That mistake will not repeat.
I mark the frame. Export the clip. Send it to Lev, Roman, and Dimitri with one line attached.
Confirmed. His sniper.
I lean back slowly, eyes never leaving the frozen image of the man in the trees.
My fury doesn’t burn hot anymore.
It crystallizes.
“This,” I murmur to the empty room, voice steady as ice, “is what you chose.”
Markov wanted war.
Now he gets precision.
I leave the surveillance room and move back toward the bedroom.
The door is unlocked. Raelyn is sitting on the side of the bed, hair damp from a shower, sweater soft against her skin. Despite the smile she gives me, her eyes are wide, still raw from shock. The sight hits me harder than any bullet ever could.
I kneel in front of her—the same man who has knelt before no one—and take her hands gently in mine. My voice comes out rough, foreign even to me.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I should have anticipated this. I should have protected you better. You shouldn’t have been alone when they came.”
She shakes her head slightly, breath trembling. “I don’t want apologies,” she murmurs. Her voice is fragile, but there’s steel beneath it. “I want the truth. I want you to tell me something that really matters.”
I hold her gaze, feeling the weight of her demand, and for the first time in hours, the calculated edge of the world outside blurs. Maybe she’s right. It’s time I tell her something substantial. She’s already been through a lot.
“Your father wasn’t just investigating Markov,” I say. My thumbs move over her knuckles, grounding myself as much as her. “He uncovered a coded list. Intelligence leaks threaded through multiple criminal networks. Names, transfers, moles. The kind of information that doesn’t just ruin empires; it rewrites them.”
Her fingers tense in mine.
“He believed someone inside Markov’s circle was selling intelligence to other syndicates. Markov believed your father passed the list on before he disappeared.” I hold her eyes. “That’s why they’re circling you. Not because you know something. But because they think you might.”
The silence that follows is brutal.
I watch it hit her—the devastation first, then the fury. Her jaw tightens. Her eyes shine, sharp and wet.
“So that’s it,” she says hoarsely. “You married me to contain the threat.”
I don’t flinch. “Yes.”
The word lands between us like a gunshot.
Her breath stutters. “You used me.”
“I protected you,” I say immediately—and then stop. I shake my head once. “No. I did both. And you deserve to hear that.”
She pulls her hands back, standing abruptly. “You don’t get points for honesty after the fact.”
“I know,” I say quietly.
She turns on me. “So what am I to you, Konstantin? A liability? A lockbox with legs?”
Something in my chest breaks clean open.
“I would have taken you for myself,” I say. The words are out before I can stop them. “Even without the debt. Even without your father.”