Chapter 4 - The Scars We CarryThe private suite on the forty-second floor was decorated in muted tones of cream and warm oak, designed to look like a luxury hotel rather than a safehouse. But the armed guards standing silently on either side of the double doors dispelled any illusion of comfort.
Garrett punched his biometric code into the digital keypad, the heavy bolt disengaging with a soft mechanical hiss.
Inside, the room was dimly lit by a single floor lamp. Mave was sitting on the edge of the oversized velvet sofa, wearing an ivory cashmere robe provided by the female detail. She was holding a steaming mug of tea between both hands, staring blankly at the gas fireplace flickering behind a sheet of tempered glass.
In the adjoining bedroom, soft murmurs indicated that Dr. Vance was finishing up her examination of the child.
As the door clicked shut behind him, Mave didn't look up. She didn't flinch. She just spoke into the empty space between them, her voice flat and hollow.
"Are you going to lock the doors now, Garrett? Put bars on the windows? Make it official?"
Garrett walked slowly across the Persian rug, stopping five feet away from her. Up close, the damage of the past three years was painfully clear. The dark circles beneath her eyes were bruised purple; her skin had that paper-thin translucence that comes from chronic malnutrition and relentless anxiety.
"You should have come to me," he said. The words tasted like ash in his mouth.
Mave finally raised her head. Her eyes—once bright and full of a quiet, stubborn academic curiosity when they met at Columbia University eight years ago—were now dark, weathered, and etched with a hardened cynicism that chilled him to the bone.
"Come to you?" A dry, humorless laugh escaped her lips. "To what, Garrett? To your armed fortresses? To your dinner parties where men talk about body counts over filet mignon? I watched your top enforcer execute a man in our hallway because he forgot to wipe his shoes on the mat. You told me it was 'business.' You told me I was safe because you kept me behind glass."
"You were safe," he argued, his voice tightening.
"I was a bird in a gilded cage, and I knew it," she snapped, her voice suddenly rising, trembling with pent-up rage. "And the moment I found out I was pregnant... I knew what you were going to do. You would have wrapped me in more security, more guards, more bullets. You would have turned my baby into a leverage point for every lowlife in the Tri-State area. So I ran. I gave up my name, my degree, my family, my entire life... just so my daughter could grow up breathing normal air."
She stood up, setting the mug down so hard the hot tea sloshed over the rim. She stepped right up to his chest, her small frame trembling as she jabbed a sharp finger against the lapel of his shirt.
"And you couldn't even let me have that," she whispered, hot tears finally breaking free. "You had to walk out of your million-dollar wedding, start a war with the Ashfords, and drag us right back into the middle of your bloody chessboard. Look at me, Garrett! Look at what your world did to me!"
Garrett didn't move. He didn't blink. He took the verbal blows without flinching, because every word she spoke was a razor blade dipped in truth.
He reached out slowly, his large, calloused hand hovering over her cheek before gently brushing a stray lock of brown hair behind her ear. His touch was lighter than air, as if he expected her to shatter at the slightest pressure.
"The Russians know," he said quietly.
Mave froze. The fire in her eyes flickered out, replaced instantly by a cold, gray horror.
"What did you say?"
"Viktor Solov’s men have been tracking your building for two weeks," Garrett continued, his voice dropping to a gravelly register. "They didn't find you by accident, Mave. They knew you were there. And the moment I walked out of that car today... they realized what you mean to me."
Before Mave could process the warning, the overhead lights in the penthouse flickered violently, then died.
The emergency generators kicked in three seconds later, bathing the room in a sickly, amber-tinted glow. But it wasn't the lights that made Garrett’s hand drop instantly to the Sig Sauer tucked into his waistband.
It was the distinct, rhythmic beep of the master security grid overriding from the outside.
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"Boss!" Mateo’s voice screamed through the comm-link, broken up by a wall of heavy static and the unmistakable rattle of suppressed automatic gunfire from the lobby below. "We’re breached! The Bratva—they’ve got thermal charges on the forty-first floor stairwell! Get out of the suite now—!"
The comm-link went dead with a high-pitched squeal.
