Page 71 of His Contract Queen

Every hour that drags on without her tightens the noose around my neck, strangling me until breathing feels impossible.

I pace the length of my office because stopping will only allow my thoughts to consume me further.

Early this morning, my intelligence network confirmed she had been taken back to her childhood home the night of the gala. Military personnel have been on a twenty-four-hour rotation guarding every centimeter of that property. No further movement has been recorded since then.

I have stared at that line of information so many times, the words feel etched behind my eyelids. Every instinct I possess screams at me to storm that estate, tear the gates from their hinges, and rip through every guard standing between me and her. The urge is primal, violent, almost animal in its intensity.

Deep down beneath the rage clawing its way through my chest, I know going in without a plan would be suicide. Not just for me, but for her. For any man foolish enough to follow me throughthose gates. As much as I despise admitting it, Ramil Borchin may be a coward, but he is not an idiot. Men like him survive as long as they do because they understand exactly how cruel they need to be when cornered. If he even suspects I am closing in on him, he will kill her without hesitation.

The thought makes my teeth grind together hard enough that my jaw aches.

Without the Iron Pact behind me—without the distraction of political pressure and the weight of their combined influence bearing down on him long enough for me to slip inside that estate and pull her out—my hands are tied.

For the first time in years, power means absolutely nothing.

Money cannot fix this. Fear cannot force my opponent to bend to my will. Reputation will not scare him into complying. He has nothing left to lose.

Every hour I do nothing feels like parts of me are being carved away, another piece of her slipping further out of reach. The longer she remains under his control locked behind those walls, stripped of the protection my name once offered her, the more the distance between us begins to morph into something permanent.

I miss her.

Horribly.

Worst of all, I cannot stop replaying our last conversation.

Trying to shield her from the truth of who and what the Iron Pact is had seemed like the logical choice at the time. Keeping her outside of it and away from the men who decide the fate of entireregions with only a few carefully chosen words had felt like the only way to keep her safe.

Especially from Malyshko.

I told myself that keeping her in the dark was a mercy. That if she remained far enough from the Pact’s orbit, she would never have to see the parts of my life that have the greatest potential to swallow people whole and never let them see the light of day.

Ineverintended to hurt her.

But the thought that our argument might be the last words we ever spoke to each other cuts deeper than any blade I’ve ever felt sink into my flesh. I would give up almost anything to undo it and erase the bitterness from that moment to replace it with something else.

Before all of this, I have always known my life would most likely end abruptly,violently, sooner rather than later. That is the cost of the position I hold and the choices I have made to maintain it. There would be no point in deluding myself otherwise. Growing up in this world strips that illusion away early. You either accept the inevitable or spend your life pretending it won’t happen to you and being surprised when death finally catches up.

Now, the possibility of dying without reconciling with her is my greatest fear slowly coming to fruition.

And I only have myself to blame.

Bashir and Shkanovafind me just after midnight.

I hear the door to the control room open behind me but don’t bother turning to greet them.

My fingers hover over the touchpad of the surveillance system spread across the monitors in front of me, the blue glow of the screens painting the room in a cold light. Every camera feed I’ve managed to pull up is displayed in neat grids across the wall.

At the center of it all sits the Borchin estate.

The mansion looms across the screen in eerie stillness. The feed is live, transmitted from two of my enforcers currently parked down the road in a nondescript van to keep tabs on the soldiers’ movements while they wait for my next plan of action.

This is the best vantage point I have right now, and I hate it. Their equipment is top-tier, but even that only gets us so far. This external surveillance is the only way I’ve been able to keep eyes on the property while my tech team works through the far more frustrating task—breaking into Borchin’s internal network.

So far, it has been a nightmare.

Military-grade security is exactly as difficult as it sounds to infiltrate. It’s layers upon layers of encrypted firewalls, rotating access codes, and monitoring systems designed specifically to detect intrusion attempts before they even fully gain temporary access. Whoever designed the cyber architecture inside that estate knew exactly what they were doing when they set it up and has only made this all the more complicated.

My jaw tightens as I watch the guards pass each other near the driveway. My thumb drags across the touchpad, zooming in. A pair of them patrol beneath the floodlights outside of the front doors, rifles pulled taut against their chests ready to aim at any shadow they believe to be suspicious.