Irina’s POV

I heard them before I saw them.

The sound hit first — boots on packed earth, hundreds of them, moving in perfect unison. A low, rhythmic thunder that traveled up through the ground and into the soles of my feet. Then we turned the corner past the east gate, and the full training yard opened up in front of me, and I stopped walking.

I actually stopped.

Nicolas kept moving for two steps before he noticed. He glanced back at me, said nothing, waited.

I couldn’t speak anyway.

The yard was massive — I’d known the compound was large, but this was something else entirely. Rows upon rows of soldiers stretched across the open ground, each line precise, each gap between men identical, like someone had measured it with a ruler. Dark uniforms. Weapons worn like a second skin. Not one head turned when we walked out onto the elevated walkway overlooking them. Not one person broke formation.

The drills were already underway. One contingent ran combat sequences in the far left quadrant — hand-to-hand, brutal and efficient, no wasted motion. Another group was at the range, the crack of gunfire cutting clean and sharp through the morning air. A third unit ran laps around the perimeter carrying full gear, faces blank, breathing controlled, not one of them gasping even though the weight they carried would’ve put me flat on the ground in about thirty seconds.

"How many?" I asked. My voice came out smaller than I intended.

"This yard? Around four hundred." Nicolas scanned the field below us the way someone else might glance at their watch. Completely routine. "There are three more yards on the west side."

Four hundred. And this was one yard of four.

I looked back out at the rows of soldiers. The noise of it — the boots, the shots, the sharp bark of commands from the unit officers — layered into something that pressed against my chest like a physical weight. Not unpleasant, exactly. More like standing too close to a very large engine. You felt the vibration in your teeth.

This was Nicolas’s world. This was what he was, underneath everything. All of it, this entire machine of organized violence, answered to him.

That was the moment I really understood it. Not when he told me he controlled forty-two families. Not when I’d seen the deference in other men’s eyes. Right here, looking at four hundred soldiers running drills at eight in the morning, and knowing there were three more yards just like this one.

---

Then I saw her.

One of the combat training groups had rotated — the men cycling out to the range, a new unit cycling in. And in the front row of the incoming unit, moving into position without hesitation, was a woman.

She wasn’t the only one. There were three of them in that row alone, and when I looked further — more. Maybe fifteen, twenty, scattered through the formations. I hadn’t noticed at first because they moved exactly the same way the men did. Same stance. Same economy of movement. Same absolute lack of self-consciousness about where they were and what they were doing.

The one in the front row pulled up into a ready position, and her partner threw the first strike, and she deflected it so fast I almost missed it. A pivot, a counter, and the man was on the ground.

She didn’t react. Just stepped back, reset, waited for him to get up.

Something happened in my chest that I couldn’t quite name.

I wanted — I felt this sudden, fierce, completely irrational *want* — to be down there. To be the one in that front row. To know how to move like that, to carry that kind of certainty in my own body, to not have to stand on a walkway watching from a safe distance while other people occupied the space that felt, inexplicably, like something I’d been cheated out of.

*What would that be like?*

Waking up every morning and training. Building something in yourself that no one could take away. Not needing anyone’s protection because you were the protection.

"She’s been with us three years," Nicolas said. He’d followed my line of sight without my realizing it. "One of the best close-combat trainers in the compound."

"She’s incredible," I said. And I meant it so plainly it surprised me.

He looked at me for a moment. I couldn’t read his expression — not quite. Something somewhere between noticing and calculating.

I looked back at the woman in the front row. Watched her drop her partner a second time.

And then I let myself, just for one second, imagine it — me, down there. Running those drills. Learning those patterns. Getting thrown and getting back up and getting thrown again until it stopped hurting.

The image lasted about three seconds before reality reasserted itself.

I pressed my hand lightly against my side, where the small, persistent proof of everything made itself known. My body, which couldn’t walk to the end of the corridor without getting winded some mornings. My body, which hadn’t been able to stop a single blow in eighteen years of having blows thrown at it.

I shook my head. Quiet. Half to myself.

*Not now,* I thought. *Maybe not ever.*

I didn’t say it out loud. Nicolas was already moving again, and I followed him.

---

The Iron Thorn contingent was housed in the east barracks — separated from the main body of troops, which I understood was standard for newly integrated units. They were in the middle of a formation drill when we arrived, their officer calling out sequences while they executed them in rows of eight.

Nicolas stood at the edge of the yard and watched them.

I stood next to him and watched them for entirely different reasons.

I kept my face neutral. I was very careful about that. I let my eyes move slowly — not darting, not obviously scanning — just the normal way a person looks out at a crowd. Methodical. Row by row.

My pulse was loud in my ears.

I went through the first row. The second. The third. My breathing stayed even — I was very focused on keeping it even. My hands were loose at my sides.

*Come on,* I thought, though I wasn’t sure who I was talking to. *Just let it be nothing.*

Row four. Row five.

A soldier in the fourth column of the fifth row moved, and the angle of the light caught the side of his face, and for a full two seconds I couldn’t breathe.

Then he turned fully, and it wasn’t him. Different eyes entirely. Darker. Set differently.

I exhaled.

Quietly, carefully, so no one heard it.

I kept going. All the way through — every row, every face I could see clearly, and several I moved slightly to get a better angle on. Nicolas never asked what I was doing. He just continued his own observation of their drills, occasionally exchanging words with the unit officer, and let me stand next to him in silence and do what I’d come here to do.

By the time they cycled into their next exercise, I’d seen all forty-three.

No Alexei.

The relief was physical. It moved through me like something warm and dense — loosening things that had been braced tight since last night. I didn’t smile. I didn’t let it show on my face. But inside, the screaming thing that had been sitting behind my ribs since yesterday afternoon finally, finally went quiet.

*Maybe it was just someone who looked like me.* The maids had said it themselves — pale eyes, similar bone structure. It wasn’t impossible. The world was large and faces repeated. I’d been catastrophizing. It was nothing.

I exhaled again, this time all the way down.

"Done?" Nicolas asked, low, just for me.

"Yes," I said.

He nodded once. Back to the unit officer.

The walk back was supposed to be simple.

---

The main corridor connecting the east wing to the residential block was long and high-ceilinged — pale stone, recessed lighting, the kind of architecture that looked expensive and felt cold regardless of the temperature. Empty at this hour. My footsteps were the only sound.

I’d made it past the first junction when the light went out.

Not a flicker. Not a slow fade. One of the recessed panels above me simply — died. A ten-foot stretch of corridor swallowed into shadow between two wall sconces, and my heart lurched hard against my ribs before I’d even registered what had happened.

*Bulb,* I told myself. *It’s just a bulb.*

I kept walking. Into the dark stretch, out the other side, back into the pale wash of the next sconce. Fine. Nothing. I was fine.

Then I heard it.

A footstep.

Behind me.

I stopped so abruptly I nearly stumbled. Stood completely still, every muscle locked.

Silence.

Just the low hum of the ventilation and the distant, muffled bark of a drill command from somewhere outside. Nothing else. No one.

*Echo,* I decided. *Stone corridors do that. You know they do that.*

The footstep came again.

One. Deliberate. Matching my pace exactly.

The skin on the back of my neck went cold.

I forced myself to keep moving. Ten steps. Fifteen. The corridor curved slightly ahead, the far junction still thirty feet away, and the shadows between the sconces were long and deep and—

Something moved in my peripheral vision.

A shape. Just for a second — in the dark gap to my left, where a recessed doorway sat flush with the wall. A shift of shadow that was wrong, too deliberate, too—

I spun around, slamming my back against the opposite wall.

Nothing.