“Yes, but we couldn’t catch the plates in the footage.”
“We’re going to get them anyway,” I say. “My men are already on it. But could you see who actually took them?”
She hesitates, and something in her face changes. Not grief this time. Something worse.
“Yes,” she says quietly. “One of them was the same guard who stopped me yesterday.”
My body goes still.
For a second I don’t say anything.
I can actually feel the fear move through me, cold and immediate. I look back at the front door of the house and then at her again. “You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
That one word is enough.
I drag a hand over my mouth and feel the old instinct rise hard in me, the one that says move now, hit first, tear the whole place apart until I know exactly how close Andrei’s gotten and who opened the gate for him.
And for the first time in a long time, the thought doesn’t make me angry first.
It makes me afraid. Not for me. For her. For Nikolai and Sofia.
For my children.
It hurts to breathe. I open the passenger door. “Get in.”
She catches my wrist before I can step away. “There’s something else.”
I look at her.
“My father told me what happened in Moscow.”
I stare at her for one beat too long.
Not because I care more about Moscow than the twins. Because suddenly both things are sitting in the same room with us. The old wound and the new one, my past and present colliding, my actions come to haunt me again.
“What did he say?”
Her face hardens through the tears. “That he passed the information. That he started it. That he let the blame fall on you.”
I look back at the house and start toward the steps.
She grabs me with both hands. “No. Roman, please.” Her grip tightens. “Please. Not now. I need my children.”
I look at her. Really look at her.
She’s terrified, shaking, barely holding herself upright, and still she’s the one stopping me from walking back into that house and doing exactly what every instinct in me wants.
Because she knows what I know now too—if I go in there for Sergei, I lose time. And right now, time belongs to the twins.
I force myself to breathe.
Then I turn away from the house.
“All right,” I say.
She closes her eyes for half a second in relief.
