BEATRICE'S POV
Theodore holds me through the night.
His bed is large enough for five people, yet with his arms around me, my cheek pressed against his chest, the world shrinks to exactly this.
He keeps his hands above my waist — one resting warm and broad against my back, patting in a slow rhythm that pulls me under like a tide.
I drift into the deepest sleep I've had in years.
A knock on the door. I stir. He whispers against my hair, "Sleep. I'll check."
"I'm scared to be alone." The words come out before I can stop them. Half-conscious. Barely mine.
His hand pauses on my back. I feel his lips press against the corner of my closed eye — soft enough that it might have been imagined.
"My right-hand man is posted outside this door. I'm not leaving you unguarded."
My body unclenches. He slips out. Pulls the blanket higher over my shoulders — the one that smells like him.
Closes the door behind him with a soft click.
I don't know how long I sleep. Five hours. Six.
But for the first time in as long as I can remember, I truly rest.
The explosion of sound rips me from sleep like a detonation.
Not a knock. Not a crash. A controlled breach — the kind that comes with flashbang concussion, splintering doorframes, and the synchronized thunder of tactical boots hitting hardwood in formation.
I'm upright before my eyes fully open.
Heart slamming. Hands gripping the sheets. The space beside me is empty. Theodore —
Glass shatters downstairs. Shouted commands overlap in clipped military cadence.
The heavy, rhythmic thud of an entry team clearing rooms — moving fast, moving practiced, moving like men who've rehearsed this a hundred times in a hundred different buildings.
My blood runs cold.
I pad down the stairs on bare feet, pressing myself against the wall. Theodore's beautifully arranged villa looks like a war zone.
The front entrance is blown inward — hinges twisted, wood splintered across the wooden floor.
Roughly forty-five operatives in full tactical gear occupy the ground floor, faces hidden behind balaclavas, assault rifles at low-ready position, laser sights painting red lines across the walls and furniture.
The red roses in the black vase — Theodore's roses — lie crushed under combat boots.
"ADRIEN FUCKING LAURENT! DO YOU THINK THIS IS SOME KIND OF JOKE?"
The roar shakes the room. Full of rage. Full of disgust.
I locate the source. Lucas Lincoln stands at the base of the staircase like a human barricade.
Theodore introduced him briefly yesterday before taking me upstairs. Last night he seemed like an overworked, dramatic kitten with blue eyes and a leopard skin print leather jacket.
Right now he's a lion.
Shoulders squared. Feet planted in a combat-width stance.
One hand resting on the sidearm at his hip, the other hanging loose and ready.
Every operative in the room has a weapon. Lucas has his body language — and somehow it's more threatening than all of them combined.
He stands between the tactical team and me.
Between Adrien and the staircase.
Between force and the woman Theodore told him to protect.
Adrien stands in the center of the destroyed living room.
Black tactical jacket. Sidearm holstered at his hip.
Angel flanking his right in full combat gear. His blue-green eyes are bloodshot, jaw locked so tight the muscles twitch visibly, every line of his body vibrating with barely contained violence.
"If you value breathing, move." His voice comes out low. Controlled in the way that signals he's one provocation away from losing that control entirely.
Lucas doesn't shift an inch. "You seem to forget — one signal from me and your entire team gets buried in this foundation. I'm not standing here because I enjoy your company, Aurélien." His eyes harden. "I'm standing here because Theo gave me one order: make sure Beatrice is safe and doesn't see this side of your world."
Something loosens in my stomach despite the cold flooding my body.
Theodore meant it.
He left his most trusted person to guard me. Not his mansion. Not his assets.
Me.
A gentle warmth spreads through my chest even as my hands tremble.
Adrien raises his weapon. Points it at Lucas's head.
My eyes widen.
Lucas doesn't flinch. Doesn't blink. Stares down the barrel with the particular stillness of a man who has had guns pointed at him before and decided long ago that fear is optional.
"Move."
"No."
"Lucas Lincoln."
"I'm aware of my name, Aurélien. Perhaps focus on why you're aiming a firearm at the one person standing between you and a catastrophic mistake."
The standoff holds for three seconds.
Five. Seven. The operatives behind Adrien shift their weight — fingers resting on trigger guards, waiting for a command that will decide whether this becomes a conversation or a firefight.
I step forward. "Lucas. Let him through."
Adrien's eyes snap to me. His breathing hitches. Relief floods his expression so fast it looks like pain — until his gaze drops to what I'm wearing.
Theodore's shirt. Falling to mid-thigh. The braid Theodore must have woven while I was drifting off, now slightly undone and messy across my shoulder.
Smelling like agarwood and leather and a night spent in another man's bed.
Lucas glances at me. Reads my expression and Steps aside.
Not because of Adrien's gun — because of my voice. Those were Theodore's orders I guess.
"You know Theodore will have me dismantled if something happens to you," Lucas says quietly.
"Don't worry. I'm not that easy to kill."
Adrien takes the stairs three at a time, his operatives holding position below. His hands reach for me — trembling, desperate, hovering inches from my face.
"Don't."
One word.
His hands freeze mid-air.
He stands in front of me. Close enough that I can smell his cologne beneath the gunpowder and rain still clinging to his jacket.
Close enough that I can see the red veins webbing his eyes, the shadow of sleeplessness carved beneath them, the way his jaw works like he's physically chewing back words.
He can smell Theodore on me. On the shirt.
On my skin. In my hair. I know exactly what I look like right now — cared for, rested, wrapped in the scent of the man Adrien hates more than anyone alive.
"You're coming with me."
Not "are you okay." Not "I was terrified." Not "I'm sorry."
A command. Low and absolute. Enough to make Lucas shift his weight at the base of the stairs.
I clench my fists. Look at him through pain and fire and the kind of rage that only comes from caring too much about someone who keeps disappointing you.
"I'm not a possession you toss aside when something more important appears and retrieve when you feel like it."
Adrien's eyes widen. "I never treated you like —"
"From day one." My voice comes out steady. Deceptively calm.
"You placed me in an advisory role I never asked for. Threw me into situations that served your strategy. Let me be humiliated in a boardroom because the recording needed to be authentic. Let Sarah Ashcombe assault me in my own office. And yesterday —"
my voice shakes, "— you put me in an unlocked car in hostile territory with a weapon I don't know how to use and walked away."
His eyes redden. "I didn't walk away. My sister was at gunpoint."
"THEN YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE BROUGHT ME."
My voice cracks through the villa like a second breach. Every operative downstairs hears it.
Angel hears it. Lucas hears it. I don't care.
"YOU KNEW I HAVE NO COMBAT TRAINING. YOU KNEW WHERE WE WERE GOING. AND YOU BROUGHT ME ANYWAY BECAUSE MY 'SHARP MOUTH' WAS USEFUL TO YOU."
Adrien towers over me. The dangerous glint in his eyes is terrifying — so terrifying that I know I'm seconds from crying and I refuse to give him that.
"You're my advisor. I needed you. I compensate you —"
"THEN YOU SHOULD HAVE PROTECTED ME!" I scram.
"MY SISTER WAS AT GUNPOINT! YOU SAW IT!"
Both of us. Screaming. Both of us right. Both of us wounded in ways the other can't fix.
A hollow laugh escapes my chest. Empty. Exhausted.
"Your sister was never in real danger."
He freezes. Mid-word. Mid-breath.
I step closer. Chin up. Eyes glassy with everything I've been swallowing since that car door opened empty.
"Theodore told me. If the Pakhan wanted to harm the Laurent family directly, he would have done it years ago. The gala was a proxy attack — designed to kill people from multiple families and create a chain reaction. Because a direct strike against one of the five families triggers a collective response none of them can survive."
Adrien's face drains of color.
"Your sister being held was leverage. Theatre. They were never going to pull that trigger because killing a Laurent openly would unite every other family against the Nochnye Kogti within twenty-four hours." My voice drops.
"You knew that. Didn't you?"
Silence.
"Beatrice —"
"The one whose life was actually in danger — was mine." I point at myself.
Finger trembling. Voice cracking apart at the seams. "I have no family name. No dynasty backing me. No invisible shield of mutually assured destruction. If someone wanted me dead, nobody would start a war over it. Nobody would mobilize tactical teams. Nobody would even notice."
My lips tremble. The ache in my chest threatens to swallow me whole. But I will not cry in front of this man.
"You left the car unlocked, Adrien."
He looks at me with desperation I've never seen on his face. "I asked Angel to stay —"
"You think Angel would choose me over you?" A dry, broken laugh. "She would walk through fire for you. Not for me. You know that."
His jaw clenches. His hand reaches for me again.
I step back.
Something in his expression shatters. Not cracks — shatters.
Like watching a window give way in slow motion.
"Come with me." His voice drops to something raw and stripped. "Please."
He says "please" like it costs him a piece of himself. And still — still — no apology. No acknowledgment that he gambled with my life and lost.
I shake my head. "No."
His eyes widen. "You're staying here? In his house? Wearing his shirt like he's —"
"He's someone who saved me."
"I'M HERE TO SAVE YOU."
"Too late." The words leave my mouth with a calm that surprises even me. "I don't need to be saved from him."
Something settles behind those words. Something that's been forming since a man knelt at my feet with soup and didn't ask for anything in return.
Since he kissed me and blushed. Since he braided my hair while I fell asleep and left his most trusted person to guard my door.
Adrien's face goes white.
"You'll have my resignation by ten AM. I refuse to work for someone who treats me as expendable."
"I won't sign it."
I clench my jaw. "That's not your decision."
Adrien reaches for me. One last attempt — not a command this time, something closer to drowning.
Lucas materializes at my side.
Silent.
Steady. A wall of calm lethality that wasn't there a second ago.
Adrien's eyes widen at the movement.
Lucas's voice drops to something measured and precise. "Aurélien. Alpha 21 and Beta X2-7 are currently not at the Laurent estate. You redeployed them here." A pause. "Vanderbilt's commando unit is covering your family's security in their absence. Thirty-five men for an estate that normally requires eighty."
Adrien's breathing changes.
"I wonder," Lucas continues, tilting his head with the clinical calm of someone reading a threat assessment aloud, "how effectively thirty-five men can defend seven siblings and two parents against a Pakhan whose right-hand man you shot in both shoulders six hours ago. Mikhael Ivanov is not the forgiving type."
Adrien's face contorts. "What have you done?"
"Nothing. I'm merely observing a tactical vulnerability you created in your haste to retrieve one woman."
Lucas meets his gaze evenly. "Your family is exposed, Aurélien. By your own orders. Perhaps redirect your resources where they're actually needed."
Adrien's fist connects with Lucas's jaw. Fast. Hard. The sound cracks through the stairwell. Lucas's head snaps sideways
. Blood appears at the corner of his mouth.
Adrien glares at me. Eyes burning. Chest heaving. "You'll regret choosing that bastard Schweitzer. You have no idea what kind of monster he is."
Lucas spits blood onto the marble floor. Straightens.
Grins — teeth stained red, eyes sharp and unbothered.
"Monsters know how to protect better than saints. So I wouldn't worry about her."
Adrien is already descending the stairs, barking orders into his phone.
Commands fly in rapid succession — redeployment coordinates, perimeter restructuring, security protocols.
Within minutes, the tactical team evacuates. Boots thunder through the destroyed entrance. Engines roar outside. Helicopters lift off.
Then silence.
Complete. Absolute. The kind that follows a storm.
I look at Lucas. "You're bleeding."
He grins. Blood on his teeth. Mischief in his bruised eyes.
"Scars are proof of a man's bravery, Beatrice."
A soft, exhausted laugh escapes me.
And oddly — watching Adrien's back turn away from me one more time — I don't feel the devastation I expected.
I feel something closer to release.
Like I've been holding a rope for weeks. And I've finally let it go.