended from the chandelier, her feet finding the barstool again now, her wrists still bound, her face turned toward me. Alive.
I got to her in three steps. I worked the rope until her hands were free and she came down against me. I took her weight. She gripped the front of my shirt. I held on with both arms. Neither of us said anything because the things that needed saying were not available in the immediate term. She was shaking. I was not going to tell her she was shaking.
“You didn’t tell anyone,” Yegor said behind me. Not a question. The voice of a man who had pieced the whole sequence together and arrived at his conclusion before he’d fully crossed the threshold.
“I know,” I said.
I felt Sofia exhale against my chest—slow and unsteady, the breath of a woman who was already building the case she intended to make against me, brick by careful brick, and choosing for the moment to set it aside. Her arms tightened around me anyway.