Page 40 of The Bratva’s Innocent Sold Bride (Fokin Bratva #9)
Back at home, Artem clung to my side much the way he did to CJ when we first rescued him.
He’d at least given us a starting point, the place where they must have ditched him before leaving with CJ.
I didn’t have the energy to comfort him, and after a long scratch behind the ears, I turned him over to one of the housekeepers who helped spoil him rotten.
“I need to concentrate on finding her,” I said.
That meant everything I had, no distractions.
It had been three hours since I first went to the office and discovered her missing, but it might have been much longer than that.
Lev had driven down from San Francisco, and we were organizing search teams, along with getting any available surveillance cameras from the office park.
The uptight property manager was balking at handing it over, so I sent someone to impersonate a police officer to get it with as little fuss as possible. He was on his way now, and for the moment, all I could do was wait.
A call finally came in with new information.
Someone had located the driver’s car, so much blood on the inside of the windshield that it would be unlikely Bardil would turn up alive, if at all.
Another dead end, more time ticking by with CJ in the hands of a man who wanted to wipe me off the map as much as I wanted him gone from it.
To think I had planned to broker a peace treaty we could both live with. I had foolishly believed he had shown himself for that purpose, that he might even come to me. Perhaps he was growing tired of the swift retaliation we brought down on him every time he attacked something of mine.
Seemed he was feeding on the chaos, growing stronger and bolder. I wouldn’t make the mistake of cutting him some slack again. When I found him, there’d be no talking. No peace.
Masha ran into the room I was pacing in, her face red. “Josef’s on the phone. Someone found him in bad shape a little while ago. He must have been pretty out of it, said he woke up in the hospital.”
I followed her to where Garik stood in the other room, phone pressed to his ear and a harsh look on his face. He handed the phone over when he saw me.
“Tell me everything,” I said.
There was a pause as Josef figured out he was now speaking with me. He immediately apologized. I should have asked him about his injuries, but all I could focus on was finding CJ.
“What happened?” I urged.
“We got a message from Garik. At least we thought it was Garik. Something…” he coughed, groaning. “Sorry, got shot in the side. Hurts to talk. He needed more guns on the scene, and fast. We were the closest.”
“What about CJ?”
“She said you were five minutes away, and showed us a text from you. We told her to lock the door and stay in the back until you arrived, then alerted the driver to stand guard outside.”
“He’s dead,” I said. It hadn’t been confirmed, but I’d seen pictures of the inside of his car.
“Fuck,” Josef said, then. “What happened? When we got jumped, I thought it had to do with whatever was going down with Garik.” He took a deep breath, groaning again. “I think Ilariy’s dead too. Took a shot straight to the chest.”
“It was a setup,” I said, wondering how Anatoli could have faked messages from me and Garik. CJ probably could have explained it to me, but she’d been fooled too, into believing I was on my way. “They took my wife.”
He apologized again, sounding like he wished he’d been the one to take the bullet to the heart.
As pissed as I was, it sounded like they hadn’t actually screwed up.
CJ still had an armed guard with her and was locked in her office.
The kidnapper must have killed the driver and hidden the car as soon as the guards left.
But how did the attacker get into the office? The place was locked up tight, no sign of breaking and entering. Unless… my heart went cold even as it raced.
“Boss,” Josef said, his voice growing weak. “I think she found something.”
“Okay,” I told him. “Rest now.”
“Sorry for fucking up. If they’d let me out of here, I could help.”
I ended the call after telling him he didn’t need to worry, we had it covered, even though we were hitting dead end after dead end.
He was barely clinging onto life, from what it sounded like, and his partner and CJ’s driver were dead.
If he hadn’t been fooled, it was likely he would have been overpowered.
But what about the office appearing like nothing untoward had happened there? It left a lump of icy terror in my stomach. What if Anatoli had gotten in somehow and killed her immediately, calmly turning off the lights and locking up after himself?
It took me half the normal time to get back to the office park, whipping down side streets and making some fairly bad driving decisions in my haste to make sure my imagination was running away with me. There was no way he’d kill her. No fucking way.
The office was deserted, and I breathed a sigh of relief that I didn't find her there. No sign of a struggle or that she’d been hurt in any way. Which brought up a whole new slew of questions to plague me.
Could she have gone willingly? Did she set the entire thing up herself?
I dismissed that out of hand, but what if Anatoli had offered her something she found difficult to refuse, like her silence for protection or perhaps even her freedom?
Pain knifed through my gut, even as I was relieved that she might still be unharmed.
Could I blame her for taking such a deal? Anatoli was much more cunning and experienced at disappearing than her father. Maybe he’d offered Gordon protection as well. As if grinding salt into a wound, the man I’d sent to view the office building’s camera feed called me.
“I’m looking at it right now, Sarge,” he said, still pretending to be a police officer, probably in the offices a few hundred yards away.
He explained what he saw. CJ spoke to an unidentified man for a moment before opening the door and rushing off with him, dog in tow.
No violence, no sign of her being under duress.
It could have meant anything. She could have been tricked somehow, like the guards were. But how? My wife was naive, but one of the smartest people I knew. The only logical explanation was just what the camera showed. She went willingly.
I shoved the pain aside, slamming a door on useless conjecture. None of it was helpful in finding CJ, and that was my top priority. It didn’t matter if she was tricked or not; Anatoli was a crazed killer who wanted to destroy everything that was mine. She wasn’t safe as long as she was with him.
I went over the conversation with Josef again. There was something I had dismissed at first, but even with every word he spoke causing him pain, he felt it was important.
She found something. Something new about Anatoli, or even his alter ego, Terrence?
Sitting down, I fired up her computer, but there were so many files I didn’t know where to start.
I spent months trying to track Anatoli down, and she had found all this in a matter of days.
I had a feeling the answers I needed were in those files somewhere, and I needed them fast. Everything was dated, and I began to work backwards from the most recent.
I hit pay dirt almost immediately, finding a new list of properties that Anatoli owned.
CJ had highlighted the ones in Moscow, but it was the ones that were closer to home that I was interested in.
Closing that file, the next one was nothing but a series of somewhat familiar numbers.
It took me a second to realize it was a long list of GPS coordinates, many of them repeated as I studied them closely.
Delta was currently at my house, getting his best people to work on finding out what we could from the city’s cameras. I called him, staring at those numbers.
“Still nothing new, Boss,” he said by way of a greeting. “We’re cycling through the cameras in the neighbor—”
“Don’t worry about that for a minute,” I interrupted. “You know that thing CJ used to get into Anatoli’s phone?”
“Yeah, pretty clever little program. I’ve already tried tracking him through that, though. He’s got his phone off or using a different one by now.”
“Okay, but I’m looking at a whole list of timestamped GPS coordinates. Could she have found a way to do it with the phone off?”
There was a long silence. “I wouldn’t put it past her. Or she might have even been able to hack directly into his car. We’ve actually been experimenting with getting into newer cars through the entertainment systems. Want to send me the file, and I’ll check it out?”
“No. Get over here now,” I said. “I think there’s something important in all this, and I need you to figure it out.”
“On my way.”
Could my ingenious wife have found a way to lead me right to her, whether inadvertently or not? For the first time since I realized she was missing, I could breathe a little easier. Even the pain that she might not want to be found was receding with this new hope on her computer screen.
No, none of it mattered until I was certain CJ was safe. I was going to get her back and make her see that she should be with me. That she could be happy with me. She was my life, my everything, and I would get her back.
If only it wasn’t too late.