The ones who beg and grovel and piss themselves when death comes calling. My father beat that weakness out of me by the time I was twelve. Tied me to a chair in the basement and mademe watch him gut a traitor, told me if I looked away, he'd do the same to me.
Real strength is facing death without flinching.
Valerie Novak is a coward. I saw it in every trembling breath, every stammered excuse, every sob that tore out of her throat when I pressed the Glock to her forehead. Pathetic. The kind of weakness that makes my skin crawl.
But then.
For one second, she wasn't groveling, and that's the second that interests me. I also noticed another anomaly the moment something shifted in her.
The instant she stopped begging.
It wasn’t courage. Not the clean kind. It was something colder, something that comes from surviving a violence you didn’t deserve and learning that pleading only entertains the predator.
One breath she was shaking. The next, her eyes went flat, like a switch flipped behind them.
Pull the trigger and explain to your daughter why there’s a corpse in your bathroom.
That wasn’t a maid talking.
That was a person who’s seen death up close and decided she’d rather bite than cry.
I don’t like surprises.
I like them even less when they show up inside my house wearing a uniform and a terrified smile.
I finish buttoning my shirt and stare at the door like I can still see her silhouette on the wet marble.
Who put you here, little mouse?
Who the fuck are you really?
I head to my office, mind circling the problem like a predator scenting blood.
My office is soundproofed, reinforced, and designed for war. Steel and mahogany desk. Computer system with encryptionthat costs more than most people make in a year. Filing cabinets that require fingerprint access. This is where I run an empire worth half a billion dollars.
And where I'm about to dig into a girl who shouldn't be here.
Her file is clean. Too clean.
Valerie Novak. Twenty-two. Columbia graduate. Father Viktor Novak, deceased two weeks ago—home invasion, robbery gone wrong according to the police report. Mother Anna, brother Ethan. Middle-class family from Brighton Beach. No criminal record. No suspicious associations. Marina Petrov's agency personally vetted her.
Everything checks out perfectly, which is exactly the problem.
In my world, nothing is ever this perfect unless someone scrubbed it that way.
She shouldn't have gotten through my vetting process. Shouldn't have ended up in my private bathroom on her first day unless someone wanted her there.
Someone sent her.
I pull up the security footage from today and watch her arrive. Daniel drops her at the entrance, and she's barely holding it together—gripping her bag like a shield, hands shaking when Sofia greets her. During the tour, she keeps digging her nails into her palms, eyes going distant like she's somewhere else entirely.
Fresh grief, probably. Her father died two weeks ago. That kind of trauma makes people sloppy.
But then I watch her slip away during her break, and the nervous girl disappears.
She moves through the house with purpose, heading straight for the east wing like she knows exactly where she's going. Tries three locked doors before finding mine. No hesitation. No second-guessing.
She wasn't lost.
