Chapter 6: The Bride Under Watch

POV: Arsen Dragunov

Arsen stared at the photograph on his screen until the image stopped looking like Dora at all and started looking like a puzzle piece he didn't yet understand.

He didn't ask himself why she had been there. That question could wait. What mattered more, what made the muscles along his jaw tighten until they ached, was the angle.

He zoomed in, studying the perspective of the shot, the slight downward tilt, the distance.

"Nikolai." His voice came out low, controlled in the way that made people in his organization move faster than shouting ever could.

Nikolai appeared in the doorway within seconds. "Sir."

"This photograph." Arsen turned the screen toward him. "Where was it taken from."

Nikolai leaned in, studying the image with the practiced eye of a man who had spent a decade reading crime scenes for a living. His expression shifted slowly from professional focus to something closer to alarm.

"That's the rooftop above Aldrich Street." He straightened. "That's inside our secured perimeter, sir. That location has been monitored around the clock since the Council announcement."

"So someone stood on a rooftop my own men are supposed to be watching," Arsen said, "and took a photograph of Dora protecting my future wife, and none of my people noticed."

Nikolai's throat moved. "I'll pull the surveillance logs myself."

"Do that." Arsen's voice stayed flat, but something colder moved beneath it. "And Nikolai."

"Sir?"

"Tell no one else about this. Not the security team. Not the Council liaison. No one."

Nikolai hesitated only a fraction of a second before nodding and leaving the room, and Arsen was alone again with the photograph still glowing on his screen, Dora's blood-streaked sleeve, Sera's half-shadowed face, and a question that refused to settle.

Someone had gotten inside his walls without tripping a single alarm.

For fifteen years, Arsen had built those walls brick by brick, layer by layer, until he genuinely believed nothing could reach him that he hadn't allowed to reach him first. He had told himself that control was the only thing standing between him and the boy who ran through a tunnel while his parents burned behind him.

Now someone had walked straight through that control like it was nothing at all.

The second package arrived less than an hour later.

No return address. No courier record, exactly like the first. Arsen's hands didn't shake this time when he opened it, though something in his chest went very still the moment he saw what was inside.

A silver wolf pendant, small enough to fit in his palm, its surface worn with age in a way that couldn't be faked or manufactured.

He knew that pendant. He had seen its twin every night for fifteen years, sitting untouched on his nightstand, the only piece of his mother he had left.

His fingers closed around the new one slowly, carefully, as though it might dissolve if he moved too fast.

No note this time. No explanation. Just the pendant, resting in a small velvet cloth, delivered by someone who apparently had no trouble reaching him at all.

Arsen sat with it for a long time before he called security.

"I want a full investigation," he said, once his head of security answered. "Every camera. Every delivery log. Every face that came within a hundred meters of this building in the last twenty four hours."

"Understood, sir. What am I looking for?"

Arsen looked down at the pendant resting in his palm and made a decision he wouldn't fully explain even to himself. "You're looking for whoever is getting through my security. That's all you need to know."

He didn't mention the pendant. He told himself it was strategy, that revealing it would only invite more questions he wasn't ready to answer, that the fewer people who knew about this the better he could control what happened next. He almost believed it.

The truth sat closer to the surface than he wanted to admit. That pendant belonged to a part of him nobody in this life had ever been allowed to touch. Not his men. Not the Council. Not anyone.

Someone had reached through fifteen years of walls and found the one thing he had never let go of.

He didn't sleep that night either. Instead, sometime past two in the morning, he found himself opening a different file entirely, one that had nothing to do with the pendant or the rooftop or the photograph.

Sera's security file.

He told himself it was necessary. The Council expected the marriage to proceed. If enemies were already targeting her, he needed to understand every vulnerability before the wedding, every weakness someone might exploit. That was simply due diligence. Any competent leader would do the same.

He read every page anyway. Not just the security assessments.

Her medical history, Her travel patterns, A brief note about her late husband, clinical and cold, the kind of entry written by someone who had never bothered to ask what those ten years had actually cost her.

He lingered longest on a photograph attached near the back, taken at some function years ago, Sera standing slightly apart from a crowd with an expression that didn't match the smile on her face.

He recognized that expression. He had seen it in mirrors more times than he could count.

He closed the file eventually, telling himself again that this had only been strategy, and turned his attention back to the pendant sitting on the desk beside him.

That was when he noticed it.

Fresh scratches along the surface, thin and recent, the kind that came from a clasp being opened and closed repeatedly. Not damage from age. Damage from use.

Someone had been wearing this pendant. Recently. Often.

Arsen's chest tightened as the implications settled in, cold and unwelcome, refusing to resolve into anything he could name yet.

A knock interrupted him before he could follow the thought any further.

His chief of security stood in the doorway, and Arsen knew immediately from the man's posture that whatever he had come to say wasn't going to be easy to hear.

"Boss." The man's voice was tight, careful. "We found another body."

Arsen set the pendant down slowly. "Where."

"Two blocks from the alley where the attack on Miss De Luca happened last night." He shifted his weight, clearly reluctant to continue.

"One of the men from the crew that hit her. We think his own people silenced him before he could talk."

"And?"

The man hesitated again, longer this time, long enough that Arsen felt the pause settle into his spine like a warning.

"The victim's last words were."

He paused once more, choosing the next sentence carefully, as though saying it out loud might make it more real than it already was.

"Protect the bride."