The Uncle and the Ex

ISABELLA

Six red laser sights cut through the settling dust, painting bright, lethal targets across my shoulders and Luca's chest.

Luca stands immovably, arm is fully extended, his grip on his heavy pistol absolutely steady, the barrel aimed dead center at Viktor's forehead.

He doesn’t speak or issue threats. The Ghost of the East Coast simply waits for a reason to pull the trigger.

Marcus is still kneeling on the floor, his breath coming in shallow, pathetic wheezes. Sarah is weeping silently behind the glass desk.

I’m standing in the middle of a war zone, holding the encrypted drive containing my husband's destruction in my left hand, and my own compact handgun in my right.

Viktor ignores the gun pointed at his head. He leans slightly his weight on his silver wolf's-head cane and looks only at me.

"Put the gun down, little bird," Viktor says. His gravelly voice completely calm. "You’re completely out of your depth. You don’t understand the board you just walked onto."

"You’re the one who told me to get ON the board," I reply. My voice remarkably steady, though my heart is slamming against my ribs with enough force to crack bone. "You told me to come back as a queen. And then you followed me here to steal my crown."

Viktor sighs and he taps the silver tip of his cane against the hardwood floor.

"I’m trying to keep you alive, Isabella," Viktor rumbles, his eyes dropping to my right hand. "That gold signet ring on your finger isn’t just a family heirloom. It contains a highly sophisticated cipher. An encrypted code that leads directly to your father's ledger. That book is the only thing keeping the Volkovs from slaughtering every single Romanov loyalist left on the East Coast. Whoever controls the ledger controls our survival."

The revelation hits me with the force of a physical blow, validating exactly what Luca suspected in the freezing cabin.

My father had anchored his most dangerous weapon directly to my body.

Viktor takes a slow step forward, and Luca shifts his aim slightly, tracking the movement, but Viktor doesn’t stop until he’s only a few feet away from me.

"I’ve spent five agonizing years holding this Syndicate together with my bare hands," Viktor says, the aristocratic mask slipping to reveal the raw, bloody exhaustion underneath. "I bled for our territory while you played house in the suburbs. I won’t stand here and watch you hand our family's most powerful weapon over to a Moretti. I won’t let you trade our independence for his protection."

He pauses and he looks at my face, and for half a second, the ruthless mafia underboss vanishes. I see the uncle who sat by my hospital bed when I broke my arm at age ten.

"Please, Isa," Viktor says, his voice actually cracking on the word. "Give me the ring. Let me carry the weight."

It’s the most dangerous kind of manipulation in the world, because it’s entirely rooted in truth.

He genuinely loves me.

He genuinely believes he knows what’s best for me and he’s willing to kill the man standing beside me to prove it.

The victim I used to be would have handed the ring over instantly, desperate to be saved, desperate to let a stronger man carry the burden. But that woman died on the bathroom floor of the Romanov estate.

I lower my handgun toward the floor.

"No," I say clearly.

Viktor's eyes narrow into dangerous, dark slits. The Syndicate enforcers tighten their grips on their assault rifles.

"I’m not giving you the ring, Viktor," I tell him, my voice carrying the absolute freezing void of the ocean below the Moretti fortress. "And I’m not giving it to Luca, either. My father left this legacy to me. Not to his brother. Not to my husband. To me."

I take a step forward, closing the distance between me and my uncle. I’m completely unarmed in this posture, entirely vulnerable, but I’ve never felt more powerful in my entire life.

"I’m going to walk out of this ruined penthouse with the encrypted drive," I state, outlining the terms of my survival. "And you’re going to let me walk out of here alive. In exchange, I’ll give you exactly seventy-two hours. I will decode the ring and find the ledger myself. And if this document is as critical to our family's survival as you claim, then I’ll be the one to decide what happens to it. Not you. Me."

Viktor stares at me. He’s calculating the odds, measuring the tactical risk of initiating a firefight with Luca Moretti in a confined space versus the strategic value of letting me test my own strength.

But more than that, he’s searching my face looking deep into my eyes, searching for the terrified girl who ran away in the rain five years ago.

But he doesn’t find her.

A slow smile spreads across Viktor's scarred face. He sees Alexei staring right back at him.

Viktor raises his left hand and the six enforcers instantly lower their assault rifles.

"Seventy-two hours, little bird," Viktor says, his gravelly voice dropping to a lethal whisper. He turns his back on me and begins walking toward the ruined doorway, his silver cane tapping a steady rhythm against the floor.

He pauses at the threshold of the shattered doors. He looks back over his shoulder.

"Your father would’ve made the exact same play," Viktor says softly. "He would’ve been wrong, too."

He disappears into the dark, smoke-filled hallway. His enforcers follow him in absolute silence, melting away like heavily armed phantoms.

The tension in the room drops, but it doesn’t disappear.

Luca exhales a harsh breath.

"You just bluffed a man who has killed more people than you have ever met," Luca says. His tone is carefully neutral.

I look down at the heavy gold signet ring on my right hand. I feel the crushing weight of the legacy it represents.

"I didn't bluff," I answer quietly, looking back up into his eyes. "I meant every single word."

We leave the penthouse together carrying the encrypted drive that holds the final nails for his coffin without sparring a single glance at the trembling man still kneeling in the shattered glass.

But monsters don’t die quietly in the dark.