Page 233 of Eternal
Zanae set the cup in front of me. “Don’t apologize, it's okay. I didn’t know how you take your coffee. Sugar’s right here.” She smiled, soft, a little tired, like she understood more than she let on about my visit.
“Thanks,” I said, managing a real smile for once. I didn’t deserve their kindness, I didn’t deserve any kindness. I wasn’t a good person.
Then Nikolai leaned in, expression shifting slightly. “So, Voron. Can we be honest around this table?”
“That’s why I came,” I said, surer of that than anything else.
“Your name is Azra Al-Mansour,” he continued. “Vik told us about you when you came back to Vegas.”
I looked between them. Elijah’s gaze hadn’t shifted once. “I knew Alexei,” Elijah said, and my heart thudded once. “And I knew your mother. When Viktor told me you were alive, that you needed a home… we checked, studied you, and approved you.”
My mother…
“I know who you are. You’re efficient and dangerous. We work hard to keep your identity clean. We have a fed on our payroll who cleans your mess when needed, you’ve given us so many opportunities. So, tell me… what do you know about the ones we’re fighting?”
I didn’t answer right away, instead, I reached into my bag and pulled out the file, and placed it gently on the table.
This was the part I hated the most. Telling the story, bleeding it out in front of strangers who might understand it or might just pity it. But I had to, because something in my gut told me they could help, or maybe I could help them. I took a breath and started.
“I was nine when they came,” I said quietly. “Men, mercenaries, I think.”
The coffee shop around us didn’t fade, but it felt further away, or maybe I was the one drifting away. Reliving the worstnight of my life. I can still hear the loud world around me, the laughter of a child, the smell of espresso, the clinking of a spoon, it was all too soft for what I was about to say.
“They started with my step father, Volk. Stabbed him in the stomach, shot him in the head while he tried to tell us to hide.” No one spoke. “My little brother was three. They cut his throat open like he was nothing. My mother… pushed me away when they came at me, then she took the knife in the neck.” I touched the long scar on my jaw, traced it out of habit. “It touched me here, sliced through my skin, then they pushed the blade into my stomach. They shot there to make sure I’d be dead.”
I leaned back, trying to calm the stress, because I never told this story out loud, not to Vik, not to Kat, not to Damir. But they needed to understand, they needed to know why I’m the way I am. To know what shaped me and understand that I’m not here to waste their time.
I need to know what they know, I need it to be done with my past.
“I crawled until I found Volk’s phone and called the police. They arrived and I was the only one who lived.” I heard Zanae’s breath catch, felt Elijah’s silence grow colder. Nikolai blinked slower, nodding faintly. They all knew what that kind of pain looked like. So I pointed at the file. “My mother… She kept a journal. She was a lawyer for a lot of people, but she also worked, quietly, with a women’s rights group. She was tracking contracts. Domestic abuse cases that led her to discover strange stories about influential people. She found things, documents tied to disappearances, to names. That’s why they came. I only got the journal back from the police when I turned eighteen.”
Nikolai reached for the folder, and Elijah just stared.
“I’ve been working through it, killing the ones I could trace. But the last man I hunted… he slipped up. Told me something, he said the girls and boys were being ‘cleaned’ beforebeing shipped. Like… disinfected. Groomed, washed clean and branded new.”
I swallowed, the coffee untouched and cold in front of me. “I talked about it with Vik and he told me we might be fighting the same group.”
Zanae’s hand curled slightly, her eyes darkened and Elijah’s fingers squeezed hers. Nikolai just looked like he was processing, calculating the next step.
“Where were you all those years?” Zanae asked, studying my face, my breathing, everything coming out of me.
“InHell.”
She didn’t flinch, she just reached out and squeezed my hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. Not like she pitied me. Not like she needed the details. She just said it in a way that didn’t feel hollow or cheap, in a way that made me thinkshe knows.
Maybe not my exact pain, but something close.
She felt like a woman who’d suffered the way only women do.
And somehow, that made my chest ache, because she was still here, smiling, in love, alive.Healing.
Nikolai leaned forward, tapping his fingers on the table. “What’s in the file, Voron?”
I exhaled slowly and opened it. Names, shipping routes, surveillance photos, scribbled notes.
“I started following a case some time ago, a girl disappeared, no papers, no family looking for her. She worked at a vineyard, under the table, she was really round.” I pointed to a photo of the estate, rolling fields, quiet gates, and secrecy painted in soft light. “The vineyard’s owned by a wine magnate, old money with expensive lawyers. He's had allegations in the past, trafficking rumors, workplace abuse, but nothing stuck. All sealed behind NDAs.”
Zanae didn’t breathe, Elijah barely blinked.
