MasukNikolai’s POV“Are you going to speak to her?” Clara asked, her voice trembling slightly as Camille’s smiling face remained frozen on the digital terminal display.“Answering her directly gives away our exact operational layer,” I replied, my fingers already moving across the mechanical keys to isolate the connection. “I am shutting down the video feed right now.”“She cracked our encryption in less than ten minutes, Nikolai,” Clara noted, leaning over the console as the screen flickered back to black. “If she knows we are alive, she knows we are using Marcus’s network.”“She does not know where we are physically sitting,” I said, typing a rapid series of trace commands into the terminal. “She used a brute-force broadcast signal to hit every active ghost server in the central district. She was fishing for a response. I am tracking the return packets of the data stream right now to see exactly how she routed the override.”“Can you find her specific terminal?” Clara asked.“I just did,
Clara’s POV“Turn the volume up, Nikolai,” I said, my eyes pinned to the large flat screen television on the apartment wall.“There is no point in listening to more of her lies,” Nikolai replied, though his hand moved to the remote control and increased the sound anyway.“Look at what she is wearing,” I whispered, my fingers tightening against the back of the leather sofa. “That is a midnight black velvet dress from the Autumn collection of Maison Valois. Victor bought that exact custom piece for me three months ago for the foundation gala. He kept it in the private vault at the estate.”“She cleared out your closets along with the bank accounts,” Nikolai said, his voice flat and dangerous as he sat at his server terminal.“It is not just the dress,” I said, shaking my head as Camille continued her smooth address to the rows of reporters. “Look at her posture. Look at the way she handles the press core. She is completely calm. She does not look like a woman who just lost her husband a
Clara’s POV“She is finally stable, Clara, you can step away from the bed now,” the private medical practitioner murmured, dropping his soiled latex gloves into a plastic disposal bin.“Are you completely sure the sedatives are entirely out of her system?” I asked, my hands gripped tightly around the smooth metal railing of the medical bed.“The intravenous flush worked perfectly,” he replied, adjusting the dial on the saline drip hanging beside her pillow. “The violent tremors have completely subsided, and her temperature is back to a normal baseline. She just needs uninterrupted sleep now. Marcus paid me very well to ensure she received the exact chemical blockers she required.”“Thank you, Doctor,” I whispered, watching the slow, rhythmic rise and fall of my mother’s chest.Marcus had kept his word down to the very last detail. Within an hour of Nikolai’s meeting at the meatpacking plant, a secure black transport car had pulled into the alleyway behind the rail yard to pick us up.
Nikolai’s POV“Are you certain this terminal is completely untraceable?” Clara asked, her voice tight as she leaned over my shoulder, her fingers gripping the back of my desk chair.“Marcus swore his tech team scrubs these routing lines every thirty seconds,” I said, my fingers flying across the mechanical keyboard. “If the city grid detects even a single packet of data leaving this room, the entire system kills the power automatically.”“Then crack it open,” she whispered, her breath warm against my neck. “We have been sitting in this luxury apartment for twelve hours doing nothing but watching the rain. I need to know what happened to the company after the fire.”“I am bypass the security firewalls right now,” I muttered, tapping the enter key with a sharp click. “The main mainframe for the Novarion Group uses a dual layer authentication protocol. Victor built it himself to keep the board of directors from snooping into his private holdings. But he forgot that he showed me the maste
Nikolai’s POV“If you walk out that door, you are giving them our exact location,” Clara said, her hand tight on my wrist as I pulled away from the damp wall.“Hiding in this dark hole will get us killed much faster than Victor’s men ever could,” I replied, shaking her grip loose. “Your mother is burning up with a fever and we are out of options.”“You are still limping, Nikolai,” she whispered, looking down at my left leg. “The moment you step onto the main street, you are a target.”“Watch me,” I said.I took a deep breath, forcing my weight down onto my left heel. A sharp, burning pain shot straight up my thigh from the deep muscle bruising I took at the shipyard, but I locked my jaw and clamped down on the agony. I smoothed out my stride, stepping forward into the dim light of the flashlight without a single trace of a limp. It took every single ounce of my willpower to keep my posture perfectly straight, but I could not afford to look weak to anyone on the surface.“Stay with you
Clara’s POV“Hold her shoulders down, Clara, she is going to bite through her tongue!” Nikolai shouted, his boots sliding against the slick, damp concrete floor as he lunged forward.“I am trying!” I yelled back, my palms slipping against my mother’s cold, sweat-slicked skin. “Mama, look at me! You need to breathe. Just breathe!”Her teeth clicked together in violent, rhythmic clicks, her entire body shaking under the thin, stolen gray wool blankets we managed to scavenge from a dumpster behind a rail yard. The clinic in the upper district had kept her pumped full of heavy, medical-grade sedatives for months to keep her compliant. Now, going cold turkey in this pitch-black hole was throwing her nervous system into a catastrophic spiral.“We need real heat,” Nikolai growled, his knuckles white as he pressed his weight against her knees to stop the violent muscle spasms. “She is freezing from the inside out.”“Look around us, Nikolai. There is no heat here,” I said, a wave of bitter re
POV: CLARAVictor stood in the driveway, his hands moving over every inch of the new vintage car he had bought that morning. “This thing is perfect,” he said. “Nikolai, you and Clara take it for a full test drive to the valley and back. I have a conference call starting in five minutes and I need t
POV: ClaraThe greenhouse smelled of damp earth and rot, a heavy scent that stuck to the back of my throat. It was supposed to be a sanctuary, a glass-walled escape from the marble and steel of the mansion, but even here the air felt thin.I found my mother sitting on a stone bench, her hands folde
Clara's POVThe black SUV pulled up the circular driveway, and my stomach performed a slow, agonizing flip. My parents stepped out, looking so small against the backdrop of the Draven estate.My mother looked even more slender than the last time I had seen her, her kind face was etched with that pe
POV: Nikolai The beach at six in the morning was grey and flat, the tide pulling back from the sand in long, slow sheets.Victor walked ahead, hands behind his back, talking. Quinn kept pace beside him, nodding at the right intervals. I walked a half step behind them both, which was where Victor p







