Chapter 382: Do You Still Believe You Can Protect Her?

who they’ve placed in government, what protection they think they have. I will burn them to the ground. I did it once. I will do it again."

There was a beat of silence, and then Antonio laughed...not warmly, not with humor, but with something bitter and sharp.

"You didn’t burn them," Antonio said. "You destroyed one facility. One. And look where that has landed you. Look what it has cost you already."

Dimitri’s grip on the phone tightened.

"I received information tonight," Antonio continued, "that their new target is your very well-protected woman. And if my intelligence is correct, they already made their first attempt. Tonight. While you were standing in the same room as her."

Dimitri went very still.

Antonio’s voice hardened, each word a blow delivered with surgical precision.

"So tell me, son. Do you still believe you can protect her? When they can attempt to poison her right under your nose, in your own territory, surrounded by your own security?"

Dimitri said nothing.

"What does that tell you?" Antonio pressed. "If you don’t already know, I’ll tell you. It means they can kill her whenever they choose. With or without your protection. The same way they killed your mother. Under my watch."

The line went silent.

Dimitri stood at the window, the city stretched out below him, and for the first time since this conversation began, he understood that his father’s cruelty wasn’t cruelty at all. It was fear wearing the mask of certainty. It was a man who had failed once, catastrophically, permanently, and who now saw the same failure unfolding in his son’s life with a clarity that made him desperate and cutting.

Neither of them spoke for a long moment. The silence stretched, thick with everything unsaid, years of distance, a mother’s death neither of them had ever properly grieved together, a son’s ambition his father had never fully understood, a father’s guilt his son had never fully forgiven.

"Come home," Antonio said finally, his voice quieter now, almost tired. "Next week. We’ll talk about it then."

He didn’t wait for Dimitri’s response.

The line went dead.

***

Dimitri lowered the phone slowly, staring at the dark screen as if it might reveal something more, some explanation for what had just happened, some resolution to the storm still moving through his chest.

"Dimitri."

Eve’s voice was soft, careful, the voice of someone who understood she’d just witnessed something that went far deeper than a conversation about immediate danger.

He turned to look at her.

"What did he say?" Eve asked.

Dimitri was quiet for a moment, gathering himself, deciding how much of what had just happened he could put into words without it costing him something he wasn’t ready to give up yet.

"He wants me to come home next week," Dimitri said finally. "To talk."

Eve crossed the distance between them and took his hand.

"And the rest of it?" she asked gently. "Because that wasn’t a five-second conversation, Dimitri. I watched your face."

Dimitri looked down at their joined hands, then back up at her.

"He knows about the facility," Dimitri said. "The one I destroyed. He’s known....suspected for months, but tonight he confirmed it."

"And the argument?" Eve asked. "The part where your voice changed?"

Dimitri was silent for a long moment.

"We talked about my mother," he said finally, and something in his voice cracked just slightly, just enough for Eve to hear the years of unresolved grief buried beneath it. "About what happened to her. About what The Covenant is planning to do to you."

Eve’s hand tightened around his.

"He said they haven’t come for me directly because they’re afraid of what he’d do in retaliation," Dimitri continued. "But you...you don’t have that protection. To them, you’re simply the easiest way to hurt me."

"I know," Eve said quietly.

"He said I can’t protect you," Dimitri said, and the words came out rawer than he intended, rawer than he usually allowed himself to be. "That if they can poison you tonight, in my own territory, under my own protection, then they can kill you whenever they choose."

Eve reached up and placed her palm against his cheek, forcing him to look at her directly.

"He’s wrong," she said, her voice steady, certain. "Because you caught it tonight. Because your people are good. Because you’re not going to stop fighting for me, and I’m not going anywhere."

Dimitri closed his eyes for a moment, leaning into her touch, letting himself absorb the certainty in her voice even as the doubt his father had planted continued to churn beneath the surface.

"He wants me to come home," Dimitri said again, quieter this time.

"Then we’ll go," Eve said.

Dimitri opened his eyes, surprise flickering across his features.

"We?" he asked.

"You don’t think I’m letting you walk into that conversation alone, do you?" Eve said, something fierce and protective entering her expression despite everything she’d just survived tonight. "Whatever happens next week, whatever your father wants to discuss, we’re doing it together."

Dimitri looked at her for a long moment, this woman who had nearly been poisoned hours ago and was now standing in front of him promising to walk directly into the heart of his most complicated relationship without hesitation.

He pulled her into his arms, holding her against his chest, feeling the steady rhythm of her heartbeat against his own.

Outside the window, Manhattan continued its endless motion, indifferent to the war being waged in its shadows, indifferent to the wounds being reopened between a father and son who had never learned how to grieve the same woman together.

But inside this room, something had shifted.

His father was coming into the fight, whether Dimitri wanted him there or not.

And next week, in a house he hadn’t called home in years, he would have to face not just The Covenant’s growing threat, but the ghost of his mother, standing between them, unresolved and unforgiven, waiting to finally be reckoned with.