He crossed the room slowly, eyes narrowing as they flicked toward the study door, which was still closed, lights off, exactly as he’d left it. “Early night for you to be wandering around. You’ve been… quiet lately. Jumpy. If there’s something you’re not telling me, Anja…”
He let the unfinished threat hang between us, heavy with all the ways he could make my prison feel smaller. His hand lifted, hovering near my cheek, not quite touching but close enough to remind me he could.
I leaned into the space instead, letting my forehead rest against his chest the way I used to when I still believed he was my savior. The move felt calculated now, practiced.
“I'm... I’m just tired, Fadir. That’s all. Thinking about… my past, my future again. What if I have to crawl back there? Everyone knowing I failed… it scares me. I hate feeling like I have nothing left.”
Vulnerability. The one card he always fell for. He loved being the strong one who kept me from that fate. His posture softened instantly, arms coming around me in that familiar possessive hold, fingers stroking my hair.
“Shh. You’re not going anywhere. This is your home now. I’ve got you, baby. No one’s taking you from me.” His voice dropped into the soothing register he used when he thought he was being kind. “Go back to bed. I’ll bring you some tea in a minute.”
I nodded against his shirt, relief crashing through me so hard my knees nearly buckled. He bought it.
Barely.
One more minute in that study, and he would have walked in on me at the laptop. One suspicious glance at the screen and everything would have ended that night, and probably with his hand raised the way it finally was in the warehouse.
I slipped back into the guest room on trembling legs and hid the USB inside an old tampon box at the back of the bathroom cabinet. Somewhere he would never look. Then I lay awake until dawn, staring at the ceiling, the fear still coiled tight in my chest like a living thing.
He had brought me the tea he promised, and his eyes were full of suspicion. But I quickly feigned being tired, and he left me alone.
I hadn't realized how close I had come to possibly the end of my life that night.
Now, months later, I sit in Alexey’s quiet library, the same USB drive already doing its work somewhere in the system. Justice unfolding in clean, surgical lines instead of panicked midnight thefts.
I close the book on my lap and press my fingers to my eyes.
The fear from that night still lingers under my skin, a bruise that hasn’t fully faded. But so does the quiet thrill of knowing I am the one who started pulling the threads that are unraveling Fadir’s entire world right now.
Across the hall, the man who actually pulled me out of that situation sleeps behind a closed door, never once crossing the line we drew.
Some nights, that feels more dangerous than any suspicion Fadir ever carried.
***
I know that giving Alexey the USB with Fadir’s information pleased him and perhaps earned him more trust.
He has not said much when I slid the small black drive across the marble island this morning. He remained quiet.
“This changes everything,” and a nod of approval that felt heavier than any praise. But I saw the shift in his eyes. The tension in his shoulders eased fractionally. The way he looked at me a little longer, a little softer, as if I had handed him not just data, but proof that I am truly on his side.
Yet every time my phone rings and I don’t answer, I see the weariness and mistrust flicker across his face.
It happens in small, quiet moments. During our late-night strategy sessions, when the phone vibrates on the table, I silence it without looking. In the kitchen, when an unknown number flashes on the screen, I slip the phone into my pocket as if it burns my fingers.
Alexey never asks outright, but I catch the raised eyebrow, the slight tightening of his jaw, and the way his browneyes linger on me a second too long… as if he’s calculating, assessing, and wondering.
I know I need to tell him about the calls. About the people behind them.
My father’s debts, and those who still hunt for Viktor Kuzmin’s daughter because they believe she can pay what he owes. The bookies and sketchy friends who somehow always find my number, no matter how many times I change it. The voicemails filled with threats, guilt trips, and desperate pleas for money that make my stomach twist with shame.
I need to tell Alexey.
But every time the words rise in my throat, fear chokes them back down.
What if he considers me a problem? A weakness? What if the steady patience he has shown me, the quiet respect when I offer intel, the way he says, “When you’re ready,” and actually means it, finally cracks under the weight of my messy past?
I am already the disheveled woman who brought nothing but baggage into his world. The girl whose father’s gambling almost got her sold off at eighteen. The woman who once lived with the enemy he is trying to destroy.
