Nicolas’s POV

Maxim was in a cell.

Mikhail too.

Separate cells, because I wasn’t interested in watching them hold hands and tell each other it was going to be fine. Give a man four walls and nothing to do and he starts thinking. Thinking made people honest. I’d found that useful, over the years.

The report was on my desk.

I’d read it three times. The medical records Roman’s people had pulled from Iron Thorn. Injuries. Dates. What had been documented and what hadn’t. The gap between those two columns was—

I pushed back from the desk.

Went to the window.

The city was lit up. Traffic moving. Ordinary. Ten million people going about their lives with no idea what happened inside this building, and no particular interest in finding out.

My hands weren’t clean.

That was fine. I’d done what needed doing. That was how this worked. You did the thing, you moved on, you dealt with what came next.

The problem was what came next.

---

"You’ve been standing there for forty minutes."

Andrei was sitting on the corner of my desk. He always sat on the corner of my desk. I had never figured out how to make him stop doing that.

"Go away."

"Roman timed you."

"Roman should find something better to do."

"He’s in the east wing." Andrei picked up a pen. Turned it over in his fingers. "Still trying to figure out how she got past three checkpoints and almost cleared the perimeter wall. He’s very personally offended about the wall."

I didn’t say anything.

"For what it’s worth," Andrei said, "I don’t think she was running toward Maxim."

I turned around.

He met my eyes. That easy face of his, the one that made people underestimate him until it was too late.

"She wasn’t running toward anything," he said. "She was running away from the visit. From what she thought it meant." He set the pen down. "Those are different things."

"I know what she did."

"Do you?" He looked at me. "Because you’ve been standing at that window for forty minutes, and you only do that when you’re angry at something you can’t figure out how to aim."

I looked at the desk.

The file was still there. The one I’d already read too many times.

She’d run. And I’d spent the whole night being angry at her for it.

"There’s something else," Andrei said. 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

His voice had changed. Still easy. But underneath it—careful. The kind of careful he only used when he was about to say something he knew I wasn’t going to like.

"What."

He reached into his jacket. Set a piece of paper on the desk.

I picked it up.

Read it.

Read it again.

The room went very quiet.

I set the paper down.

Picked it up again.

"She’s been alone in that room for four days," Andrei said. Quiet. Measured. Like he was giving me time to absorb each word. "Locked in. No real information. No explanation from you about what actually happened in that office. And she’s been—" He paused. "Someone’s been in her ear the whole time. Every day. Pushing her. Telling her things."

I stared at the paper.

"She didn’t have the full picture," he said. "She was scared, and she was alone, and someone found her at exactly the right moment and started filling in the blanks." He looked at me. "With the wrong answers."

The anger had nowhere to go.

That was the problem. Usually anger was simple. You aimed it. You used it. You burned through it and came out the other side with something done.

This was different.

This was the specific, grinding feeling of realizing you’d been looking at something wrong this whole time. She’d spent four days in that room. Alone. Being slowly talked into—

I folded the paper. Put it in my pocket.

"She needs to hear something different," Andrei said.

I was already moving toward the door.

He didn’t say anything else. Didn’t need to.

---

Her hallway was quiet.

Two guards outside her room. They saw me coming from twenty feet away and both went very still in the way that meant *we see you, we are not going to do anything, we are just going to be part of the wall now.*

I stopped outside her door.

I didn’t go in immediately.

I stood there. Which was stupid. I didn’t stand outside doors. I went through them. That was how doors worked. But something about this specific door, this specific room, was making my feet stay exactly where they were.

Because I didn’t know what I was going to say.

That was the problem.

I walked into every room in this palace knowing exactly what I was going to say. It was the only way to run forty-two packs and a war on the eastern border and whatever else was currently on fire. You didn’t walk in unprepared. Unprepared got people killed.

But I’d been standing at that window for forty minutes and I still hadn’t worked out the words.

She’d been alone in there. Scared. Running on four days of bad information and no sleep. And I’d locked her in and gone back to my meetings and told myself she needed time and that had been—

That had been wrong.

I put my hand on the door.

Pushed it open.