Page 76 of His Contract Queen

I glance once more down at the letter in my hand before folding it carefully and slipping it into the inside pocket of my slacks. I nod firmly at him. “I’ll set up a war room for us, then.”

20

ALEKSANDR

Istand at the head of the long table inside the makeshift war room, hands braced on the edges of the blueprints spread before me.

The room used to be one of the estate’s formal meeting halls meant for quiet negotiations and carefully curated diplomacy. Now it looks like the command center of a military operation. Maps blanket nearly every surface.

Satellite overlays are pinned to corkboards along the walls. Thermal signatures from the last drone pass glow faintly across a tablet screen beside me, red silhouettes marking heat sources scattered across the Borchin estate. Guard rotation schedules—freshly stolen from Borchin’s private security network after Bashir’s team finally cracked their encryption two hours ago—sit stacked in a neat pile near my elbow.

Every piece of intelligence we’ve gathered tonight has been dragged into this room and laid bare.

A battlefield assembled in paper and pixels.

Snow falls outside the tall windows in slow, relentless sheets, the flakes thick enough to blur the world beyond the glass into a pale gray haze. Inside the room, however, the air is anything but calm. Low voices murmur across the space as Sasha’s men and my own move around the room, studying the maps and data points from different angles.

The faint tapping of a keyboard echoes from the far end of the room where Bashir continues to pull data from Borchin’s compromised network, Shkanova hovering close by to supervise. Lines of code cascade across the monitor in a constant stream of green and white as he navigates deeper through the estate’s internal system.

I drag one hand slowly across the largest blueprint—the structural layout of the Borchin estate pulled from municipal records. The lines of the building stretch across the paper in precise architectural detail—the main house, the east wing, the service corridors.

And beneath it, the tunnel.

A narrow, half-forgotten line carved through the foundation decades ago, running beneath the house before sloping downward through packed earth toward a wooded hillside a quarter mile beyond the property line. The faded ink marks the final point where the tunnel ends to a storm cellar exit facing east.

Exactly where Katerina said it would be.

My fingers press harder against the table directly over the exit point.

Something shifts in my peripheral vision. I turn just enough to see Sasha moving toward me, the low conversations in the room quieting slightly as he steps closer to the table.

“What are we starting with first?” he asks.

I lean back slightly, grabbing the tablet resting beside the blueprints and swiping across the screen until the tactical overlay appears. “Our primary breach will have to be at the southeast service gate.” I turn the screen so both of us can see it clearly. The satellite image sharpens as I zoom in, highlighting the outer security posts. “Secondary will be at the north wall. We hit both simultaneously, it’ll send the military scattering. The chaos will buy us time to get in.”

He nods silently.

“Bashir,” I call across the room. “What’s the status of the first wave?”

He pauses his fingers, his head lifting from the monitor in front of him. “Everyone’s ready to go. We’ll have the outer perimeter down in ninety seconds. Once it’s clear, then we’ll move to the interior.”

“Good.” I straighten, rolling my shoulders once, the tension that’s been knotted there for days finally beginning to shift now that we’re no longer standing still.

“Who’s taking the tunnel?” Sasha asks.

I glance down once more at the faded line running beneath the estate. The path that leads directly to her.

“You will. I’ll be hunting down her father.”

He nods once with no hesitation.

We both understand what this part of the plan means. While our Bratvas create chaos above ground, I’m trusting him to go straight for Katerina. Six months ago, neither of us would have trusted the other with something like this.

Now I’m trusting him with the most important person in my life, and he knows it.

I know if we were in the opposite positions and he were to ask me to do the same, I would without question.

Sasha’s phone buzzes against the table. He glances down at the screen and goes still. The shift in his posture is small, almost imperceptible to anyone who doesn’t know him well. His shoulders lock, his expression flattening in that particular way that happens only when something dangerous has just entered the room. I don’t need to see the name to know who it is.