Page 76 of Captive Promise

What they’d be willing to give up under pressure.

I read it again and it feels like I was just plunged into an icy river.

I fold the paper up small and put it in my pocket instead, because I need to think about it more before I decide what to do with it.

I can’t think about any of this right now.

I have a full day in front of me.

I have a trauma surgeon and a Bratva-adjacent toddler both currently living under my roof, and somewhere between all of that I still have to run an actual criminal organization that a man named Russo is trying very hard to burn to the ground.

I eat dinner alone that night.

Katerina’s been eating with Seraphina in the early evening the last few days.

I’ve seen it on the cameras, the two of them at the little table in the nursery, Seraphina throwing more food than she eats and I haven’t figured out a way to insert myself into that without it being obvious that I want to.

So I don’t.

I eat alone in the dining room like an idiot and I tell myself it’s fine.

It is not fine. But I eat anyway.

I’m in my study after, working, when I hear her in the hallway. I know her footsteps by now.

They’re lighter than my guys and quicker too. The door opens without a knock.

She’s in leggings and a t-shirt, hair pulled back in a low ponytail with a few pieces falling loose around her face.

Her cheeks are a little flushed like she jogged here then walked the last few feet so it wouldn’t be obvious.

I’ve got a map of half the state of New York spread across the desk when the door opens, red pins marking every property Russo’s people have been spotted near this past week, notes scrawled in the margins about which of my other houses might be safe enough to move Seraphina to if this one gets compromised.

It’s not something I want Katerina looking at.

I try to close the map, but I’m half a second too slow.

Her eyes go straight to the desk before I get it shut, taking in as much as she can in the two seconds she has: the pins, the handwriting, the shape of the state she’d recognize without trying.

Then the folder’s closed.

Too late. I know it’s too late by the way her face changes.

She’s still in the doorway, one hand on the frame, and her eyes come up off the desk and onto my face, narrowed now, working something out.

“What is that?” she asks, gesturing toward my desk.

“Nothing,” I tell her gruffly. Usually I would be thrilled she would be in the same room as me, but for the first time since I saw her two years ago I wish she weren’t here. “Nothing you need to worry about.”

Fuck me.

That was the wrong answer.

I know it the second it’s out of my mouth.

She rears back as if she were slapped and her jaw sets, her shoulders go rigid, and the flush that was already in her cheeks from walking fast turns into something angrier.

Foot meet mouth. Fuuuuuck.