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The room went still again. It was the kind of silence you only hear right before something detonates.

I let it wrap around me. Let it settle into my deep into my bones. And then I spoke.

“She’s not leverage,” I said. “She’s not a pawn or a plot device in a headline. She’smine.”

“I know,” Ivan replied, his fingers moving faster. “We’ll find her.”

“We don’t stop until we do.”

My hand went inside my jacket and squeezed tight around the gun holstered at my side.

Maxim looked at me, not like a brother, but like a man standing beside a king preparing to burn his kingdom down.

“And when we get her back?” he asked.

I didn’t blink.

“Whenwe get her back,” I said, “I’m going to marry her. In front of everyone. And then I’m going to kill the man who took her.”

A beat of silence.

Then Aleksei said, “That’s one hell of a wedding reception.”

CHAPTER 37

Sloane

Pain came first.

A dull, pounding ache at the base of my skull that pulsed with every slow beat of my heart. Then the pressure: tight, cutting, hot against my wrists and ankles. My skin burned where the ropes dug into it. My mouth was dry, my tongue heavy.

I tried to move and couldn’t.

The panic didn’t come all at once.

It arrived in pieces, in fragments. It started with the slow realization that my arms were pinned behind the back of a chair. It rose when I felt that my knees were tied together and my ankles were bound to the legs of the chair. My spine was aching from the angle and my neck throbbed from where someone had grabbed me too hard.

I forced my heavy eyelids to open.

The room was too bright. A single industrial light buzzed overhead, humming like a warning signal. The walls were gray cinderblock, stained in places with God knows what. No windows. No furniture. I registered the echo of water in the pipes somewhere off in the distance and the harsh sound of my own breathing.

I opened my mouth to speak and tasted blood.

Fuck.

I was bleeding.

The metallic tang bloomed across my tongue, and I remembered the van. The cloth. Everything. That’s when the panic arrived in full.

“Well, you look like hell.”

I blinked again.

Stillwell.

He stood a few feet away, hands in the pockets of a tailored navy suit, composed and polished as ever, like he was giving a press conference and not watching me bleed under fluorescent lighting.

“You’re awake. That’s good,” he said, walking slowly across the room. “We weren’t sure how long you’d be out. You don’t weigh much.”