I don’t look away from her. “Who?”
“Dimitri. Roman. Lev.”
I close my eyes for half a second. Exhale through my nose.
“Take her back to her room,” I say calmly. “Make sure she doesn’t leave it again.”
I turn before she can say another word.
She doesn’t make it easy.
She fights Nik the entire way, heels skidding against the floor, hands striking his chest uselessly as she screamsprofanities at my back—creative ones. Desperate ones. Furious, wounded ones.
“Coward!”
“Psychopath!”
Every other wicked name under the sun.
I don’t slow down. I don’t respond. I don’t look back.
My surveillance room is dim, screens glowing with live feeds and encrypted data.
They’re already there.
My brothers stand like a dark council, each occupying the space in his own way.
Roman leans against the table, arms crossed, eyes sharp and calculating—always thinking three moves ahead.
Dimitri stands with his hands braced on the edge of the console, all brute presence and barely leashed violence.
Lev watches from the shadows, still and unreadable, his calm more unsettling than the others’ aggression.
I enter and shut the door behind me.
“Why are you here,” I ask evenly, “without informing me?”
A beat.
They exchange a glance.
Then Dimitri straightens, jaw tight. “Why have you extracted a civilian girl and brought her into a Rusnak estate?”
The word civilian is a challenge.
I narrow my eyes. “This mansion is mine. I don’t require permission to use my own property.”
Roman’s gaze hardens. “The mansion may be yours,” he says coolly, “but the Rusnak name belongs to all of us.”
Silence thickens.
“And when the name is at risk,” Roman continues, voice precise, surgical, “everyone answers for it.”
Lev finally speaks, quietly. “So you’re going to tell us why she’s here, Konstantin.”
I lean back against the console, jaw tight. “Remember the Hart case Lukin put me in charge of?”
They nod. All of them.