Work Text:
The rain in Os Alta didn’t wash away the grime, it merely gave the city a glossy, treacherous sheen. On the top floor of a nondescript brick building in the lower districts, a glowing sign buzzed irregularly, casting a stark white glow through the blinds. Inside, the man the world knew as Nikolai Lantsov was nowhere to be found.
There was no tailored suit, no precisely combed blond hair, no easy aristocratic smile. Instead, the man sitting behind the scarred oak desk possessed a mop of unruly red hair, eyes the colour of a muddy river after a storm, and a crooked nose that looked like it had taken one too many left hooks.
Coloured contacts, a different wardrobe predominantly teal, a rougher way of carrying himself to distance the persona from the quick-witted conglomerate. Over the years, Nikolai had authored a dozen different codes for his own survival, most of which he had long since forgotten. But one golden rule remained absolute, carved into the bedrock of his career: never adulterate professional work with personal emotion. It had worked for years.
Nikolai—for now he was Sturmhond—puffed on a cheap clove cigarette, watching the smoke curl toward the ceiling. Across from him sat Aleksander Morozova.
Even in a low-rent private investigator's office, Morozova looked like power personified. His tailored black overcoat probably cost more than the building’s monthly mortgage. His dark eyes were cold, calculating, and fixed entirely on the red-headed man across from him.
"They say you're the best, Sturmhond," Morozova said in a low, smooth baritone that carried the weight of absolute authority. "That you find people who don't want to be found."
"I'm the best, Mr. Morozova," Sturmhond replied, his voice deliberately raspy, a far cry from the crisp, theatrical cadence of the second son of the Lantsov empire. "That usually aligns with being expensive."
Morozova slid a thick, leather-bound dossier across the desk. It thudded heavily against the wood. "My wife. Alina Morozova. She has… let’s say, suffered a bout of hysteria. We are in the middle of a rather delicate divorce proceeding, and she has fled. She is missing."
Sturmhond flipped the file open with one finger. The first thing that caught him was the photograph. A young woman with sharp, beautiful features, wide dark eyes, and a smile that seemed to be too pure as opposed to the polished socialite way he was used to seeing in his own circles. The file listed her achievements: a brilliant young architect, top of her class, married to the city's most powerful corporate titan.
Frankly, she looked entirely too young for the man sitting across from him.
"She’s been gone for two weeks," Morozova continued, his tone even. "The police are useless. I need her found. Everything you need is in that file. Her habits, her friends, her favourite restaurants, the galleries she frequents. I know my wife, Sturmhond. She cannot survive outside the world I built for her."
Sturmhond closed the file, his tarnished jade eyes locking onto the ramrod businessman. "I’ll study the case tonight. I'll let you know tomorrow if I'm taking it."
"Take it," Morozova said, rising to his feet. "And name your price."
The black-coated man started to walk away from the desk, ready to leave until the other man stopped his track.
"One condition," Sturmhond called out before Morozova reached the door. "If I take this, you don't call me. You don't track me. You don't breathe down my neck. I get three months with no interference. I find her on my terms, or the deal is off."
Morozova paused, his back to the investigator. "Two months. Not a day more."
That night, long after the city had gone quiet, Nikolai sat in his apartment, the secret one that he paid for in cash under a dead man’s name, and stared at Alina’s file.
He found himself looking at her picture for a little too long. The way her smile curved, the small freckles across her nose, dark eyes that seemed to hold all the universe. There was a striking, fierce intelligence behind those eyes, but underneath it, a profound exhaustion. Her sketches were brilliant, structural masterpieces that felt almost like sunlight trapped in a bottle. He traced the line of her jaw in the photograph, and a sudden, unfamiliar ache stirred in his chest.
He told himself it was professional curiosity. He accepted the case the next morning.
The first fortnight was a masterclass in frustration. Following Morozova’s immaculate dossier, Sturmhond visited every location listed. He did it with the cold, methodical precision of a seasoned private investigator, but every lead dissolved into thin air. He staked out the high-end boutique galleries in the upper districts, watching the entrances through the tinted windows of a parked sedan. He kept watch on the modernist, glass-fronted cafés where Alina supposedly frequented. He even initiated brief, carefully calculated conversations with the socialite "friends" listed in the file—polished, wealthy socialites who spoke of Alina with a patronising pity.
“Oh, poor Alina,” one of them, Zoya, had sighed as she sipped her champagne. “Aleksander gave her everything, but she just couldn’t handle the pressure.”
But everywhere Sturmhond looked, he found absolutely nothing. No paper trail, no credit card swipes, no sightings on traffic cameras. Alina was a ghost.
Apart from the oddities in this case, Sturmhond also felt something odd while he was doing this job. Every time he stepped out onto the pavements, a prickle of unease settled between his shoulder blades.
As a private investigator living two lives, Sturmhond had learned never to let a gut feeling slip away. A shadow was surely clinging to him. He was sure it was a professional job, a figure slipping seamlessly into crowds and blending against the grey stone architecture, but he noticed. He always noticed.
Instead of breaking his routine, Sturmhond decided to play along. He followed Morozova’s immaculate dossier precisely, visiting every location listed where Alina supposedly spent her days to give his shadow exactly what it wanted to see.
By the seventeenth day, he decided it was time to turn the hunter into the prey.
One of the locations in the file was a prestigious grand ballet studio where Alina allegedly held a private membership. To pull off the trap, Nikolai temporarily shed his Sturmhond skin to use his real-world resources. A quick, encrypted call was made to Dominik Vertov, Nikolai’s loyal right-hand man in the Lantsov world. Dominik used a shell company to discreetly rent out the entire ballet studio for the afternoon, ensuring the building would be entirely devoid of staff, patrons, or witnesses.
Sturmhond arrived at the grand, mirrored venue under the guise of an active investigation. The lobby was dead quiet. He bypassed the empty reception desk, pushing through the heavy double doors into the cavernous auditorium, and made a direct, loud line for the backstage corridors. He pretended to search, opening dressing room doors and calling out, making sure his shadow could track his exact trajectory.
But the backstage area was already rigged. Dominik had done his job flawlessly.
As Sturmhond walked down a dimly lit, narrow corridor lined with heavy stage curtains, he heard the sharp, sudden snap of a tripwire behind him. It was immediately followed by a breathless low grunt of shock and the heavy rustle of weighted ropes.
Sturmhond stopped walking. He spun around, a smug grin spreading across his face.
Dangling two feet off the ground, securely tangled in a heavy, industrial cargo net suspended from the stage rigging, was a rugged man dressed in a dark, nondescript coat. The man was thrashing and his face was flushed with anger and embarrassment.
"Well, well," Sturmhond said, strolling over with his hands tucked casually into his pockets. "I didn't think ballet was a contact sport. You looking for a private lesson, mate?"
The man stopped thrashing, forcing his expression into a mask of stoic calm. "Look, friend, there's been a mistake. I'm a civilian. I came in here to watch my daughter perform. She’s in the junior ballet class."
Sturmhond chuckled, leaning against a prop crate. "What a lovely story. Truly touching. There’s just one tiny flaw in the choreography, pal—there is no performance today. In fact, the whole place is closed. Now, let’s try this again, shall we?"
The man remained stubbornly silent, his jaw clamped shut.
Sturmhond’s easy-going demeanour vanished in an instant. He reached behind his back, pulled a sleek, heavy-barrelled semi-automatic pistol from his waistband, and stepped right up to the netting. He pressed the cold steel of the muzzle directly against the man's temple, clicking the safety off with a loud, deliberate sound.
"I don't like being lied to, and I sure as hell don't like being followed," Sturmhond said, his voice dropping into a low, terrifyingly calm purr. "You have five seconds to tell me who you are, or I find out what the inside of your skull looks like. Five. Four..."
“Over my dead body,” the man defied coldly.
Sturmhond pressed the gun even harder against the aloof man’s temple. “If you keep going like this, I sure will have to take care of your dead body, mate. In three. Two…”
The man’s stoic facade finally cracked under pressure. It seemed he knew the price for keeping his mouth shut was not worth as much as his own life. He swallowed hard, his cold eyes darting to the gun. "Ivan," he muttered roughly. "My name is Ivan."
"And who do you work for, Ivan?"
"Aleksander Morozova," Ivan confessed, his voice tight. "He didn't fully trust you. He didn't like the term you set, the one about no interference. He’s a man who needs to know every single move, to keep track of everything. He wanted to know what you were finding, so he ordered me to follow you."
Sturmhond’s eyes darkened with genuine irritation. A breach of contract was an insult to his business, and more importantly, it risked exposing the carefully guarded line between his two identities.
"Morozova is a control freak who doesn't know how to play by the rules," Sturmhond muttered.
He reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a small leather notebook, and ripped a blank piece of paper from it. Using a stubby pencil, he scribbled four words in bold, aggressive strokes: THE DEAL IS OFF.
He folded the paper into a tight square. Then, with lightning-fast precision, Sturmhond brought his left fist around, punching Ivan squarely across the jaw. The force of the blow made the hanging net swing violently, leaving Ivan dazed and spitting blood. Before the man could recover, Sturmhond forcefully stuffed the crumpled piece of paper right into Ivan's open, bleeding mouth.
"Give your boss my regards," Sturmhond said, holstering his gun. He turned on his heel and walked out of the backstage area, leaving Ivan tangled in the rafters to find his own way out.
The very next morning, the bell above the door of Sturmhond’s lower-district office rang.
Sturmhond didn't even need to look up from his desk, where he was lazily shuffling a deck of cards, to know who it was.
Aleksander Morozova walked in alone. The corporate titan looked remarkably unbothered, though there was a rare, subtle tightening around his eyes that betrayed his agitation.
"You made a mess of Ivan," Morozova said, stopping just before the desk.
"Ivan was a terrible dancer," Sturmhond replied without looking up. "I don't tolerate spies, Morozova. We had an agreement. You breached it. Go find your wife yourself."
Morozova took a slow breath, adjusting the cuffs of his dark coat. To Sturmhond's absolute surprise, the powerful man bowed his head slightly. "I suppose I owe you an apology. It was an error in judgement. I am unaccustomed to relinquishing control, but I see now that I disrespected the unique talents of the man I hired. It will not happen again. You have my word. No tracking, no interference, until the two month deadline."
Sturmhond flipped a card over. The Ace of Spades. "Not interested. I’m a busy man, Morozova. I have other clients who actually know how to cooperate and respect my boundaries."
Morozova didn't blink. "I will double your original fee."
Sturmhond kept shuffling, unbothered. "My peace of mind is worth more than that."
"Triple it," Morozova countered, his voice like iron. "Paid in untraceable bonds, half delivered to your account by noon today, the rest upon completion."
Sturmhond paused his movements, letting the cards fall into a neat pile. He let a slow, greedy grin spread across his face, playing the part of the mercenary detective to perfection. "Well... I suppose everyone has a price for a little irritation.”
Morozova only did so much as raise his eyebrows expectantly.
Sturmhond snorted. “It’s a deal. But if I see so much as a shadow of your men again, I don't just drop the case—I vanish with your money."
"Agreed," Morozova said, and left as quickly as he had arrived.
Half of the triple fee from Aleksander Morozova was resting securely in an offshore account not long after. However, Sturmhond’s efforts on following the dossier still yielded nothing.
One day, the breakthrough didn't come from finding a clue. Instead, it came from the sheer, suffocating artificiality of everything he uncovered.
During a discreet conversation at a charity gala with a polished woman named Marie, listed as Alina’s closest confidante, Sturmhond noticed a jarring disconnect. When asked about Alina's favourite architectural styles, Marie had parroted a line about Morozova’s corporate headquarters, and her smile was rigid and practiced. The cafés where Alina supposedly spent her time were all owned by holding companies directly tied to Morozova’s conglomerate. Even the art galleries were the exact venues where Aleksander hosted his press conferences.
Sitting in his car on a rainy Tuesday evening, flipping through the high-gloss photographs in the dossier, the truth finally clicked in Sturmhond's mind. The path enlightened itself not by what was there, but by the glaring, suffocating artificiality of it all. Aleksander hadn't documented his wife’s actual preferences. He had documented the tightly controlled, high-society persona he had manufactured for her. The friends were curated chaperones. The favourite places were just locations where she had been forced to stand by his side.
"You idiot," Nikolai muttered to himself, a sharp grin breaking through his lips. He had been looking for the woman Morozova wanted her to be, not the woman she actually was.
Apparently, Alina hadn't been living a life. She had been living in a gilded cage. And when a bird escapes a cage, it doesn't fly to another branch of the same tree nearby. It flies as far away as its wings can carry it.
To find her, he had to look for the person she was before the Morozova name swallowed her whole.
He abandoned the high-society circles of Os Alta and began digging into the deep, neglected archives of Keramzin, the provincial childhood hometown listed on her older files. It took hours of bypassing outdated local government firewalls to unearth her high school records. There were no polished portraits there. Just grainy, low-resolution digital scans of a teenage Alina, looking pale and painfully thin, standing alongside her graduating class.
Sturmhond studied the faces of her old classmates one by one, cross-referencing their names with current residential registries in the capital. Most had stayed in the town, but one name flashed a match for a current address in the merchant district of Os Alta: Alexei.
An hour before midnight, Sturmhond slipped into a smoky, low-ceilinged pub tucked away in a cobblestone alley deep within the merchant district. The air smelled of stale ale and cheap tobacco. Alexei was behind the bar, wiping down the counter with a greasy rag, his face worn by years of hard labour. The pub was mostly empty, save for a few sleeping drunks in the corner booths.
Sturmhond slid onto a stool. His red hair was messy beneath a flat cap, and his green contacts caught the dim amber light of the bar. He ordered a double shot of local rye, downing it in one smooth motion before sliding a printed photograph across the damp wood. It wasn't the high-society portrait from Morozova's file. It was the grainy, cropped high school photo from Keramzin.
"Looking for a girl," Sturmhond said. "Goes by Alina. Heard she used to run in your circles back in the day."
Alexei picked up the paper, his eyes widening slightly before his expression quickly guarded itself. He let out a long, heavy breath, tossing the photo back onto the counter. "Alina. Bloody hell. I haven't seen that face since graduation day."
"You two were close?"
"We were classmates," Alexei said as he leaned his hands on the bar. "Look, mate, if she owes you money, or if you're a debt collector, you're wasting your breath. I know she got married. A couple of years back, it was all over the regional rags. Some filthy rich corporate titan from the capital swept her off her feet after college. After that, she vanished into the high life. Never wrote, never called. She completely cut ties with the old crowd."
Sturmhond leaned in slightly, his green eyes locked onto the bartender. "Any idea where she’d go if that high life fell apart? If she needed to hide?"
Alexei laughed out a dry, humourless sound. "From a bloke with that kind of money? She wouldn't come to me, I can tell you that much. But if she’s really on the run... she’d probably look for Mal."
Sturmhond’s brow furrowed. "Mal?"
"Malyen Oretsev," Alexei clarified, pouring himself a short drink. "They grew up together in the Keramzin orphanage. They used to be close, those two. If he had a shadow, it was Alina. Fiercely protective bloke. He absolutely loathed the corporate tycoon when he first started showing up with his fancy cars and slick promises. Mal told everyone the bloke was dangerous."
"And what happened to Oretsev?"
"He vanished," Alexei said simply, taking a sip. "Right around the time the wedding announcements were finalised. One day he was working the local timber yards, the next, his flat was completely cleared out. No forwarding address, no trace. Rumour was he took a hunting or farming job out west, but nobody ever heard from him again."
Sturmhond thanked the man, left a generous stack of notes on the counter, and slipped back out into the rainy night.
The name Malyen Oretsev was the first real thread he had pulled, but the moment he sat down at his secure terminal to run the name, he hit a massive brick wall. It took him three days of intense, exhaustive digging through ancient digital archives, military conscription lists, and provincial border crossings to confirm his suspicions. Malyen Oretsev didn't exist anymore. The paper trail ended abruptly four years ago, precisely matching the timeline of Alina’s marriage.
Sturmhond sat back, tapping his fingers rhythmically against the edge of his desk. A young, fiercely protective orphan doesn't just abandon his surrogate sister to a wealthy man he distrusts unless he is forced to. If Morozova wanted Alina completely isolated, he would have removed the single biggest obstacle in his path. Morozova must have threatened Oretsev, perhaps with a choice between stepping out of her life permanently or losing it entirely.
But a man like Oretsev wouldn't just hide in the next town over where Morozova’s corporate reach could easily grab him. He would leave the country entirely. He would probably even cross the true sea.
"Novyi Zem," Sturmhond whispered, a sharp smile breaking through his features.
The frontier nation of Novyi Zem was vast and notoriously lax with identity registration for immigrants looking to disappear. But finding a man who had changed his name in an entire continent was an improbable task without a logical anchor. Sturmhond began to think the other way around. Oretsev was a tracker and a woodsman by trade in Keramzin. A man doesn't change his core skills when he changes his identity; he uses what he knows to survive.
Sturmhond bypassed the standard passenger registries and dug into the Zemeni land grants and hunting permits from four years ago. He looked for single men of Ravkan origin who had registered for homesteading permits using common Ravkan aliases or anagrams, specifically focusing on those who had registered within a three-month window of Oretsev's disappearance.
After hours of cross-referencing, he found a match that made perfect sense: a homestead registered under the name Malachi Orton. It was a lazy, minimalist truncation of his real name, the exact kind of alias a hurried, desperate young man would choose when forging papers at a chaotic port. In fact, it was also probable that he chose that name just in case Alina needed to find him again. The permit was for a small, isolated plot of land in a sleepy rural town on the western edge of Novyi Zem, listed alongside a co-signer for a marriage license two years later to a woman named Ruby.
The piece of the puzzle was brilliant, but tracking a digital ghost across the sea required absolute secrecy. If Sturmhond booked a commercial flight or utilised standard travel visas, Morozova’s corporate surveillance networks would flag his departure instantly, and he would most likely breach the delicate security of his investigation once more.
It was time to play the rich heir again.
Shedding his Sturmhond persona entirely, Nikolai used his privilege both as the second son of the Lantsov conglomerate and an army reserve to clear a private, unlisted flight plan. He bypassed the public terminals of Os Alta entirely, arriving at a restricted military hangar in the dead of night.
His private, high-speed corporate jet was already fuelled and waiting on the tarmac, its sleek silver chassis glinting under the hangar lights. The flight crew had been hand-selected by Dominik, bound by strict non-disclosure agreements. No cargo manifests were logged, and the transponder was set to a private diplomatic frequency that masked his true destination from commercial tracking grids.
As the jet roared down the runway and lifted effortlessly into the night sky, climbing high above the rain clouds of Os Alta, Nikolai sat back in the plush leather seat of the cabin. He poured himself a glass of amber brandy, staring out of the window at the city lights fading into the distance below.
He was on the cusp of finding Malachi Orton, and through him, the real Alina Starkov.
The transition from the high-altitude luxury of the Lantsov jet to the raw, unyielding terrain of Novyi Zem was a deliberate regression. Nikolai didn't take a hire car from the airfield. Instead, he rented a dusty, unremarkable pick-up truck with cash, and changed back into the rugged teal attire of Sturmhond.
The drive into the western valleys took the better part of a day. The roads degenerated from cracked tarmac to packed dirt, winding through vast expanses of ancient pine forests that choked the horizon. The air here was different from the heavy, soot-choked smog of Os Alta. It was crisp, thin, and carried the sharp scent of damp earth and woodsmoke.
According to the land registry coordinates for 'Malachi Orton', the homestead sat on the outermost fringe of a sleepy, almost isolated rural town. Sturmhond didn't drive straight to the property. A good investigator never announced his arrival until he had mapped the exits.
He parked the truck half a mile away, deep within a thicket of weeping willows, and trekked the remaining distance on foot through the undergrowth. He climbed a gentle, grassy ridge that overlooked the valley, dropping low onto his stomach beneath the low-hanging branches of a cedar tree. He pulled a pair of heavy, military-grade binoculars from his pack, adjusting the focus wheels until the lens brought the modest wooden cottage into sharp, crystal-clear definition.
The house was weathered, its timber walls bleached by the fierce Zemeni sun, but it was far from derelict. A neatly tended vegetable garden ran along the eastern fence, and patches of wild, untamed lupins and cornflowers burst in vibrant blues and purples around the porch.
Through the glass, Sturmhond spotted the man first.
It was unmistakably Malyen Oretsev, though Novyi Zem had changed him. He was broader now, his skin tanned a deep, leathered brown, and a beard framed his jawline. He was splitting logs near the shed with easy, practiced swings. A moment later, a young woman with a wild braid of blonde hair, who Sturmhond believed to be Ruby, stepped out onto the porch. Perched securely on her hip was a chubby, dark-haired toddler, no more than a year old, clutching a wooden toy.
Sturmhond watched as Mal stopped his work, wiping his brow with the back of his hand as a soft, genuinely warm smile transformed his rugged face. He walked over, pressing a brief kiss to Ruby’s cheek and letting the child pull playfully at his beard. It was a domestic tableau of absolute peace, a life built from scratch, entirely off the grid.
Then, the front door swung open again, and Sturmhond's breath hitched sharply in his chest.
Alina stepped out onto the veranda, carrying a heavy wooden easel.
For the past one month, she had been nothing more than a ghost in a leather-bound folder. He had studied her face in high-resolution corporate portraits, in grainy high school scans, and in frozen surveillance stills. She had become an abstract puzzle, an intellectual obsession that kept him awake in the dead of night. But seeing her now, illuminated by the unfiltered golden light of the Zemeni afternoon, made Nikolai feel as though his entire world had suddenly tilted violently on its axis.
The high-society styling that used to be inflicted upon her was entirely gone. She wasn't wearing the suffocating silk dresses or the heavy diamond chokers that looked like elegant nooses. She wore a simple, oversized linen smock splattered with bright smudges of paint, her dark hair pinned up loosely with a wooden splinter, a few stray locks framing her face.
She looked warmer. The sickly, translucent pallor from the photographs had been replaced by a healthy, sun-kissed glow across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. As she set the easel down, Mal said something over his shoulder, and Alina laughed out a free, unburdened, melodic sound that carried across the quiet sky. Her smile was radiant, stretching all the way to her dark eyes, completely devoid of the rigid, fragile tension Sturmhond had noticed in the photographs.
Sturmhond lay perfectly still in the grass, his fingers tightening around the casing of the binoculars. His heart hammered a heavy, erratic rhythm against his ribs. She was beautiful in the photos, yes, but in person, alive and unmonitored in her natural element, she was utterly captivating. The sheer relief of seeing her safe, contrasted with the sudden, fierce spike of possessiveness that flared in his chest, left him temporarily breathless. She was right there. The prize he had been hunted for, the woman he had crossed an ocean to find, was a mere hundred yards away.
He watched her for another hour, observing her habits. She painted with focused and deliberate strokes; her fingers stained with vibrant oil paints as she captured the jagged line of the distant mountains. The dynamic between the three adults was strictly familial. Mal treated her with the protective, easy affection of an older brother, often nudging her shoulder playfully as he carried the split wood past her easel.
Once the sun began to dip below the mountain peaks and cast long, bruised shadows across the valley, Alina and the family retreated inside the cottage, the warm glow of oil lamps flickering through the windows.
Sturmhond packed away his binoculars. He needed confirmation of her local identity before he made his approach. He couldn't simply walk onto the property as a stranger without knowing the lie she was living under.
He walked back to his truck and drove into the heart of the small rural town. The settlement was tiny, only with a single dirt main street lined with a general store, a blacksmith, a feed depot, and a scattering of timber cottages. It was the sort of place where everyone knew their neighbours' business, which made it incredibly easy for a skilled investigator to extract information.
Sturmhond pulled up outside the general store, stepping out into the cool evening air. He adjusted his flat cap, adopting a slightly slow, rolling stride that suggested a traveling labourer looking for seasonal timber work.
An elderly man with a thick grey moustache and suspenders was sitting on a wooden bench on the porch of the store, smoking a carved wooden pipe. A wooden crate of fresh apples sat between them.
"Evening," Sturmhond said, leaning casually against the porch railing and tipping his cap. "Right quiet place you’ve got here."
The old man looked him up and down, taking a slow puff from his pipe. "Mmm. Keeps the trouble out. Mostly. You passing through, stranger?"
"Aye, looking for some short-term work in the valley yards," Sturmhond lied smoothly, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a silver coin, tossing it lightly in the air before catching it. He used the coin to purchase two apples from the crate, handing one to the old man as a gesture of goodwill. "I was driving up the western ridge earlier, saw a nice little homestead on the fringe. Broad chap splitting wood, had a blonde-haired lass with a bairn on the porch. Was wondering if he ever takes on extra hands for the clearing."
The old man accepted the apple, his expression softening slightly. "Ah, you’re talking about Malachi's place. Malachi Orton. Good lad, hard worker. Keeps to himself mostly, runs the traps and does some timber framing. No, he don't hire out. Barely makes enough to keep his own roof tight, though he’s doing better now he's got the little one."
"Fair enough," Sturmhond said, taking a crisp bite of his apple. "Saw another woman on the veranda too, setting up an easel. Didn't look like his wife. A relative, maybe?"
"Oh, that’d be Lana," the old man chuckled, shaking his head with a fond smile. "Lana’s his sister-in-law, or sister in spirit, depending on who you ask. Came out from the old country some months ago to live with 'em. Right mysterious lass, but sweet as honey. Mostly keeps to herself on that porch, painting those mountains of hers. Sells a landscape or two down at the market town when travellers pass through. The townsfolks leave her be. She’s a good girl, just likes her quiet."
Sturmhond nodded, registering the name with a sharp, internal click. It was a perfect, simple cover. A lazy, defensive abbreviation of Alina, close enough to her real name that she wouldn't hesitate if someone called out to her in the street, but distant enough to keep the Morozova hounds off her scent. To this entire town, she wasn't a runaway high-society architect or the missing wife of a corporate billionaire. She was just Lana, the quiet painter who lived with the Ortons.
"Lana," Sturmhond repeated thoughtfully, letting the name roll over his tongue. "A pretty name for an artist. Well, shame about the timber work, but I appreciate the chatter, old man."
"Safe travels, son," the neighbour called out as Sturmhond stepped off the porch.
Sturmhond walked back to his truck, the darkness of the valley closing in around him. He had everything he needed. He knew her location, he knew her protectors, he knew her alias, and he had seen the genuine, unforced joy on her face when she was free from Morozova’s shadow. The logical phase of the search was entirely complete. The target had been thoroughly acquired. All that was left now was to step out of the shadows and let her see his face.
The morning after his conversation with the old neighbour, Sturmhond set his plan into motion. He couldn't simply walk onto the property as a high-priced investigator. He needed an infiltration that allowed him to buy time. He told himself it was standard operational caution, a necessity to observe the target's psychological state before initiating contact. But deep down, as the memory of Alina’s radiant, unburdened laughter from the day before echoed in his mind, he knew the truth: he just wanted a reason to stay near her.
He drove the pick-up truck to the edge of the property, then cut the engine. Adopting a weary, slightly down-on-his-luck posture, he walked up the gravel path. He had chosen the alias Nikita Akkerman he hoped wouldn't draw any attention in the town.
Malachi Orton was already by the woodpile, a heavy iron axe resting against his shoulder as he watched the stranger approach. His posture was instantly defensive, his sharp blue eyes narrowing as Sturmhond halted a respectful distance away.
"Morning," Sturmhond said, wiping a bead of sweat from his forehead, deliberately letting a rough, traveling labourer’s cadence colour his voice. "Name’s Nikita. I’m passing through from the coast, looking to settle down in the valley. Funds are running a bit thin, and the old chap at the general store mentioned you did timber framing. Was wondering if you needed an extra pair of hands for clearing or hauling. I don't ask for much, just enough to cover a bit of food and a dry place to sleep."
Mal eyed him with deep suspicion, his knuckles white on the axe handle. "I don't hire out, mate. I run this place myself. Don't have the coin to pay a hand."
"I don't need coin upfront," Sturmhond countered smoothly, offering a self-deprecating grin. "Just a roof. I can haul, split, and do basic maintenance. Served a bit of time in the army back home, so I know how to handle a heavy workload."
Mal opened his mouth to refuse, but the kitchen door creaked open. Ruby stepped out onto the porch, wiping her hands on a tea towel. She looked at Sturmhond’s dusty clothes, then at her husband’s stubborn expression. "Malachi," she called out softly. "The west fence is still broken from the storm, and you've got three timber orders to finish by Friday. We could use the help, and we have a guest room that is empty."
Mal let out a long, defeated sigh. He looked back at Sturmhond, pointing a stern finger at him. "One week. If you slack off, or if you cause any trouble, you're out on your ear. Understand?"
"Crystal clear," Sturmhond said, suppressing a victorious smile.
For the first three days, Nikita proved himself to be a flawless worker. His training as a soldier and his natural athleticism made the gruelling manual labour easy. He cleared thickets, repaired the broken fences, and split logs until his shoulders ached, earning a begrudging nod of approval from Mal.
But throughout it all, he kept his distance from Alina. She spent her days on the porch or at the edge of the meadow, completely absorbed in her canvas. Nikita only looked at her from afar, and his heart did a strange, fluttering dance whenever the sun caught the dark strands of her hair. He didn't know how or when to interrupt her quiet time, terrified that a single wrong move might shatter the fragile sanctuary she had built for herself.
One afternoon, the dynamic shifted.
Nikita was washing his hands at the outdoor pump when Ruby called out from the kitchen window. "Nik! Come inside a minute, would you? I need an extra pair of hands with the dinner prep."
He dried his hands on his trousers and stepped into the warm, fragrant kitchen. Ruby was standing by the wooden table, chopping root vegetables while her toddler napped in a wicker basket in the corner. As Nikita took a knife to begin peeling potatoes, he noticed Ruby watching him with a sly, knowing smile.
"You're a hard worker, Nik," Ruby began, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "But your eyes wander a lot when you think no one's looking."
Nikita paused, his thumb pressing into the skin of a potato. A sudden jolt of adrenaline spiked through his veins. As an investigator, being caught watching a target was a critical failure, and it could end in his own tragic death. "I'm not sure what you mean," he murmured carefully.
"Oh, don't you play daft with me," Ruby chuckled, nudging his elbow playfully. "You've been casting glances at our Lana since the moment you walked onto this land. Every time she walks past, you look like a puppy hoping for a scrap from the table."
Deep down, a profound wave of relief washed over him. He internally breathed a massive sigh of thankfulness. It was an absolute blessing that his intense, analytical obsession had been misinterpreted as a simple, innocent crush rather than the calculated surveillance of a high-priced detective.
"Is it that obvious?" Nikita asked, letting a genuine, embarrassed flush colour his cheeks as he played along.
"To a woman? Absolutely," Ruby said, leaning against the counter. "So, what is it? You like her?"
Nikita looked down at the knife in his hands. He opened his mouth to deliver a fabricated, scripted line about his fictional attraction, but as the words began to form, he found himself drowning in the reality of his own emotions. "She’s... unlike anyone I’ve ever met," he said softly, his voice dropping its rough edge entirely, replaced by a raw, unvarnished sincerity. "There's a strength in her that she doesn't even seem to realise she has. When she looks at those mountains, or when she laughs... it feels like the rest of the world just goes quiet. I can't seem to take my eyes off her."
He froze internally, realising with a shock that he wasn't acting anymore. The words coming out of his mouth weren't a clever script produced by his brain to maintain his cover; they were the absolute, terrifying truth of what he felt.
Ruby’s eyes lit up with romantic excitement. "I knew it! Oh, she needs someone like you, Nik. Someone gentle who sees her for who she is." Before Nikolai could object, Ruby turned toward the back door and called out loudly, "Lana! Darling, can you come inside? I need you to wash the greens!"
A moment later, Lana stepped into the kitchen. She wiped her paint-stained fingers on her apron, her dark eyes shifting from Ruby to Nikita. When her gaze met his, she offered a slightly stiff and reserved smile. It clearly was a defensive mechanism of a woman who had spent years being handled by a controller.
"Actually," Ruby said, suddenly picking up her sleeping child from the basket with a terribly unsubstantiated air of urgency. "The little one just stirred. I need to take him upstairs for a change. You two finish up here, yeah?"
With a dramatic swirl of her skirts, Ruby vanished up the wooden stairs, leaving a heavy, loaded silence in the kitchen.
Alina stood by the sink, looking uncertain. Nikolai looked at her, his eyes softened by the dim indoor light. He felt a desperate urge to break the ice, to wash away the stiffness of her smile.
"She’s not very subtle, is she?" Nikolai said, his voice laced with a warm, self-deprecating amusement.
Alina blinked, then a small, genuine amusement cracked through her guarded expression. "Ruby means well. She just... thinks everyone should be as happily paired up as she and Mal are."
"Well, I can't exactly blame her for trying," Nikolai said, setting his knife down and turning fully toward her. "Though I must apologise if my presence is an intrusion. I noticed you painting earlier. I don't know much about art—I'm just a bloke who works with his hands—but what you're creating out there... it genuinely moved my soul. You capture the mountains like they're alive, like… they're a secret only you know."
Alina froze, her dark eyes widening slightly. Then, a sudden, bright laugh escaped her lips. It was a free, unburdened sound that made Nikolai feel as though the sun had risen inside the cramped kitchen just for him.
"You're a terrible flatterer, Nikita," she said, her cheeks flushing a beautiful, warm pink. "But thank you. No one has ever described my work like that before."
"I only speak the truth," he said softly.
From that afternoon onward, the ice completely melted. They began talking during the quiet moments of the evening, sitting on the porch steps while the fireflies began to dance in the grass. Nikolai found himself becoming dangerously, completely comfortable with this new persona. He loved the way Alina looked at Nikita with growing trust, loved the way her sharp wit matched his own banter. Mal watched their growing closeness with a dark, protective scowl, clearly uncomfortable with a stranger getting so close to his sister, but Ruby always dragged him away by his arm, singing praises about how hardworking and devoted ‘Nikita’ was.
Two weeks later, the beautiful fantasy collapsed into a nightmare.
It was a brilliant, humid afternoon, and Nikolai had offered to help Alina carry her heavy art supplies deeper into the ancient woods, where she wanted to capture the light filtering through a hidden waterfall. They walked deep into the canopy, laughing and teasing one another. Once they found the perfect clearing, Alina set up her canvas, completely losing herself in her work. Nikolai stayed nearby, gathering fallen timber and firewood to haul it back to the barn once she finished.
As the afternoon began to wane, Nikolai walked back over to her easel. He couldn't resist the urge to provoke her, to see that radiant smile again. He reached out, subtly dipping the tip of his index finger into a dollop of bright sunshine yellow paint on her palette, and swiftly flicked it across her freckled cheek.
Alina gasped, her hand flying to her face as she looked at the yellow smudge. "You did not just do that!"
"I believe it improves the composition immensely, sunshine," Nikolai taunted, his eyes flashing with a wicked, playful arrogance.
"Oh, you're going to pay for that, Akkerman!" she cried out. With a fierce, determined grin, she lunged forward, intending to smear her paint-covered hands across his chest.
Nikolai laughed, stepping backward to evade her attack, but his boot caught the edge of a jagged rock hidden beneath the moss. His balance shattered. He tumbled backward into the thick, lush grass of the forest floor, and with a sharp cry of surprise, Alina fell directly on top of him.
The laughter died instantly.
The forest around them seemed to fall into a dead, breathless silence. Alina lay flushed against his chest. Her hands rested against his shoulders and her dark hair fell completely free from its wooden pin, cascading around their faces like a silk veil. Nikolai’s hands instinctively came up to rest on her waist, his palms burning through the thin linen of her smock dress.
The line between his identities began to blur. He looked up into her dark eyes, and the sheer, agonising desperation of his love for her hit him like a physical blow.
He wanted her. He wanted her with a desperation that terrified him.
Not as a case file, not as a contract, but as the air he breathed. The clever heir and the calculating detective were utterly obliterated, leaving nothing but a man completely consumed by the woman holding him down.
Alina didn't pull away. Her breath hitched as her eyes dropped to his lips and her body trembled.
It was then that Nikolai tilted his head up, closing the remaining distance, and pressed his lips to hers.
Alina froze for a fraction of a second, a silent, internal war flashing through her posture as the ghosts of her past threatened to claw her back. But then, with a soft whimpering sigh that broke against his tongue, she surrendered completely. She kissed him back.
The kiss was an absolute storm of pent-up longing and raw, unvarnished devotion. It was a beautiful, desperate devouring of one another’s lips, time dilating and slowing down until the rest of the world ceased to exist. Nikolai’s hand moved up to cup the back of her neck, fingers tangling in her dark hair to pull her impossibly closer as his tongue slid past her teeth, claiming her with a fierce, protective passion. She melted into him, her lips parting eagerly against his, tasting of sweet summer air and absolute freedom.
A sudden sharp crack of thunder shattered the heavens above them, and within seconds, a torrential tropical downpour began to slam through the canopy, drenching them in cold rain.
They broke apart, gasping for air as their clothes instantly soaked through. But instead of panic, they both burst into breathless, euphoric laughter. Nikolai scrambled to his feet, grabbing her heavy easel and paintbox in one large sweep, while Alina gathered her canvas, shielding it beneath her apron. Together, they ran through the blinding sheets of rain, sprinting across the muddy meadow and bursting through the back door of the homestead.
The house was empty that day. Mal and Ruby had taken the truck into the market town earlier. Drenched and shivering, Nikolai led her straight toward the guest room where he had been staying. It was a private sanctuary; Nikolai had always insisted on cleaning the room himself, so neither Mal or Ruby ever set foot inside.
"Go on, use the washroom first to dry off," Nikolai said, his voice thick with emotion as he set her dripping art supplies by the wall. "I'll grab some dry blankets."
Alina nodded, her eyes lingering on him with a soft, residual heat before she vanished into the small adjoining bathroom, closing the door behind her.
Nikolai pulled off his dripping jacket, tossing it into the corner. He walked over to his canvas duffel bag resting on the table near the window, intending to pull out a dry shirt. But as he opened the zipper, his things fell to the floor messily.
On the floor now lay his leather-bound investigator’s notebook. And resting right beside it was his contact lens case, along with the binoculars and the high-tech, encrypted sleek black burner phone he used for his international intelligence routing.
Before his brain could process the danger, the bathroom door clicked open.
Alina stepped out, a rough towel wrapped around her wet hair. "Nikita, I think the rain stopped the—"
Her voice cut off abruptly.
Nikolai turned around, his heart stopping dead in his chest.
Alina had stopped in her tracks. Her gaze had dropped to the floor beside the bed. She walked over slowly, as if in a trance, and knelt down in the dim light. Her trembling fingers reached out, picking up the encrypted burner phone. The screen had lit up from the moisture, displaying the active, unread logs of his international network. Right at the top of the recent dial list, stamped in cold digital text, was the name: MOROZOVA.
Beside it lay the open pages of the notebook, detailing her habits, her aliases, even her old school records from Keramzin.
The silence in the room became a suffocating, crushing weight.
Alina rose to her feet slowly, her face draining of every drop of its warm, sun-kissed colour until she looked as sickly pale as the day she had fled Os Alta. She turned her head, lifting her dark eyes to meet his.
When her eyes were locked onto his own, they were glassy with unshed tears, and her features were twisted into a mask of profound, agonising betrayal that pierced straight through Nikolai’s chest like a jagged blade. The trust, the warmth, the beautiful love that had bloomed between them over the past two weeks vanished, replaced by a cold, hollow terror.
She looked at him, not at her gentle friend Nikita, but at the monster who had hunted her down across an ocean to sell her back to her captor.
"You..." she whispered, her voice a fragile, broken shard of glass that tore through the quiet room. "It was all a lie."
The words hung in the damp air, heavy as a funeral shroud. The look in her eyes cut deeper than any blade he’d faced in dark alleys, and her quiet devastation left a wound no bullet could match.
"It wasn't a lie," Nikolai said, his voice coming out strained and desperate as he stepped forward, his hands raised in an instinctual plea for her to stay. "Alina, listen to me. Yes, I lied about my name, I lied about how I found this place, but what happened between us—what we have—that wasn't a lie. I swear to you, none of that was an act. It was–"
Alina didn't back down. The fragile, quiet painter named Lana vanished, replaced by a woman consumed by a feral, white-hot fury. She stepped directly into his space, her breath hitching in her throat and her chest heaved with deep, ragged gasps. Before he could even finish his sentence, her hand flashed through the dim light of the room.
"You lying bastard!" she screamed, her voice cracking with a terrifying mixture of rage and absolute agony.
The sound of her fist connecting with his cheekbone was sharp and loud, stronger than what you would expect coming from a small woman like her. The sheer force of the blow snapped Nikolai’s head to the side, and a dull, throbbing ache instantly bloomed across his jaw.
Nikolai winced, slowly turning his face back to look at her. He didn't raise a hand to touch the bruise already forming on his skin. He just swallowed hard. "Okay," he murmured quietly, his voice thick with a heavy, unshielded remorse. "Yeah. I deserve that."
"You deserve the absolute worst!" Alina cried out, the tears finally spilling over her lashes, tracking hot and fast down her porcelain cheeks.
She couldn't look at him for another second. Suffocating under the weight of his betrayal, she turned on her heel and bolted from the room. The back door slammed open, and she ran straight out into the elements, disappearing into the torrential, blinding sheets of the storm that was still lashing the valley.
"Alina! Wait!" Nikolai shouted, his heart leaping into his throat.
He didn't hesitate. He burst through the door right after her, plunging into the freezing, relentless downpour. The rain instantly soaked through his thin shirt, plastering his hair to his forehead. He could barely see through the grey curtain of water, but he spotted her white dress cutting through the tall, muddy grass of the meadow, running blindly toward the tree line of the deep woods.
"Alina, stop! Come back inside!" he yelled, his voice competing with the booming thunder that rolled across the mountain peaks.
She didn't look back. She kept running, her boots slipping in the slick, muddy earth. But Nikolai was faster, his long strides eating up the distance between them in seconds. He caught up to her just at the fringe of the forest, and his arm reached out and wrapped firmly around her waist, pulling her momentum to a sudden, jarring halt.
"Let me go!" she shrieked, twisting violently in his grip. "Get your hands off me!"
She rebelled with every ounce of strength she possessed, throwing her weight backward, kicking her legs, and turning around to strike him. Nikolai didn't let go. He clamped his arms around her, locking her against his chest to keep her from hurting herself or running further into the dark, treacherous woods.
"Alina, calm down. Please, just listen to me for one second," he begged, his chest heaving as the rain poured over them.
"No! No!" she screamed. Her fists rained down on his chest, his shoulders, his collarbones. She hit him over and over again with frantic, desperate blows until her knuckles were bruised against his solid frame. When her arms grew tired, she leaned forward in a blind, panicked frenzy, parting her lips to bite fiercely into his forearm right through his damp sleeve.
Nikolai grunted in pain, but he held fast, tightening his embrace until she was pinned securely against him, her breath sobbing out against his neck. He knew it was now or never. He had to strip away every single layer of deceit before he lost her completely.
"I was hired by your husband," Nikolai said, his voice raw and completely unmasked. "I am a private investigator, okay? Morozova paid me a fortune to track you down across the ocean to bring you back to Os Alta. That is the truth."
Alina stiffened in his arms, her head snapping up, her eyes wide with a terrifying, hollow despair. "I knew it," she choked out, her voice dripping with venomous heartbreak. "You're going to drag me back to that prison. You're going to hand me over to him like a piece of stolen property."
"No, I'm not!" Nikolai yelled desperately. "I'm not taking you back, Alina. I knew the moment I saw you on that porch that I could never give you back to him."
"Why should I believe you?" she shrieked, pushing against his chest with all her remaining strength, her face slick with a mixture of cold rain and hot tears. "You're a hunter! You do this for money! If Sasha offers you more, you will slide those handcuffs on me and pack me into your jet without a single drop of regret!"
"No, I won't!" Nikolai roared back, the sheer intensity of his voice causing her to flinch. He gripped her upper arms, forcing her to look at him until his face was only inches away from hers in the middle of the howling storm. "I don't care about his money. I will protect you from him with my own life, Alina. I will tear his entire world down before I ever let him touch you again."
"Why?" she screamed, her voice cracking as she shook her head in blind denial. "Why would you do that for me? You don't even know me!"
"Because I love you!" he shouted into the rain.
The words hung between them, heavy and undeniable, louder than the thunder clattering above the valley.
Alina’s entire body went completely slack. The fight drained out of her all at once, her knees buckling beneath her weight. Nikolai caught her instantly, gathering her tightly against his frame as she broke down completely, sobbing so hard that her chest racked against his. She buried her face into the crook of his neck, her hands clutching at the fabric of his soaked shirt as she wept from the very depths of her soul.
Nikolai held her close, his arms wrapping around her like a shield against the rest of the world. He stood there in the pouring rain, letting her cry, fingers gently stroking through her tangled wet hair. He leaned his head down, pressing his lips against the crown of her head, murmuring soft, breathless apologies into the damp strands. "I'm sorry," he whispered over and over again, his voice breaking. "I am so sorry, sunshine. I’m so sorry."
After a long while, when her heavy sobs began to subside into quiet, shivering gasps, Nikolai gently pulled back just enough to look down at her.
"Come back inside with me," he said, his voice dropping to the softest, most tender cadence he had ever used to anyone in his entire life. "Please, Alina. You're freezing. Let's go back to the house, and I promise you, I will tell you everything. No more lies."
Alina didn't answer verbally, but she didn't pull away either. She let him guide her by the waist, her shivering body leaning into his side for warmth as they walked slowly back through the mud and into the quiet, empty house.
They retreated back into the guest room, where the air inside was still warm and dry compared to the tempest outside. Nikolai guided her to the edge of his bed, ensuring she sat down safely. He immediately went to the washroom to retrieve a large, plush dry towel. Then he knelt on the floor in front of her, gently taking the towel and beginning to dry her wet hair. His movements were incredibly careful, as if she were made of the finest, most fragile glass. Although, considering how he already did break her with the truth, it was needed for him to take careful care of her.
Alina sat quietly, her hands clasped in her lap, watching him through her dark long lashes. As he reached up to gently wipe a stray droplet of rain from her temple, her gaze locked onto his.
"Stop looking at me like that," she whispered.
Nikolai paused, the towel draped over his hands. "Like what?"
Truth be told, they were sitting so close that he could see his own reflection caught in the dark, glassy depths of her irises. So, he knew what she meant, because he knew exactly what he looked like now—the raw devotion, the fierce tenderness, the absolute adoration written across every line of his face.
"Like I'm not a job anymore," she murmured, a solitary tear escaping her eye.
"You stopped being a job the very first moment I saw you," Nikolai answered instantly, his voice rich with an unshakeable conviction. "Before I even spoke a single word to you."
Alina let out a small, sceptical snort, looking down at her hands. "I don't know what to believe anymore. I don't even know who you are. Your eyes... they aren't even the right colour, are they?"
Nikolai swallowed, then reached up with steady fingers. He carefully pinched the thin, green contact lenses from his eyes, placing them into the small plastic case on the table. When he looked back at her, the artificial green was gone, replaced by his genuine sharp hazel eyes. Clear and blazing with a brilliant golden warmth now turned softer as he stared at her.
"No, they aren't," he said softly. "And my hair isn't naturally red, either. It's blond."
Alina looked up, her eyes studying the sharp lines of his jaw and the light catching his hair. A tiny, fragile ghost of a smile touched her lips. "Yeah... I actually noticed that one a couple of days ago. I saw the blond roots coming in near the crown."
Nikolai let out a soft, genuine laugh, his shoulders relaxing slightly. "A brilliant investigator you are, sunshine. Put me right to shame." His expression turned serious again, his hazel eyes locking onto hers. "I'm going to tell you everything now, alright? My name isn't Nikita Akkerman. That was a made-up identity so I can work near you. The identity I use in the shadows, the one Morozova hired, is Sturmhond. But my real name... my birth name, is Nikolai Lantsov."
Alina’s eyes went wide, her breath catching sharply. "Lantsov? As in... the Lantsov? The shipping and aviation empire?"
"The very same," Nikolai nodded, offering a faint, self-deprecating smirk. "I am the second son. The spare heir. My family’s world is built on boardrooms, political arrangements, and pristine public relations. It can be fascinating, but it can also be tiring. So, I ran away into the shadows to play. I created Sturmhond because I wanted the thrill of the chase, because I wanted to use my skills to actually help finding missing people, and frankly, because I wanted to be entirely free from a world that wanted to own me."
He reached out, covering her small, cold hands with his large, warmer palms. "I didn't take this job because I needed your husband’s money. I am rich, Alina. So when you say I would hand you back to him for a higher fee... it’s simply not true. He couldn't offer me anything I don't already have."
Alina looked down at their joined hands, her voice trembling as the dark reality of her past clawed its way back into her throat. "Well... in this case, your job was only helping him find me so he can kill me." She lifted her eyes, and they were blazing with an undeniable fierce fire despite the terror behind them. "He told me he would rather see me in a casket than see me walk out of his house. If you take me back to him... I won't even make it to the divorce court, Nikolai. He will kill me. He’ll make it look like an accident, or a sudden suicide brought on by my 'hysteria,' but he will kill me. He’s done it before to people who crossed him."
A cold, dangerous rage flickered through Nikolai’s hazel eyes at the mention of the threats, but he quickly softened it as he looked at her. "I promise you, on my life, I will never let that happen. I know I messed up. I should have told you the truth, but I won’t let you down ever again."
Alina’s lips trembled, and another sob broke from her chest. "I'm so scared, Nikolai. Every time I think I'm safe, his shadow just finds me again."
Nikolai couldn't bear the distance anymore. He moved up onto the bed, instinctively pulling her back into his arms and wrapping his strong body around hers as she clung to him once more. "I'm here now," he murmured against her temple. "I’ve got you."
He rested his chin on her head, staring out the window at the fading storm. "I know I’m being incredibly selfish for saying this," he muttered quietly, voice laced with a heavy desperation. "But I can't let you go now. I can't leave you alone out here. Even if I go back to Os Alta and tell your husband that the trail went cold, he won't stop. He will just hire another detective, someone sharper, someone who doesn't care about the truth, and they will find this valley. I can't live with that risk."
Alina pulled back slightly, looking up at his sharp profile. "Then what do we do? How do we stop him?"
Nikolai looked down at her, a calculated spark igniting in his hazel eyes. "I have the resources to make us both permanently disappear. I can fake both of our deaths and use my vast fortunes and intelligence networks to forge new identities that even Morozova could never crack. We could leave all of this behind. We could run away together, anywhere you want to go. North, South, anywhere."
Alina stared at him, her heart hammering a frantic and wild rhythm against her ribs. "You... you would do that for me? You would leave your entire life behind just to run with me?"
"In a heartbeat," Nikolai said, his voice dropping to a gravelly intense whisper. "My life was an empty performance before I walked onto this porch, Alina. You are the only thing in this world that feels entirely real to me. I would burn the entire world to ashes just to keep you warm, and I mean it literally."
There was silence on Alina’s part for seconds long enough to make Nikolai flinch, but he was not going to take his words back.
He watched her face, bracing for another strike, or worse, a cold retreat. But Alina didn’t move. She was looking at him, truly looking at him, not as the phantom investigator who had invaded her sanctuary, but as the man who had just offered his entire existence as a shield. He tracked the slight tremor in her lower lip, the way her chest rose and fell in ragged, uneven drafts. For all his intelligence, he couldn’t parse the exact train of thought running through her head, but he could read the sheer exhaustion in her posture and what, he hoped, was a terrifying wave of relief as well as acceptance that a man who had tracked her down was also the one willing to tear the world apart to keep her safe.
The air between them felt thick, charged with a volatile residue of her tears and his desperate confession. The silence was a suffocating pressure, an inevitable breaking point of a wire that had been pulled far too taut. He didn’t dare breathe, didn’t dare reach out, completely at the mercy of whatever judgment she was about to pass on him. He had stripped away Nikita Akkerman, he had discarded Sturmhond, and he was left entirely naked before her, waiting to see if she would cast him out into the rain or let him stay.
He saw the exact moment her focus shifted from the documents on the floor back to the hazel of his eyes. There was an edge to her gaze now, something sharp and borderline voracious that made his pulse spike.
It was Alina who reached up then, her movements sudden and fierce, catching him entirely off guard as her fingers tangled into his damp hair to pull his lips down to meet hers.
This kiss was entirely different from the one in the woods, and Nikolai felt the shock of it straight to his bones. There were no more hesitation, no more hidden identities or lingering shadows of deceit between them. It was an absolute surrender, a fierce, burning declaration of possession and relief. He could taste the salt of her tears and the raw, punishing heat of her mouth; it was an angry, demanding thing on her part, an outlet for the trauma of her past and the bitter shock of his deceit. But to him, it was a beautiful, desperate lifeline. He met her volatility with an absolute surrender, an unspoken vow that he would let her break him in pieces if it meant she would keep him. He let out a low, ragged groan into her mouth, his arms tightening around her waist as he lifted her effortlessly, shifting her body until she was sitting flush across his lap.
He devoured her mouth, tongue sliding past her lips with a deep, intoxicating hunger that made his own head spin. She arched her back, pressing her chest against his, and her hands moved down to frantically grip the fabric of his damp shirt, needing to feel the solid, unyielding heat of his skin.
Nikolai broke the kiss for a fraction of a second, his breath hitching as his lips tracked a burning path down her jawline to the sensitive skin of her throat. He sucked gently at the base of her neck, earning a soft, breathless gasp from her lips that fired a current of pure unadulterated heat straight down his spine.
"Nikolai..." she whimpered, her fingers digging into his shoulders.
The sound of his real name on her lips completely shattered his remaining restraint. He reached down to grip the hem of her simple linen smock dress, lifted it smoothly up and over her head, then tossed the garment onto the floor. Now Alina sat before him in nothing but her simple cotton undergarments. Her alabaster skin flushed a beautiful, radiant pink in the warm amber light of the room. Nikolai’s gaze raked over her, filled with a profound, reverent awe that made him realise how much he wanted to worship her for the rest of his life.
With trembling and eager fingers, Alina reached for the buttons of his shirt, popping them open one by one until she could push the wet fabric off his broad shoulders. Her palms pressed against his bare chest, feeling the frantic, heavy thudding of his heart and the hard, sculpted lines of his muscles.
Nikolai wasted no time discarding the rest of their clothes. His movements were frantic and clumsy with a desperate, overriding need to be skin-to-skin. When they were both completely bare, he shifted her back onto the soft mattress, looming over her like a golden protective light.
He leaned down so his lips met hers again in a deep, slow, reassuring kiss while his long fingers traced a path down her side, cupping the soft curve of her hip. Alina parted her thighs instinctively, her legs wrapping around his waist to pull him down into the cradle of her hips.
As Nikolai aligned his body with hers, he paused, his hazel eyes locking onto her dark ones to search for any lingering trace of fear. He wanted to ensure she knew this wasn’t an acquisition, but a shared sanctuary. "Alina," he whispered, his voice rough and thick with a fierce, protective love. "Look at me."
She lifted her gaze, her eyes clear and burning with an absolute, unshakeable trust. Her hands came up to cradle his face and she slowly nodded.
With a slow, deliberate thrust, Nikolai slid inside her and filled her completely.
Alina let out a sharp, breathless cry, her eyes fluttering shut as her fingers dug deep into the muscles of his back. The sensation was overwhelming, a thick, swelling heat that seemed to fuse their souls together in the quiet room. Nikolai froze for a moment, letting her body adjust to him while his chest heaved as he fought to maintain his control. He leaned down, kissing away the tears of sheer intensity that pricked the corners of her eyes, murmuring soft, adoration-filled praises against her lips.
Then, he began to move.
He moved with a slow, powerful rhythm, each deep stroke driving them further away from the terrors of Os Alta and deeper into the sanctuary they were building together. Alina arched into his touch, her cries muffled against his shoulder as she met his pace, her body melting completely beneath his weight. The world outside the guest room faded into absolute nothingness. There was no corporate billionaire, no trackers, no fake names. There was only the slick, sliding heat of their bodies, the ragged sound of their shared breaths, and the beautiful, overwhelming reality of their love.
Nikolai lost himself completely in her. He broke his own rules of calculated detachment, letting his heart run wild as he drove harder, faster, locking his fingers with hers against the mattress. The pleasure built within them like a rising, irresistible tide, an encroaching undertow that pulled the air out of their lungs. Every touch was a feverish rhythm that left them entirely weightless. Alina tightened around him with a sudden clamping gasp and her entire body trembled as her climax shattered over her.
Hearing her call his name as she broke, Nikolai let out a low, guttural roar, delivering one final, deep thrust before his own release tore through him, pouring himself into her as the remaining tension of his old life completely dissolved.
He collapsed softly against her, keeping most of his weight on his elbows as they both lay gasping for air, their skin slick with sweat and their hearts beating a wild, matching rhythm. Nikolai buried his face in her damp hair, holding her so tightly in his arms that not even a breath of air could come between them.
The days that followed the rain bled into a breathless, suspended reality. Inside the weathered wooden cottage on the edge of the western valley, the illusion of Nikita Akkerman dissolved completely, leaving only Nikolai. Yet, to Malachi and Ruby, he maintained the necessary front. He still chopped the wood, still repaired the timber framing, and still earned his keep with the disciplined precision of a former soldier. But behind the closed door of the guest room or Alina’s room, in the quiet hours when the rest of the homestead slept, he belonged entirely to Alina.
They spent the remaining weeks of the month building a fragile fortress out of stolen moments. When she painted on the veranda, he would find excuses to work nearby, and his eyes would constantly trace the elegant curve of her spine, the focused intensity in her dark eyes, and the way the sun caught the gold threads of her hair. When Mal wasn't looking, Nikolai would slip behind her easel, his fingers lightly brushing against her hip, leaving a trailing wire of heat through her clothes that never failed to make her breath hitch.
They spoke in whispers about the future, about the vastness of the world outside Ravka and Novyi Zem. They talked of Kerch, of the bustling, chaotic streets of Ketterdam where money was the only true law and a brilliant private investigator with a massive hidden fortune could easily set up a new agency under a dozen different names. They talked of disappearing into the southern coastlines, where the sun was warm enough to permanently melt the lingering frost Aleksander Morozova had left in her bones. It was a beautiful, intoxicating dream.
Then came the final morning. The exact conclusion of the two-month deadline.
The morning sun was just beginning to peek through the cheap plastic blinds of the guest room, casting long, golden bars of light across the rumpled bed. The air in the room was cool, carrying the scent of damp pine from the valley, raising faint goosebumps on Nikolai’s bare shoulders. He lay on his side, his arm thrown possessively over Alina’s bare waist as his fingers rested against the soft flare of her hip.
He hadn't slept. His eyes were wide open, staring fixedly at the wooden slats of the ceiling. For hours, he had simply listened to the rhythmic, comforting sound of Alina’s breathing, and felt her body warm and soft where it was pressed entirely against his side. He had memorised the exact feel of her, knowing that the clock was ticking down to the precise second.
At exactly seven o'clock, the sudden, harsh vibration of his encrypted burner phone shattered the morning silence.
Nikolai didn't need to look at the screen. He knew who it was. Sixty days to the minute. Aleksander Morozova was calling to collect his prize.
The persistent, rhythmic buzzing woke Alina. She stirred against his chest, a soft, sleepy groan escaping her lips as her dark eyelashes fluttered open. For a fraction of a second, her eyes were clear and peaceful, filled with the warmth of the man holding her. But as the mechanical rattle of the phone continued to vibrate through the wood, the peace vanished. Her face drained of every drop of its sun-kissed colour, turning into a sickly, translucent ashen.
She sat up slowly, clutching the white sheet up to her chest, though the fabric did little to hide the flush on her skin or the faint marks Nikolai’s possessive fingers had left on her shoulders during the frantic, passionate hours of the night before. She stared at the vibrating phone as if it were a venomous viper coiled on the table. Then, slowly, with a raw, agonising vulnerability, she turned her head to look at him.
She looked at him expectantly, her breath caught in her throat. The weight of their shared nakedness, the absolute truth of what they had become to each other, hung heavily in the narrow space between them. There was a desperate, silent question in her dark eyes, waiting for him to make the final call.
The phone continued to buzz like a relentless executioner’s axe hovering over their sanctuary.
Nikolai didn't hesitate. His fingers were entirely steady as he reached across her, his bare chest brushing against her shoulder as he picked up the sleek black device. He looked at the glowing numbers of the Morozova's line, and his hazel eyes hardened into flints of pure ice. With a smooth, deliberate motion of his thumb, he hit the red button, cutting the connection instantly.
He broke the phone with a sharp snap to silence it permanently, then tossed the pieces face down on the nightstand.
Alina let out a shaky, ragged breath, her shoulders sagging with relief. But before she could speak a single word, Nikolai moved. He shifted his weight with a deliberate, predatory grace, crawling across the mattress until he loomed directly over her. He slid over her body, knees anchoring firmly on either side of her hips, and stepped inside her willingly parted legs until the heat of his groin pressed against the centre of her thighs.
He reached down, fingers gripping the white sheet she was clutching, and pulled it completely away from her body. He tossed it to the foot of the bed, leaving absolutely nothing between them. Alina gasped softly at the sudden exposure, her skin prickling in the cool morning air, but she didn't shrink away. She arched her back slightly; her dark eyes locked onto his as Nikolai leaned down and hovered just inches above her face. His hazel eyes were dark, burning with a fierce, absolute finality that bordered on madness.
"I’m not giving you back to him," Nikolai murmured, his voice husky, rough, and vibrating with an unshakeable conviction. "Not today. Not ever."
Alina exhaled shakily, her hands coming up to rest against his bare, muscled chest, feeling the frantic, heavy thudding of his heart. "Then what, Nikolai? He will know you have found me. He will send others and burn this house to the ground to find us."
"Let him try," Nikolai replied softly, a wicked smug smile tugging at the corner of his lips despite the gravity of the situation. "We have two choices, sunshine. We can take my fortunes, fake our deaths, and build an entirely new world in the shadows of Ketterdam where he can never touch us. Or..." He dipped his head lower, his breath hot against her lips. "We can fly back to Ravka and fight him tooth and nail for your divorce. He won't be able to touch a single hair on your head, because I will put my entire life, my family's wealth, and my own body between him and you."
Alina’s breath hitched, her heart hammering wildly against her ribs at the sheer, terrifying scale of his devotion. "I… get to choose?"
"Yes, love, you get to choose," he whispered tenderly, thumb brushing a stray strand of hair from her cheek. "Now tell me. What is your choice?"
Alina looked up into his sharp hazel eyes, seeing the absolute truth in them. The fear that had paralysed her for months suddenly crystallised into a fierce, matching resolve. She reached her arms up, wrapping them tightly around his neck, fingers tangling deep into his messy hair.
"I don't want to run anymore," she breathed, her dark eyes flashing with that undeniable fire. "I want to break his hold on me. I want to fight. And I’m not done with Os Alta yet. A few months here, and it’s already getting dull."
Nikolai let out a laugh at that, the tension in his shoulders shattering. "Good choice," he murmured, his voice thick with an overwhelming pride.
He brought his mouth down to hers, cutting off any further reply she could have offered. The kiss was deep and possessive, entirely devoid of the gentle restraint he had practiced for long. Alina let out a soft, whimpering sigh directly into his mouth, her lower body arching upward instinctively, pressing the warm cradle of her thighs flush against his heavy, rigid length.
Shifting his weight, Nikolai sank between her legs. He felt her thighs open wider for him, her knees rising to lock securely around his waist and pull him impossibly closer. He had entirely lost control; the clever heir and the calculating investigator were utterly consumed by the brilliant, blinding light of the woman beneath him.
He knew the consequences. He knew that by ignoring that call, he had declared war on the most dangerous man in Ravka. He knew Morozova would unleash an absolute hell of legal, perhaps even physical, violence the moment he realised he’d been burned by his own investigator.
But as Alina shifted beneath him, digging her fingers fiercely into the muscles of his back and urging him forward with a desperate, breathless tilt of her hips, Nikolai knew there was no going back. For years, his golden rule had kept him safe: never adulterate professional work with personal emotion. Now, he was guiding himself against the wet heat of his beautiful target and sank slowly, deeply inside her. The sheer, tight friction of her taking all of him was an agonisingly perfect rush, a visceral ache that drowned out any lingering thought in his head. Being buried deep inside her was the only truth that mattered now; it was everything he had spent months craving, a luxury he had never thought he’d be allowed to touch.
As he locked his hips flush against hers, fully united with the woman he loved, he watched his golden rule burn to ash. For the first time in his life, both of his worlds had aligned on the same goal: to keep Alina safe, to keep her loved, and to tear down anyone who dared try to take her away from him.