I don’t want to believe what I’m seeing.
But what the fuck else can it be?
The tracking necklace lies on our bedside table like a severed limb, a symbol of connection torn open, hemorrhaging trust all over the silk sheets where I fucked her just hours ago. And worse…
Rowan has taken my daughter.
Those five words are worse than any knife that’s ever found its way into my gut. They’re clean, fucking surgical, goddamn devastating, splitting my sanity into tidy before-and-after segments.
There was the man who believed he had everything under control.
And now, there’s this hollow-eyed executioner standing in his place, ready to watch the world burn.
Every cell in my body has crystallized into rage. Pure, undiluted, sacred rage.
A smarter man would wonder why she left. What she found. What she heard.
I am not that man.
Not when it comes to Rowan.
Not when it comes to Sofiya.
I tear through the compound. The security footage confirms what my gut already knows: Rowan disabled the cameras in the east wing. She’s no fool. All those months watching me, she learned our security protocols well enough to slip through cracks I didn’t even know existed.
“Find them,” I order into the phone, voice so deathly calm it makes the army of grown men on the other end audibly flinch. “Every camera in the city. Every traffic light. Every fucking convenience store. If you have to break into the goddamn NSA, do it. Just. Find. Them.”
“We’re trying, boss.” Dimitri sounds desperate. He’s smart enough to realize failure means death. “But she’s good. Really fucking good.”
Eighteen hours. She’s been gone eighteen hours now, and we have nothing.
Not so much as a single security cam freeze frame or a stray credit card transaction. She’s become a ghost.
Someone had to help her. This level of disappearance requires resources.
“Pull up everything we have on Natalie,” I tell Arkady, who hasn’t left my side since we discovered them missing. “She’s involved. I can smell her fucking perfume all over this.”
“Already searching her financials and communications,” Arkady confirms, his fingers flying across his tablet. “Nothing suspicious yet, but—”
“Dig deeper,” I snarl. “She didn’t vanish into thin air.”
But as hours stretch into the second day, it begins to feel exactly like that. Like Rowan took all her light with her, leaving me in a darkness so profound I’m drowning in it.
I stand in Sofiya’s empty nursery, surrounded by stuffed animals and tiny clothes that still carry her scent. I lift one of her blankets to my face. It smells like her baby shampoo, like innocence, like everything good I never deserved to touch.
My knees crack against the hardwood as I sink to the floor, clutching the blanket to my chest.
“Why?” I whisper to the emptiness. “Why would you take her from me?”
The room offers no answers. Just mockery in the form of abandoned toys and the mobile still spinning lazily above the empty crib.
The knock on the doorframe barely registers.
“Vin…” Arkady’s voice is uncharacteristically gentle. “We need to talk.”
“Unless you’ve found them, I don’t want to hear it.”
“Come on, man. You haven’t slept. You haven’t eaten. This isn’t helping anyone, least of all Rowan and Sofiya.”
My head snaps up, fury replacing the momentary weakness. “Say their names again. I fucking dare you.”
Arkady crosses his arms, refusing to be intimidated. After fifteen years as my right hand, he’s earned that right. “Rowan and Sofiya Akopov. Your wife. Your daughter.”
I’m on my feet in an instant, hands fisted in his shirt, slamming him against the wall hard enough to knock the air from his lungs. “You think this is funny? You think it’s a joke that someone took what’s mine?”
“No,” he says, not struggling against my grip. “I think it’s fucking impressive.”
This unexpected response loosens my hold, just slightly.
“Think about it, Vin,” he continues. “Rowan didn’t do this on impulse. She planned. She executed. She protected herself and your daughter from what she perceived as a threat. Sound familiar?”
I release him, stepping back as if his words burned me.
“She learned from the best,” Arkady presses, straightening his shirt. “She became exactly what you wanted her to be—someone strong enough to survive in our world.”
“She took my daughter.”
“She protected your daughter. There’s a difference.”
“From what?” I roar, the sound tearing from someplace within me that’s never spoken before. “From me? I would die for them!”
“Maybe that’s the problem.” Arkady’s voice has gone quiet, contemplative. “Maybe Rowan doesn’t want anyone dying—for them or because of them.”
The rage inside me starts to curdle, mixing with something colder, more painful. The possibility that I might be wrong. What if Arkady is right? What if Rowan’s decision to leave wasn’t an act of betrayal, but of love?
“She wanted another baby,” I whisper, staring down at my hands—hands that have killed, that have tortured, that have stroked her hair as she slept. “Just last night, she begged me to put another child inside her. And now, she’s gone. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Unless something changed between last night and this morning.” Arkady watches me carefully. “Did you say something? Did she find something?”
The question stirs a memory, foggy through exhaustion. I’d come out of yesterday’s morning meeting with Arkady, and I could swear that Rowan’s scent was lingering right outside the door. Could she have…?
“My study,” I breathe, already moving.
I tear through my desk like a man possessed, searching for what she might have seen. Nothing seems disturbed. Nothing seems—
The folder.
The Petrov operation.
The fucking blueprint for her father’s assassination.
“She knows,” I say, collapsing into my chair. “She must’ve found the plans for the Petrov compound raid.”
“Fuck,” Arkady mutters.
The pieces click into place with sickening clarity. “She thinks I’m going to kill her father.”
“Aren’t you?” Arkady lifts an eyebrow. “That’s the plan, right? Eliminate Petrov, consolidate power. You’ve been planning this for months.”
Have I? The exhaustion of the past two days makes it hard to remember why I’d been so determined to take out Grigor. Was it strategy? Jealousy? Some twisted need to eliminate any other man who might have a claim on my wife’s affection?
It all seems so pointless now, with her gone.
“We need to suspend the operation,” I say. “Indefinitely.”
“What?” balks Arkady. “But everything’s in place. The team is ready. We’ve never had a better shot at taking out Petrov.”
“I said indefinitely.” My voice leaves no room for argument. “If there’s even a chance it helps bring Rowan home, we scrap it. All of it.”
Arkady studies me with something like pity creeping into his expression. “And if she doesn’t come back?”
I cringe and turn away. The possibility that Rowan might never return, that Sofiya might grow up without me, that I might never hold either of them again—it’s too much to contemplate.
“Then none of it matters anyway. None of it fucking matters.”
I stare at the door she walked out of. I wonder if she hesitated. If she looked back. Did she cry when she removed the necklace that bound her to me?
“You know what kills me?” I ask Arkady, my voice so raw it hardly sounds human. “She’s right to run. Everything I touch turns to blood.”
“That’s not—”
“Don’t.” I cut him off. “Don’t say it’s not true. We both know it is. I would have killed her father without a second thought, without even telling her. I would have robbed my daughter of her grandfather because I couldn’t stand the idea of sharing them.”
Tick. Tock. Painful seconds drag past like broken glass shredding my skin to ribbons.
“So what now?” Arkady finally asks.
I dig my fingernails into my palms. I need the physical pain to drown out the emotional agony.
“Now, we wait.” I meet his eyes, letting him see the devastation there. “We stand down.”
“And if she still doesn’t come back?”
“Then I’ll spend the rest of my life proving I can be the man she needs me to be. The man I promised I would be.” I run a hand through my hair, silver-streaked and unwashed. “Even if she never sees it. Even if I never hold my daughter again.”
Arkady nods. “That’s growth, Vin. That’s putting them first, for real this time.”
“It’s too late, though, isn’t it?” I laugh hollowly. “I spent so long trying to protect them from external threats that I never realized the greatest danger was right here.” I tap my chest, where my heart used to be, before Rowan took it with her. “It was me. It was always me.”
“For what it’s worth,” Arkady says quietly, “I think she loves you too much to stay away forever.”
I want to believe him. I want it with a desperation that borders on madness. But the truth pulsates between us, and it says otherwise.
“She loved me too much to keep letting me destroy her world.” I stand, decision made. “Send out the order. Operation canceled. Effective immediately.”
“And what should I tell the men?”
I move to the window, staring out at the compound that feels more like a mausoleum than a home now. “Tell them the truth. Vincent Akopov is standing down.”
