All Chapters of A Prey For My Enemy: Chapter 171 - Chapter 180

“Where is my mother, Kain?”The question lingered in the cold, red-drenched archive room, stripping away the remaining armor of my twenty-year career. I looked at Tatiana. The wide, terrified eyes of the girl I had pulled from the drainage pipe were gone, replaced by a fierce, demanding certainty that mirrored her mother’s. I finally realized the truth. I could no longer protect her by withholding the pieces of her broken past. The lies had run their course, and the fortress of secrecy I had built around her had officially collapsed.“Everyone out,” I said, my voice dropping into a low, rumbling cadence that tolerated no argument. I turned my head slightly, my eyes locking onto Julian and Mikhail. “Leave the room. I will speak to Tatiana alone.”Julian didn't move an inch. He crossed his arms over his chest, his jaw set in a rigid, defiant line under the crimson light. “I’m not leaving her with you, Kain. Not after what we just saw on that screen.”I stepped directly into his space, my

The words hit the room like a dropped glass.Because he was the one who took me.No one moved. Mikhail's hand had gone still on the back of his chair, knuckles pale. Julian leaned against the doorframe with the stillness of a man who had been waiting years for exactly this sentence. And Kain—Kain didn't move at all.That was the worst part. He didn't flinch. He didn't deny it. He just stood there, jaw tight, eyes fixed on some point behind her mother's shoulder as though he were watching the years rearrange themselves and found nothing in the new shape surprising."No." Tatiana heard herself say it before she'd decided to. "No, that's not— he wouldn't—""Tatiana." Her mother's voice was quiet. Too quiet. The voice of a woman who had rehearsed this moment in a dark room for years. "I'm telling you what happened.""You told me he took you. Took is not the same as rescued. Say what you mean.""Tatiana—""Say what you mean, or don't say anything at all." Her hands were shaking. She put t

For three seconds, no one spoke.The monitor sat black and blank in front of them, and Mikhail was already working—keys clicking, feeds cycling, his jaw set in a way she had never seen before. He had guarded embassies. He had guarded ministers. He had, she realized, never once looked afraid in front of her until this exact moment."Backup feeds," Kain said."Dead. All of them, at the same second." Mikhail didn't look up. "This wasn't a cut. This was someone walking in through the front door with the house's own keys. There's only one set of core codes, Kain. One."No one said yours. No one needed to."How long until the car reaches the house," Tatiana said."Two minutes." Mikhail's hands had stopped. He turned in his chair. "Tatiana. Listen to me. We don't know what this is. But an old man who is supposed to be broken and a woman who is supposed to be dead do not drive through a security shutdown at midnight to pay a social call. I want you out of this corridor. There's a passage behi

The plastic receiver felt heavier than lead in my hand, the analog static scratching against my ear like a persistent hum. I couldn't move. I couldn't breathe. The name the caller had just spoken hung in the narrow space between my thoughts, vibrating with a terrifying, absolute clarity.Julian.For several seconds, my brain flatly refused to process it. My eyes drifted slowly away from the ancient rotary phone on the desk and locked onto the man standing just a few feet away from me. Julian was right there. He was inside the clinic. He was drenched in the same rain, breathing the same stagnant air, and tracking the same ghosts. I looked at the sharp, aristocratic lines of his profile and realized the caller could not possibly be talking about someone else. The trust I had placed in him—the belief that he was the only clean element in a world corrupted by my father and Kain—evaporated in a single heartbeat.Julian immediately noticed the shift in my expression. His eyes narrowed, his p

Nobody spoke for a full second.Then Mikhail was moving, and Kain was moving, and Tatiana was on her feet before she'd decided anything at all, her hand already inside her jacket where the photographs lay."Nobody leaves this kitchen," Kain said, low and absolute, and the order was for the room at large, but his eyes were on the old man."I haven't moved from this chair in ten minutes," the old man said mildly, raising one spotted hand from the tabletop. "And neither has she." The woman beside him had gone rigid, her gray-green eyes fixed on the dark doorway, and there was something in her face Tatiana had not seen there yet. Not fear. Recognition, maybe, of a sound she knew."Mikhail," Tatiana said. "With me. Kain stays.""Tatiana—""Kain stays with them. If either of them moves, he knows what to do." She was already in the corridor, the lamp from the kitchen throwing her shadow long and thin ahead of her. "That creak came from Madam's room. The room no