Page 38 of The Bratva’s Innocent Sold Bride (Fokin Bratva #9)
I spent the night fruitlessly searching for Anatoli, plagued by the fact that CJ lied straight to my face about the last time she saw her father. What was she hiding from me? Was everything a lie?
No, there was no way she could have faked some things.
It was instantly apparent she wasn’t telling the truth the moment I brought Gordon up.
There were no telltale signs like that before.
I had to believe her smiles were genuine, her sighs, her kisses.
It was driving me crazy, worse than trying to find Anatoli, so I could end this battle of ours and let CJ live the life she wanted.
The woman had gotten under my skin, and I didn’t want to dislodge her.
To do so would have killed me. She was mine, my whole life.
It had happened like a lightning bolt, fast and strong.
If anything, I should have been calling Gordon to thank him for cheating me so that she came into my life, but if he tried to take her from me…
That wasn’t going to happen.
When I finally got home, CJ was already gone. The gate guard informed me she had left with her driver early that morning, when I was still scouring the streets following bad intel, fed to my people by Anatoli himself, no doubt.
Irritated, I headed to CJ’s office, ready to drag her home for not listening.
No doubt she’d have some excuse about me not telling her how long she’d have to wait.
I wasn’t in the mood for it, not with her lies still heavy on my mind.
I had to find a way to make her tell me without accusing her or admitting I’d seen. I wanted her to trust me.
But did I truly trust her?
The office was empty, closed up tight as if no one had been there, and there were no traces of the driver or her regular guards. None of them was answering their phones, and I began to wonder if this was more than an impromptu shopping trip. Garik answered right away.
“Find Gordon Taurus,” I said. “I want a location on him as fast as possible.”
Gordon may have been a broken man, but he still had resources and powerful contacts.
If he wanted to—if CJ wanted to—he could make her very difficult to find.
Not impossible because I’d go to the ends of the earth to bring her home, but what if she didn’t want to return?
Suddenly, I was at war with what I needed and what might be the only thing to make my wife truly happy. How did she gain so much power over me?
That’s when it hit me. This wasn’t an obsession, this wasn’t possession. This was love. I loved her. More than anything else in the world.
It didn’t take Garik long once he promised to move it to the top of his priority list. As I sat in the office parking lot, waiting and hoping for CJ to show up, he called me back within ten minutes.
“Gordon is still in LA,” he said. “Some of Aleks’s men located him in a bar, half out of his head on whiskey. Want me to tell them to bring him to you?”
“No,” I answered, hanging up. If he were still in LA and drunk to boot, there was no way he had managed to take CJ.
So, where the hell was she? And why wasn’t she, or her guards or driver, answering their phones?
“Artem,” I said out loud, hitting the steering wheel.
The dog hadn’t been at home, and CJ never went anywhere without her little crybaby.
When we first got him, she’d not only had him microchipped, but she spent a fortune at the pet store, including GPS tags she attached to his collar, his leash, and even kept an extra in the little basket of toys she carried around for him.
I had considered it overkill at the time, but now I was rushing to find the app she had made me install on her phone to be able to track him if he ever got lost.
The first one showed up at the office, which would have been the basket. So, had she been here and gone? The one on his collar showed up in a part of town I’d never been to, and according to the map, there wasn’t anything there that CJ would have been interested in.
Fear started to wriggle in as I headed that way, keeping the app open on the seat next to me in case Artem should move.
It was so still I began to worry he’d gotten out of the collar somehow, or worse.
Putting my foot to the gas, I raced through the increasingly deserted streets until I came to the spot.
A gas station that looked like it hadn’t been in business for at least ten years was the only building within a block. A scraggly patch of trees sprouted up behind it, with remnants of old junked cars poking out around a rusty dumpster.
“Artem!” I shouted, looking down at the app. I should have been within a few feet of the dog, so where was he? Where was his Mama? “Artem, who’s a good dog?”
I heard the whine from behind the dumpster and hurried over, crouching down to see him curled up between it and the wall of the gas station. When he saw me, his tail thumped, and he crawled out, keeping low to the ground.
I hugged him, dirty and covered in leaves as he was. “I’ve never been so glad you’re so spineless,” I said. “Good dog, staying put. But where’s your Mama? Where’s CJ?”
As if I expected him to tell me, I stared into his sad eyes. With another thump of his tail, he whined and ran a few feet away, sniffing the ground in the cracked parking lot and letting out a sharp bark.
“Are you actually trying to tell me something?” I had lost it. I was talking to a dog, hoping beyond hope for anything that would help me find CJ.
Artem remained glued to my side as I started searching the woods, calling a team out to help me.
An hour later, there was no sign of her, and it felt like every minute that ticked past felt like time was running out.
Still no word from the guards and her driver, and I feared I might not hear from them again.
Where was my wife? She didn’t just abandon her dog out here in the middle of nowhere and wander off. Someone took her. If not Gordon, who would dare?
I knew in my gut it was my enemy, and rage began to blossom, giving the gloomy atmosphere a red tinge. It had to be Anatoli; there was no one else. He’d let himself be seen, drawing me back from LA, and now he had my wife.
And I still didn’t have a clue where he was.
The red rage slowly turned into ice-cold fear.