CLAIMED BY MY STEPBROTHER

WHAT THE DON CARRIES

Damien

Petrov had known before he walked in that he couldn't deliver.

He'd spent forty minutes discovering this out loud rather than admitting it in advance which told me his reason for falling short was something he believed I'd find less acceptable than the shortfall itself.

I gave him seventy-two hours and left.

The driver took me to the cemetery before I asked him to.

I stood at Viktor's grave for eleven minutes. I know because I counted; an old habit from years when stillness meant exposure. The headstone was new. Clean marble. The kind ordered by a funeral home when no family member specifies otherwise.

Viktor would have hated it.

He'd have wanted something older. Something that looked like it had already survived several things.

I looked at the name carved into the stone and felt less than grief. Grief implied loss. What I felt was closer to the exhaustion of a man who had spent seven years fixing a problem another man created and was now standing at that man's grave with the problem only half-solved.

Viktor had known I was alive.

I was certain of that now. The timing of the arrangement…the property registered four months after the deal, the suite built with its private entrance, all of it spoke of a man who had expected to manage the situation indefinitely. To keep the arrangement contained until the collection date. To keep me at a distance until it was too late to matter.

He'd underestimated how long I was willing to wait.

I had underestimated him too. In the early years, when I believed the arrangement was simply political…a future marriage, distasteful but not irreversible, I told myself I had time. That I could build quietly. That when I returned I'd have enough to dissolve it cleanly.

Then I'd found the property filing.

The floor plan amendment.

The suite with its private entrance and its dedicated corridor and its single window that faced a wall.

I'd stood in an office three thousand miles away and looked at that floor plan for a long time. Then I understood that quietly wasn't going to be fast enough.

That was the night I stopped sleeping well.

Seven years ago.

I hadn't slept particularly well since.

I looked at Viktor's headstone.

"I got there first," I said.

Then I got back in the car.

Rafe was waiting in the passenger seat.

"Petrov's situation," he said, when we were moving. "The dispute four years ago targeted the same eastern network."

"I know."

"He's been testing the same points for four years. Which means he knows where they're weak."

"Yes. Which means he's been waiting to use that knowledge at the right moment rather than simply to demonstrate it."

Rafe was quiet for a moment. "She's been asking about the phone."

"I know. I spoke to her this morning."

"She called it kidnapping."

"She's not wrong." I said it before I decided to say it. Rafe glanced at me. I kept my eyes on the city. "She's not wrong and she knows it and she said it anyway. That's who we're dealing with."

"Handle Petrov's supply line through the northern contact," I said. "Quietly. Don't use anyone who's been in the eastern network in the last six months."

"That narrows it significantly."

"Do it anyway."

He nodded.

I looked out at the city and thought about a headstone and a floor plan and seven years spent building something strong enough to justify the distance it required.

She wasn't wrong.

That was the part I was going to have to carry.

"Marcus Hale filed a missing person report," Rafe said. "And one more thing." He held his phone across the seat. One message on the screen with no signature. "Came through the eastern channel twenty minutes ago."

I read it.

Return what you took. You have seventy-two hours.

The car moved through the city and I looked at the message for a long moment and thought about seventy-two hours and everything I still hadn't told her and the floor plan with the window that faced a wall.

"Handle the police report," I said. "Quietly."

"And the message."

"Send nothing back." I handed the phone to Rafe. "Let him wait."

Rafe nodded.

I looked out the window.

Seventy-two hours.

She was in the building. She was safe. And the clock that I'd been working against for seven years had just started running out loud.