Collateral damage
986 Words
The first threat comes that night.
It doesn’t arrive as a phone call or a warning. There’s no dramatic showdown, no anonymous message dripping with menace.
It comes quietly.
Too quiet.
I realize something is wrong the moment I step into Adrian’s penthouse and feel it, that wrongness in the air, the kind that presses against your skin before your mind can catch up. The lights are dimmed lower than usual. The city glows beyond the glass walls, distant and uncaring.
And Adrian is not alone.
Two men stand near the far end of the room. Dressed in black. Armed. Not guards. I recognize the difference instantly. Guards stay back. These men stand forward, tense, ready.
“What happened?” I ask.
Adrian turns toward me slowly. His jaw is clenched, his expression carved from stone. When he speaks, his voice is calm—but it’s the dangerous kind of calm. The kind that comes before destruction.
“Someone tried to access my private security grid,” he says. “An hour after the press conference.”
My heart stutters. “That was fast.”
“Yes.” He studies my face. “Too fast.”
I swallow. “You think it was my father.”
“I know it was,” Adrian replies.
He gestures toward the far wall. One of the men taps a tablet, and the screen lights up. Lines of code scroll past, interrupted by a frozen frame, a grainy surveillance footage of a dark corridor.
And then I see it.
My breath leaves me in a rush.
“That’s my old apartment,” I whisper.
The peeling wallpaper. The flickering hallway light. The place my mother and I fled from years ago. The place that still haunts my dreams.
“They went there looking for you,” Adrian says quietly.
Cold spreads through my chest. “But I haven’t been there in years.”
“I know.” His eyes darken. “Which means this wasn’t about finding you.”
A second image appears.
My mother’s face.
Alive and Terrified. Caught mid-motion as someone grabs her arm.
“No,” I screamed. “No, she moved. He doesn’t know where she is. He can’t.”
Adrian steps closer, his voice steady but grim. “Elena… listen to me.”
I shake my head violently. “You said you had protection. You said”
“I do,” he cuts in. “And we intercepted them before they reached her.”
My knees nearly give out. I grip the edge of the table to stay upright.
“But,” he continues, and that single word feels like a blade, “this was a message.”
I laugh weakly. “A message saying what?”
“That he knows you’re with me,” Adrian says. “And that he’s willing to use blood to remind us what that costs.”
Silence crashes down between us.
I wrap my arms around myself, suddenly cold. “This is my fault.”
“No,” Adrian says sharply. “This is Viktor Volkov doing what he has always done, hurting people to stay in control.”
I look up at him, really look at him. At the tension in his shoulders. At the faint bruise along his jaw I hadn’t noticed before.
“What?” I ask.
He hesitates.
That terrifies me more than anything else tonight.
“What happened?” I press.
Adrian exhales slowly. “I paid a visit to one of Volkov’s offshore accounts. Shut it down.”
My eyes widen. “You did that tonight?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And someone disagreed.”
He turns slightly, and I see it. The dark bloom beneath his shirt where the fabric pulls too tight. A bandage. Fresh.
“You were hurt,” I whisper.
“It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing,” I snap, anger flaring through the fear. “You’re bleeding because of me.”
His eyes meet mine. “I’m bleeding because I chose this war.”
I step closer without thinking. The space between us disappears, charged and fragile.
“You don’t have to do this,” I say softly. “You can still walk away.”
Adrian’s lips curve into something bitter. “So can you.”
I shake my head. “Not anymore.”
For a moment, something shifts between us. Not desire. Not romance.
Recognition.
“You should sleep,” he says finally. “Tomorrow will be worse.”
I manage a humorless smile. “That’s comforting.”
I don’t sleep.
Instead, I lie awake in the guest suite, staring at the ceiling as memories claw their way back. My father’s voice. My mother’s silence. The night everything broke.
At some point, I hear raised voices.
I slip out of bed and follow the sound, tiptoeing silently toward Adrian’s office. The door is half open.
“I don’t care how loyal he was,” Adrian is saying. “If he sold information, I want his name.”
A pause.
Then: “No. I want him alive.”
My stomach twists.
I step closer and freeze.
On the screen inside the office is a familiar face.
Marcus Hale.
Adrian’s right-hand man. The one who escorted me the first day. The one who swore loyalty with his life.
“He was seen near the breach point,” the voice on the other end says.
“That proves nothing,” Adrian snaps.
“It proves opportunity.”
My pulse roars in my ears.
Marcus. A traitor?
I back away slowly, my heart pounding. If Marcus is compromised, then.. suddenly a hand clamps over my mouth.
I scream, but the sound dies in my throat as I’m dragged backward into the darkness.
A voice whispers near my ear.
“Your father sends his regards.”
Pain explodes at the back of my head.
The world goes black.
- Writer
