“This ends one way,” Lev says.
I meet their eyes, one by one.
“With him underground,” I reply. “And her safe.”
Eventually, my brothers leave, and the surveillance room settles into a low, electric quiet. Screens glow. Fans hum. Time stops meaning anything.
I scrub the footage back. Again. Slower.
Frame by frame.
Rain streaks across the lens. Leaves shudder in the wind. Guards move along their routes—predictable, disciplined, exactly where they should be. Nothing out of place. Nothing obvious.
Then I see it.
I freeze the feed.
Magnify.
There—between two trees beyond the eastern fence line. Just a distortion at first. A darker shadow where shadow shouldn’t deepen. I adjust the contrast. Sharpen the image.
The silhouette resolves.
Tall. Still. Weight balanced on the balls of the feet. Rifle braced with patience, not tension. A man who can wait hours without shifting an inch.
My jaw locks.
I know that stance.
I’ve seen it through scopes. In thermal footage. In aftermath reports where the body drops before the sound arrives.
Markov’s sniper.
Not a freelancer. Not a warning man. His executioner.
I scrub back again, my pulse slowing instead of racing. That’s the dangerous part—the calm. The way fury condenses into something razor-thin and usable.
The angle is wrong for intimidation.
The distance is measured for lethality.
Head height. Library window. Clear line of sight.
This was never meant to scare her.
This was meant to end her.
The only thing that stopped it was the glass. The reinforced pane I joked about. The “cheap” window that cracked instead of shattering, that ate the force just enough to flatten the round and drop it harmlessly to the floor.
My hands curl into fists on the edge of the console.
He authorized it.
Markov didn’t test me. He didn’t probe defenses.
He tried to kill my wife.
The thought lands fully now, no abstraction left. Raelyn—pressed against my chest, shaking, breathing me in like I was the only solid thing left in the world—was seconds from dying alone in a library because I underestimated how fast Markov would escalate.