Chapter 27

“Then we do this together,” he said.

For the first time since she collapsed into his arms, Nikolai felt something steady beneath the fury.

Purpose.

Chapter Seven

Eliza returned to theoffice because she chose to.

They hadn’t really left it—not in any meaningful way.After the call the night before, Nikolai had settled her, stayed with her, and let the house go quiet again.This was the next step, taken the following morning, deliberate rather than reactive.

Not because anyone asked her to.Not because she felt cornered or obligated or useful in the way she’d been made useful before.She came back because the pull was there—quiet, insistent, familiar in a way that steadied her rather than hollowed her out.

Late morning light filtered through the glass, the sun already high and heavy with heat, warming the clean lines of the room.The servers hummed behind the wall, a low, constant sound that felt almost companionable now.She carried her laptop with both hands, a mug of tea balanced carefully on top, and set them down on the desk Nikolai had shown her.

She sat, adjusted the chair, and took a breath before opening the laptop.The screen came to life instantly.No lag.No resistance.She noticed the small things—how the system booted, how the security handshake completed, how nothing about it felt hurried or invasive.

Nikolai stood off to the side, close enough that she was aware of him without needing to look.She could sense the exact point where his attention rested—not on her hands, not on the screen, but on the space itself, the room, the exits, the variables she didn’t have to think about because he already was.

He hadn’t said a word since they’d walked in together.He didn’t hover.He didn’t watch her fingers like she might break something.He simply occupied the space like someone who understood that presence, done right, was its own kind of protection.

That, more than anything else, let her breathe.

She hadn’t realized how much energy she’d spent, for years, calibrating herself to rooms like this—reading posture, tone, the invisible rules of power.In other spaces, she’d learned to stay small, to anticipate questions before they were asked, to pre-empt demands before they hardened into orders.Here, the absence of that pressure felt strange.Disarming.She didn’t have to earn the silence.It was simply given.

She wrapped her fingers around the mug, letting the heat seep into her palms.

“I need to be clear about something first,” she said.“I can’t do this like an interrogation.I won’t answer to pressure, or timelines, or people talking over me.”

The silence that followed was brief, deliberate.

Elias’s voice came through steady and immediate.“Understood.You won’t be interrogated.You tell us what you want, when you want.We build around it.”

Something in her chest loosened.

“I didn’t remember things all at once,” she said quietly.