Chapter Seventeen
The next morning the house was quiet. Almost too quiet.
Even with half her dogs out patrolling the acreage and the soft hum of perimeter drones slicing through the trees, the silence inside pressed against Anika’s ribs like a loaded weight vest. Still. Suffocating.
She rolled her chair toward the reinforced laptop in the office adjacent to the kennel wing, setting the bloodied collar on the desk like a relic. Her fingers moved quickly, unscrewing the backplate, revealing nothing but a serial code etched into steel.
No chip. No GPS.
But something about the numbers twisted her gut. Familiar. Too familiar.
Booting into the sandboxed OS her father taught her to build—“Never search from your main system. Assume eyes are always watching”—she typed in the code and ran it through two local tag registries, then cross-referenced it with an old, encrypted black-market list she'd buried deep in the darknet years ago.
The hit came back in six seconds.
Tag ID: 79162-SHADOW
Registered Handler: Cole Marcus Banning.
Her breath stuttered. Blood iced in her veins.
“Son of a bitch.”
Nyx and Ares shifted beside her. Across the room Delta raised her head and Major paced at the window, growling low—unsettled.
Anika whispered to the room, “We’re being hunted. But they forgot who trained the wolves.”
She moved fast. Laptop under one arm, she stepped into the utility closet and unlocked the wall panel hiding her emergency cache. Inside were burner phones, encrypted USBs, tactical maps—and a framed photo of her father, smiling in uniform, with a ten-year-old Anika on his shoulders.
Her fingers lingered on the glass.
Then she moved it aside, unlocking the secondary compartment behind it.
Inside was an evidence bag containing a slim manila folder. Everything she had on him—Cole Marcus Banning.
Affiliates. Transactions. Case notes.
And one photo.
Cole, grinning beside Tomasz.
Her stomach twisted. She hadn’t known they’d crossed paths. Or maybe she hadn’t wanted to know.
Outside, tires crunched over gravel.
She stiffened.
But the dogs didn’t bark. The gate opened after a brief keypad tone.
Only one person knew the code.
Nikolai.
Nikolai —
The storm had passed, but the tension hadn’t.
Rain clung to the blacked-out Bugatti as he pulled up to the house, headlights cutting through the low mist that still lingered over the fields. He stepped out slowly, instinctively brushing the pistol beneath his jacket.
He watched the house through the windows—Nyx, Ares, Delta, Major—like a man cataloguing assets. The rest of the property felt like eyes in the fog. No barking. No warning. He could feel them—predator eyes finding him, appraising. Let them recognize me, he thought. That was trust in Anika’s language. A shift. A crack.
He knocked twice.
No answer.
Just as he was about to knock again the door opened.
Just a sliver—just enough to see her.
Barefoot. Joggers. Tank top. Bruises and wounds on display. No makeup. No armor. But her jaw was still sharp enough to cut steel. She appeared unarmed, but he knew better.
“You’re late,” she said.
“You’re breathing,” he replied.
She should’ve sent him away.
But she didn’t.
Anika —
“Come in,” she said, stepping aside.
The dogs flanked him as he entered, but they didn’t move to challenge. Just watched.
Anika dropped the folder on the desk with a hard slap.
“Cole Marcus Banning. He trained under me. Twisted everything I taught him.”
She turned the laptop around. The serial code was still up on screen.
“He trained that dog. He was behind it. And now he’s working with Tomasz.”
Nikolai’s jaw hardened. “I gave him 24 hours once. He should’ve run.”
“He didn’t. He joined forces with Tomasz to build an empire from the scraps left behind.”
“They’re not hunting you,” Nikolai said, voice low. “They’re trying to erase you.”
She nodded. “By poisoning everything I built.”
Nikolai —
He moved toward her. Not fast. Not aggressive. Just present — close enough to invade her air.
But she didn’t back up.
“You’re not alone anymore, sólyshko,” he said. “If they come for you, they go through me.”
His words landed differently this morning—less iron, more promise. Something vulnerable brushed the edges of her defenses.
“You don’t get it,” she said, voice softer now. “I’ve done this alone for so long, I don’t remember what it’s like… to not have an exit plan.”
He didn’t smile. He reached up and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear with the gentlest of motions. His fingers paused at her jaw, a light, steadying pressure.
“Then maybe it’s time you had someone to fight beside you,” he said.
Her throat tightened.
For the first time in years, she didn’t feel the need to argue. Or deflect. Or sharpen her edges.
She just… stood there.
Breathing him in.
The warmth of his body. The steadiness in his voice. The quiet way he made her feel like maybe she didn’t have to carry it all.
Not alone.
She handed him the USB drive with everything she had on Cole.
“I want him found,” she said.
“He will be,” Nikolai promised, taking it. “And when he is —”
“I want first blood.”
He didn’t argue.
Instead, he brushed his thumb over the edge of her hand before stepping back. “We’ll start tomorrow. I’ve already got my techs scrubbing known locations.”
Anika nodded. But she didn’t want to talk tactics anymore.
She didn’t want to think about war.
She just wanted to feel something that wasn’t anger or grief.
“You ever get tired of pretending you’re not a good man?” she asked.
He looked at her — really looked. “You ever get tired of pretending you don’t want to trust me?”
Silence. But it wasn’t empty.
Her hand drifted to his chest, resting lightly over his shirt.
“I don’t do soft,” she said.
“I don’t need soft,” he murmured. “I just need real.”
She looked up at him — battle-hardened, scarred, stubborn as hell.
And for the first time, she felt her walls shift.
Just enough to let him in.