Chapter 26 Nikolai
I smelled her perfume the moment I stepped off the elevator, vanilla and jasmine. It was faint but unmistakable in the sterile air of the forty-sixth floor.
My blood went cold.
The hallway stretched before me, empty and silent. Nothing looked disturbed. The steel door was closed and locked, exactly as I'd left it but Marlena had been here.
I knew it with the same certainty I knew my own name.
Anger and fear collided in my stomach. She'd gone into my war room and seen the files. The screens. The evidence of everything I'd been planning for five years.
Fuck.
I pulled out my phone, accessing the security system. The forty-sixth floor had six cameras, more than anywhere else in the building. Nothing happened up here without me knowing.
Except, apparently, Marlena breaking in.
I scrolled through the footage, my jaw clenched so tight it ached.
There.
3:47 PM. The elevator opens. Marlena steps out, looking over her shoulder like she expects someone to catch her.
She pulls out a keycard – where the hell did she get that? – and swipes it at the door.
The first and second attempts fail.
On the third try, the lock clicks green.
She slips inside.
I fast-forwarded, watching her move through the room. She was careful, avoiding the obvious camera angles, keeping to the shadows where she could but she couldn't avoid them all.
One camera caught her hand on the desk as she opened the Rousseau Bait Protocol file.
Another caught her profile as she took photos with her phone, tears streaming down her face.
A third caught her running out, her shoulders shaking.
I closed the app, my hand gripping the phone so hard the case creaked.
She knew. Not everything but at least she knew enough.
I should go to her room right now and confront her. I should demand to know what she was thinking, breaking into my private space.
I should threaten her and remind her what happened when she didn't follow the rules but I didn't move because yelling at her wouldn't fix this. Threats wouldn't undo what she'd seen.
And some small, traitorous part of me didn't want to see the look in her eyes when she finally told me exactly what she thought of me.
I'd seen enough of that look in the security footage.
Instead, I unlocked the steel door and went inside.
The room looked exactly as she'd left it. The file was back in its place on the desk, closed neatly. The screens still glowed with Viktor's faces. The maps and timelines undisturbed.
She'd been careful not to leave evidence of her intrusion.
Smart girl – she was too smart for her own good.
I moved through the space, cataloging everything she would have seen and every piece of information she now had access to.
The protocol file. The surveillance timeline. The strategies for using her emotional vulnerability.
Fortunately, she hadn't seen the safe.
The hidden safe behind the false panel in the wall, where I kept the most dangerous files.
The ones about Elena and Dmitri and the real connection between our families that went deeper than she could imagine.
She hadn't found those.
Yet.
My hands moved on autopilot, gathering the most critical files, the ones I couldn't risk her discovering.
Elena's witness protection documents. The transcripts from her testimony. The photos of her and Dmitri together, not just that one from Moscow, but dozens more spanning years.
The DNA results confirming what I'd suspected for months.
I carried everything to my bedroom on the forty-fifth floor, my jaw tight.
The safe was built into the wall behind a painting – ironic, given Marlena's profession. She'd probably appreciate the symbolism if she knew but she wouldn't know.
Not until I was ready.
I punched in the code – a date only I would know – and the safe clicked open.
Inside were other secrets. Bank account numbers. Offshore holdings. Backup identities if everything went wrong.
I added the new files, stacking them carefully, then I closed the safe, spinning the lock, and rehung the painting.
Done.
The most dangerous truths were secure now. Even if Marlena broke into the forty-sixth floor again, she wouldn't find them.
I sat on the edge of my bed, staring at the painting that hid the safe.
It was a Monet. Water lilies. Serene and beautiful and completely fake.
My phone buzzed. A text from Marcus.
Pavel confirmed for Thursd
ay. 8 PM. Everything's set.
I lay back on the bed, still fully dressed, and stared at the ceiling.