로그인Nadia's POV The silence was worse than the noise.During the shooting I had something to do with the fear — I could press myself against the wall, I could count the sounds, I could track the movement of footsteps through the ceiling above me and tell myself that as long as I could still hear his men moving it meant things were still being handled. Fear with something to listen to was manageable. Fear with nothing was just fear.When the gunfire stopped I waited. One minute, then two, then five, and the silence stretched and filled with smaller sounds — distant voices, something heavy being moved, a door opening somewhere on the ground floor — and I stood with my hand on the door handle and told myself to wait, he said wait, he said don't open it for anyone except me or Lev and I was going to do exactly that.I lasted eight minutes.Then I opened the door.The corridor outside was empty and dim and smelled like something that made my stomach turn, and I stepped out carefully and looke
Kane's POVThe warning came at half past ten.Three words from the perimeter contact — *He found it* — and before Kane had finished reading the second message was already coming through.*Multiple vehicles. Northeast. Moving fast.*Kane was already on his feet."Lev." One word down the corridor and Lev appeared from the security room within seconds, phone in hand, expression already shifted into the specific focus that meant he'd read the same report. Kane moved past him toward the staircase. "How many.""Four vehicles confirmed. More behind the tree line." Lev fell into step immediately. "They're not slowing down."The first sound reached them before they hit the ground floor — tyres on gravel moving too fast for anything casual, and then the gate alarm, and then shouting from the guards outside, and then the first gunshot split everything open and the house erupted.Kane grabbed Nadia's door on the way past, pushed it open, looked at her — she was already standing, already reading h
Kane's POVHe was on the phone before six.The first call was to the contact who'd flagged his father's man the night before — a brief conversation, specific questions, specific answers. The man had been seen in three locations since landing. Financial district, a restaurant Kane's name was loosely connected to through a business partner, and a hotel two miles from the house. Not close enough to be at the door yet. Close enough to matter.Kane ended the call and made another.Then another.By eight he had a clearer picture and didn't like any of it. His father's man — whose name was Soren, whose reputation Kane knew without ever having dealt with him directly — was thorough in the particular way that came from having done this for a long time and never having been wrong enough to slow down. He didn't make noise. He asked quiet questions of quiet people and assembled the answers into something complete before anyone realized he'd been asking.Kane had maybe thirty hours left. Possibly
Nadia's POVI woke up knowing I was going to open it.Not because I was ready — I wasn't sure ready was something that was going to arrive on its own, wasn't sure I could afford to keep waiting for it. But the envelope had been sitting on the bedside table all night and I'd been aware of it the entire time I'd been pretending to sleep, the way you were aware of something in a room even in the dark, and by the time the morning light came through the curtains I'd run out of reasons to leave it there another day.I sat up slowly. The house was already quiet in the particular way it was when Kane had been up for hours and everyone else had adjusted their pace accordingly. I could hear the distant sound of movement somewhere below, someone in the kitchen, a door opening and closing down the corridor, but my floor was still and my room was still and the envelope was sitting exactly where I'd put it.I picked it up.It was heavier than it looked. Not physically — the paper was thin enough th
He left the study just after midnight.The kitchen was quiet and dark except for the light above the counter. He went to the refrigerator, stood in front of it for a moment without really seeing anything inside it, then reached for something and ate standing at the counter while his phone screen lit up beside him.Lev. Three messages sent across the evening like a conversation he hadn't been present for.*His father's man landed at seven.**Already asking questions in the financial district. Two contacts flagged it within the hour.**48 hours. Possibly less.*He read them once, set the phone face down, and looked at the counter. Forty eight hours. The timeline he'd been managing carefully, the one he'd been certain was his to control, had apparently decided otherwise. He stayed with that for a moment, turning it over, and then noticed the plate sitting covered at the end of the counter exactly where the staff had left it hours ago.Untouched.He looked at it longer than he needed to,
NADIA'S PIV I waited.That was the thing I kept coming back to — I had stood on those stairs and said *tonight, all of it,* and I had meant it, and I had spent the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon sitting with the weight of it, turning the postcard over in my mind, going through everything I thought I knew and measuring it against everything I apparently didn't.I waited through lunch, which I ate alone in the kitchen because the dining room felt too large for just me and whatever I was feeling. I waited through the afternoon, through two chapters of a book I retained nothing from, through the sound of the house moving around me the way it always did, purposeful and quiet and completely unbothered by the fact that my understanding of my own life had shifted somewhere between picking up a jacket and reading seven lines of familiar handwriting.I heard Kane come back sometime around four.I was in the sitting room and I heard the front door and the brief exchange of voices
Nadia's POV---Nobody spoke in the car.Lev drove. Kane sat beside me in the backseat, jaw set, one hand pressed against his side in a way that told me the wound was screaming even if his face wasn't. I watched him do it and said nothing because I had already said everything there was to say and n
Nadia's POV I don't know how long we sat like that. Him in the chair, me on the couch with my face in my hands, the apartment sitting in a silence that had too many things moving underneath it. I was running calculations I didn't want to be running — exits, options, how fast I could get to my pho
Nadia's POV --- Getting him off the ground was its own ordeal. He was heavy in the way that had nothing to do with dead weight — all of it was solid, deliberate, like even his body resisted being helped. He made it to his feet on the second attempt, one hand braced against the car, the other han
Nadia's POV --- "Yuck!" I muttered it under my breath, kicking a pebble off the narrow path as I walked. The shortcut through Delvin Road smelled like wet concrete and bad decisions — which was exactly why I never used it. Except tonight my brain decided to betray me. *Take the short route, Na







