LOGINCHAPTER TWENTY:“Send out the girl and the journalist, Voss, or we turn this mill into your tomb!” Mace’s enforcer’s voice boomed through the megaphone, cold and mocking. Bullets chewed into the rusted machinery around them.Dimitri fired back twice, precise shots that elicited a scream outside. “Over my dead body, you bastard!” He reloaded with lightning speed, eyes blazing. “Lyra, stay low. Elena, if you have any other tricks, now’s the time.”Lyra crouched behind the heavy metal press, the unlocked burner phone burning in her grip. “The files are open—Anna’s folder, the ledger fragments. We can’t let them get this!” Her voice cracked with adrenaline. “Dimitri, your sister’s proof is here. Mace ordered the hit to keep you in line. My father knew it all.”Elena pressed a hand to her bleeding arm, face pale. “He’s right about one thing—we’re trapped. But the phone has a distress beacon. I can activate it, send the data to my secure server. It’ll buy us time if we survive the next five
CHAPTER NINETEEN:A sharp crack split the night—glass shattering somewhere in the distance. Lyra bolted upright in the unfamiliar bed, heart slamming against her ribs. Beside her, Dimitri was already moving, gun in hand before his eyes fully opened. “Stay here,” he ordered, voice like gravel.“Like hell.” She grabbed a robe and followed him into the hallway, bare feet silent on the cool wood. The lake house, which had felt like sanctuary hours ago, now pulsed with danger. June and Theo’s room was two doors down. She veered toward it instinctively.Dimitri caught her arm, grip iron-hard. “Lyra, damn it—”“They’re my blood!” she hissed, wrenching free. “You don’t get to lock me in a tower while your war comes for them.”Another sound—low voices, urgent, from the lower level. Dimitri cursed under his breath and pressed forward, keeping her behind him as they descended the stairs. Viktor met them at the bottom, face grim under the emergency lights.“Perimeter sensor tripped on the east ri
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN:“You don’t get to steal my family from me!” Lyra’s voice cracked like a whip through the marble entryway, raw with fury and terror. “Not June. Not Theo. Not ever, Dimitri. Tell me where they are right now or I swear I’ll burn this entire empire down myself to find them.”Dimitri stood like a statue carved from storm clouds, his broad shoulders rigid under the dim lights. The man who had kissed her so tenderly by the mountain photograph mere hours ago was gone, replaced by the mafia king who commanded fear across half the city. His dark eyes locked onto hers, unflinching, but she caught the flicker—regret, maybe, or the strain of a man unused to explaining himself.“They’re at the lake house on Blackthorn Ridge,” he said, voice low and controlled, each word precise as a loaded gun. “Thirty miles north. Off-grid. My best men—Viktor and his entire team—are guarding them with their lives. No one gets close. I moved them three hours ago the second I learned about the car
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: "They found the storage unit."Lyra's stomach dropped straight through the floor. "How.""I don't know yet. That's what I'm about to find out." Dimitri was already moving, phone still in hand, pulling her along the hallway with a grip that had gone urgent instead of tender. "Get dressed. Now.""Tell me what's happening first.""I will. In the car." He stopped just long enough to look at her, and whatever softness had lived in his face ten minutes ago in front of the mountain photograph was gone, replaced by the version of him that ran a war she'd only started to understand the shape of. "Lyra. Please. Not right now."She went.Twenty minutes later they were in the back of a black SUV, a driver she didn't recognize navigating the pre-dawn streets with a speed that suggested he'd been given very specific instructions about time. Dimitri sat across from her, phone pressed to his ear, voice clipped and low."Tell me exactly what they took." A pause. His jaw tightened.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN:She didn't say anything at first. She just stood there behind him in the dark hallway, close enough to hear him breathing, and let the silence stretch until he was the one who finally broke it."I know you're there," Dimitri said, without turning around. "You're quieter than most people. Not quiet enough.""I wasn't trying to hide.""No." He turned then, and his face in the low lamplight looked older than she'd ever seen it, all the careful architecture of control worn thin. "I don't think you know how to hide anything anymore. Not from me."She came to stand beside him, facing the photograph instead of him — the small wooden house, the smoke curling from the chimney, a life so far removed from marble floors and locked gates that it looked like it belonged to a different man entirely."Tell me," she said. Not a demand this time. Just an opening, the way she'd have left a door ajar for June when she was small and scared and needed permission more than she needed to be
CHAPTER FIFTEEN:"Use me."Dimitri looked up from the ledger like she'd struck him. "What.""You heard me." Lyra stood at the window still, the rose garden dark below, but she'd turned now, and there was a steadiness in her voice that surprised even her. "If Mace wants me to lead him to the ledger, then let him think I'm going to. Give him a reason to come out of hiding. Give your men a chance to end this instead of just reacting to whatever he does next.""No.""You didn't even think about it.""I don't need to think about it." Dimitri closed the ledger, the sound of it sharper than she expected, final. "The answer is no.""That's not your decision to make alone.""It is exactly my decision to make." He stood now too, and the careful distance he usually kept between them had collapsed into something closer, harder, his voice dropping into a register she hadn't heard from him before — not cold, the opposite of cold, something that had heat in it he clearly wasn't used to letting show.







