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I count at least four men without ever turning my head, reading them off my peripheral vision instead. I keep my eyes forward and my hands loose.

A gun muzzle prods me between the shoulder blades, steering me toward a door. The heavy metal swings open with a grating shriek.

Delaney sits bound in the center of the warehouse floor, and the sight of her chills me to the bone, because she is marked worse than the photo showed. Her wrists are raw where the rope holds them, there is a bruise blooming on her cheek, and her ankles are bound to the chair legs.

Her eyes fly up to mine, and her pupils contract in fear the instant she sees me, and then she shakes her head, small and fierce. My heart feels crushed flat in my chest, and I move anyway, ignoring the sensation that I cannot catch my breath. She is warning me off, telling me with the only movement she has left not to walk any deeper into this.

I don’t stop. I need you, I tell her without a sound.

Yelena stands behind the chair with a pistol, her eyes bloodshot, and she laughs, ecstatic, when she sees I came alone.

“Let her go,” I say. “This was never about her.”

“You don’t get to give orders here anymore,” Yelena says, vicious now, nothing left of the soft girl she used to perform. “You kicked over everything my family built and left it ruined. You gutted our docks, our companies, all of it, and now you walk in here and tell me what to do.”

“Whatever is between us is between us,” I say. “Not her.”

Yelena presses the gun harder to the side of Delaney’s head.

Delaney trembles, and my spine locks rigid.

“This is her fault,” Yelena says, her eyes narrowing and lips flattening. “All of it. If she had never crawled into your life, none of this would be happening.”

“I waited years for you,” she goes on. “I loved you. You dropped everything you were holding the moment I came back, and you would’ve married me.”

“I never loved what you became,” I say. “The girl I loved never actually existed. I built her out of pieces I wanted to see.”

“Shut up,” Yelena screams, swinging the gun toward me. Then she swings it back and shoves it against Delaney again. “You only chose her for the baby, so you could fawn over her swollen belly. That’s the only reason. Admit it.”

“I love her,” I say. “I didn’t plan to want her. The baby didn’t make me love her. She did that on her own, long before I knew.”

Delaney stares at me, her jaw trembling behind the tape, and a riptide of affection and fixation nearly drives me across the floor; I crush the impulse to tear her free.

Wheels roll somewhere to my right, and Igor emerges from the shadow in his wheelchair. Illness has thinned him down to almost nothing, but the malice in his face has not been extinguished, and a pistol rests in his lap, steadied against the armrest, aimed at my chest.

“What a touching little confession,” Igor says.

“What do you want,” I say, my voice cold.

“Everything my family owned,” Igor begins to recite. “The territory, the docks, every company you swallowed, all of it signed back to me and returned.”

“Done,” I say.

The single word leaves Yelena rooted with indecision where she stands.

“You expect me to believe that,” Igor says incredulously.

“You grabbed her to force my hand,” I say, nodding once at Delaney. “So it worked. You have my agreement. Now tell me what guarantees you want.”

“Guarantees,” Igor repeats.

“Hold her until the documents are signed, if you like,” I say, keeping my voice level, the voice I use in a negotiation when nothing in the room is personal. “You keep her until the ink is dry, and then you let them walk.”

“And you would truly let us walk out of here,” Igor says, his fingers clenching on his knee.

“I will give you a clean way out,” I say. “Safe passage to the west coast, if you want it. For my woman and my child, yes. Every time.”

It’s not a lie, so I have no need to fight down the heat of the lie, and that is the part they cannot factor in. Money can be earned again. Territory can be retaken, docks reclaimed, companies rebuilt from the studs. There is only one Delaney anywhere in the world, and there is only the one child.