All Chapters of THE COST OF SAVING HIM : Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

102 Chapters

"BRING HER TO ME"

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

THEIR HOUSE WAS RAIDED

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

HE DIDN'T LET ME TOUCH HIM

Nadia'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 GOT MAD AT ME

Nadia's POVLev had left the door open when he went back out, which I took as permission even though it probably wasn't.I stayed in the room for another twenty minutes, listening to the sounds of the house settling around the aftermath — voices, movement, the doctor's instructions carrying down the corridor in clipped professional sentences — and then I got up because sitting was making everything worse and doing nothing had never been something I was built for.The corridor outside was quieter than the main hallway. I moved through it carefully and found what I was looking for almost immediately — one of Kane's guards sitting against the wall near the east entrance, one hand pressed to his upper arm, his jacket dark with blood that had been seeping long enough to suggest nobody had gotten to him yet. He looked up when he heard my footsteps."Miss Nadia—""Don't," I said, crouching in front of him. "Let me see."He pulled back immediately, which told me the injury hurt more than he w

"YOU'RE MINE"

Nadia's POVGetting Kane back to the room was easier than getting him to stay in it.He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the phone on the bedside table and I moved it before he could reach for it, which earned me a look that would have been more effective if he hadn't been holding his side with both hands."That's mine," he said."I know." I put it on the table across the room. "You can have it back when you're lying down."He looked at the table across the room. Then at me. "Nadia.""Kane."He held my gaze for a moment, then looked at the ceiling like it had done something to offend him, and I pulled the chair close to the bed and sat and looked at the bandaging the doctor had done. Clean, well applied, but he'd been walking around on it which wasn't what it needed."Lie back," I said."I'm fine sitting.""You were holding a wall ten minutes ago.""That was ten minutes ago."I looked at him. He looked back with the specific expression he used when he'd decided something and w

HIS FATHER SHOWED UP

Kane's POVHe woke up at five.The room was still dark and quiet and Nadia was asleep in the chair beside the bed, her legs pulled up underneath her, her head tilted against the side of the cushion at an angle that was going to hurt her neck when she woke up. Her breathing was slow and even and she looked younger when she slept, which he noticed and didn't examine.He looked at the ceiling for a while.His side hurt, which was expected, and his phone was across the room, which was also expected because she'd put it there and she'd been right to and he was still going to need it. He looked at it. Looked at the distance between the bed and the table it was sitting on. Looked at Nadia.He decided to get it himself.This was, immediately, a bad decision.The first movement was fine — shifting his weight, getting his legs over the side of the bed, sitting upright. The second movement, which involved actually standing, produced a sensation that he was not going to describe to anyone and tha

FINALLY DISOWNED

Kane's POVHis father arrived at seven forty-three.Kane was in the study when Lev appeared in the doorway. "He's here.""Send him in."He stayed standing behind the desk, one hand pressed briefly against his side before he removed it. The door opened and his father walked in and didn't look at Kane immediately — just looked around the study, at the boarded window visible through the corridor, at the state of the walls, at the evidence of last night laid out like a verdict. Then he looked at Kane.He didn't greet him.He crossed the room and sat in the chair across the desk with the expression of someone who had arrived somewhere that had confirmed exactly what they'd expected to find, and the disgust in it wasn't loud or performed — it was the quiet settled kind, the kind that had been sitting there for a while and had finally found a face to wear.Kane looked back at him and waited."I warned you," his father said. His voice was level and cold in equal measure. "I told you what woul

NORMAL LIFE

Nadia's POVThe market was loud and warm and smelled like fried dough and something citrusy from a stall nearby, and I stood in the middle of it for a moment after we arrived and just breathed.People everywhere. Moving, talking, arguing prices, laughing at nothing, existing completely unbothered by anything outside the radius of their own morning. A woman haggled loudly over tomatoes. Two children ran between stalls while someone called after them without real urgency. A man balanced an impossible number of bags on both arms and still somehow managed to check his phone.Normal. Completely, unremarkably, beautifully normal.I hadn't realized how much I'd missed it until it was standing around me all at once.Lev walked beside me at a pace that matched mine, hands in his pockets, scanning without making it obvious he was scanning — something I'd noticed he did everywhere, the permanent low-level vigilance that never fully switched off. But he wasn't tense. If anything he looked almost

"STAY"...

Nadia's POVThe drive back took longer than the drive out, partly because Lev took a different route and partly because I kept asking him to slow down near certain streets.The city looked different in the early evening — the light doing something warm and golden to everything it touched, the buildings casting long shadows across roads that were starting to quiet down from the day. I had my phone out before I'd consciously decided to, taking pictures through the window the way I used to do when I was in school and had nowhere important to be and the whole city felt like something that belonged to me.A street market packing up for the evening. An old building with peeling paint and a bright green door that looked like it had been there since before anyone currently alive could remember. Two boys sitting on a wall sharing something between them, not talking, just existing. I photographed all of it.Lev glanced at me once in the mirror and said nothing, which was its own kind of permiss

FURIOUS

Kane's POVHe left before six.Nadia was still asleep when he eased off the bed, carefully, his side pulling at the movement in the way it had been doing since yesterday. He stood for a moment, looked at her, then picked up his jacket from the chair and left the room without waking her.Lev was already in the car. Of course he was.The drive to the office took twenty minutes in early morning traffic and Kane spent it looking out the window and thinking about the safe, about the files, about what his father's reach had actually extended to and what it hadn't. He'd built things independently — accounts, structures, contacts — that predated the family involvement and should have been untouchable.Should have been.The building came into view and he looked at it from the car the way he always did — assessing, reading it, looking for anything that wasn't where it should be. Everything looked normal from the outside. The lobby, the security desk, the elevators. Staff moved through the morni

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