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I nodded once.

As I carried my daughter to the car parked in the driveway, I glanced back over my shoulder. Yuriy stood in the warm spill of light from the doorway, phone in hand, shoulders straight, jaw locked.

Walking toward danger.

“Hang on, printsessa,” I whispered as I settled her into the back seat and climbed in beside her.

As the car pulled away, I watched the house shrink in the rearview mirror. A second set of headlights turned onto the street, heading straight for it. My men. His backup. I clung to that thought like a lifeline.

Because if anything happened to Yuriy tonight, Christmas would be the last day Kansas City existed on a map.

33

YURIY

Isat in the back of the SUV, shoulder pressed to the cold window, watching the city smear past in streaks of orange streetlamps and slush-thick snow. Everything outside felt too still. Even the heater humming beneath my boots sounded wrong. My breath fogged the glass every few seconds, and I kept wiping it away just to see the world rush by again.

Zasha’s face kept bleeding into that blur. One memory dug its claws in deeper than the rest: the way he’d clung to me at our parents’ funeral, cheeks blotchy from crying, while I promised him I’d always protect him.

Some promise that turned out to be. If I hadn’t gone after those idiots who tried to rob Stas—if I hadn’t done what I always did, operating on fists instead of thought—maybe none of this would be happening.

No retaliation. No borrowed vendettas. No terrified pregnant wife laboring alone in the hospital.

Maybe Zasha was right, and I was a fuckup.

I tightened my jaw.

I cannot let anything happen to him.

“Mr. Orlov,” Arty said from the front, his voice tight around the edges. “We’re almost there.”

I was grateful for Arty’s presence and how quickly he’d acted when we called him and told him what happened. Although he treated Yelena and Zasha like family, this was hardly his fight. I’d told him to leave at the first sign of trouble to which he’d replied that he would do whatever he could to get Zasha out of there.

“Good. The sooner we get him, the sooner we can all go to the hospital and be there for Yelena.”

The air in the SUV didn’t share my confidence. It felt thick and cramped. Nico—riding shotgun—exhaled sharply through his nose.

“Never should’ve crossed the Italians,” he muttered.

The words hit me low in the gut. I let out a short, humorless laugh. “Funny. Where the fuck were you when they were robbing the pakhan you swore to protect?”

Nico said something in Russian under his breath, not loud enough to catch, but the tone said everything. Blame. Resentment. Loathing he wasn’t even masking.

I didn’t need to ask why he felt that way. Stas had given me a seat at the table—informally, yes, but visibly. I’d embarrassed men like Nico more than once in front of their pakhan. And I’d made it abundantly clear that I wasn’t afraid of them.

I didn’t expect loyalty, but I expected competence to rescue Zasha.

The back of my neck prickled, an instinct that had saved me more than once. I slid my hand into my coat pocket, finding the cold, familiar weight of my gun. That grounded me for the little time I would still have it on me.

My phone buzzed.

STAS:

She’s in labor. As soon as the baby is here, I’ll be there. Stay the fuck alive, Yuriy.

A tight breath left me. I typed before I could think twice.

YURIY