"Hi."
Her face does something complicated and enormous, everything she's been holding compressed into one expression, and then she's out of the chair, careful, her hands on my face so gently I barely feel them.
"You scared me," she breathes. "You scared me so badly."
"I know." I turn my face slightly into her palm. "I'm here, I’m sorry."
"You lost consciousness." Her thumb traces my jaw. "You were — they wouldn't let me stay in the room when they were working on you, and I had to sit outside, and I couldn't—" She stops. Pulls in a breath. "I counted the ceiling tiles. Did you know there are forty-seven ceiling tiles in that waiting room?"
"I didn't know that." I try to smile and end up wincing.
"Forty-seven." Her eyes are bright, dangerously so. "I counted them four times to make sure."
I reach up and cover her hand with mine, holding it against my face. She turns her palm, laces her fingers through mine, and grips. Hard, like she's anchoring something.
"How are you? The baby? I ask.
"Fine. We're both fine." The brightness in her eyes spills over, one tear tracking quickly down her cheek that she ignores entirely. "Doctor checked. Everything's fine."
The thing compressed in my chest loosens by degrees.
"Sit down," I tell her. "You look like you've been awake for thirty hours."
"Twenty-two." She sits on the edge of the bed instead of the chair, close enough that her hip presses against my arm. "And I'm not moving to that chair, so don't suggest it."
Viktor appears in the doorway. He takes in Aurora on the bed, my hand still holding hers, and has the rare good sense to say nothing about it.
"You look terrible," he says to me instead.
"Thank you, Viktor." I roll my eyes.
"Blood loss will do that." He comes in, closes the door behind him, pulls the chair Aurora abandoned to the opposite side of the bed, and sits. He looks like he hasn't slept either. The lines around his eyes are deeper than usual. "How much do you want to know right now?"
"Everything."
He glances at Aurora.
"Everything," she says, before I can.
Viktor looks at her for a moment. Then nods.
"The attack was the Volkovs," he says. "We confirmed it from the men we took alive. Coordinated, well-funded, better equipped than anything they've moved against us before." He pauses, and something in the pause has weight to it. "They had inside help. Detailed inside help. Floor plans, security rotations, your location, the blind spots in the perimeter. Everything."
I already know what's coming. Some part of me has known since we found out that none of the forty people who had access was the traitor.
"Leo," I whisper, hoping I was wrong.
Viktor doesn't flinch. Just holds my eyes. "Yes."
I stare at the ceiling, and I let the truth sit there, and I feel it do what it does — moving through me slow and thorough, the way deep cold moves through a body, getting into the places you can't insulate. I raised that boy. Fed him. Put him in good schools, kept his name clean, gave him my own name when he had nothing. Watched him grow up. Watched him become something I didn't recognize and told myself it was fixable.
All that time, he was doing this.
"How long?" My voice comes out level.
"The financial trail Aurora found goes back eight months. But we think he was talking to the Volkovs before that. Before your release." Viktor's hands rest on his knees, still. "He had it planned before you even came home."
Eight months. Before I was even out of prison.