Mikhail asked, the question directed at no one in particular. We were all gathered in Aleksandr’s office; me, Drea, Arturo, Vincenczo, my dad, Illayana’s guards, some of the higher ranking Bratva soldiers, the Sovietnik, Vladimir and, of course, Mikhail.
After Illayana had been kidnapped, I sprinted back to their house to report it. I’d given a description of the van but there had been no license plate, so the chances of finding it were slim to none. That’s when we discovered that not only had she been taken, but so had Aleksandr and Lukyan. It was a completely unprecedented situation. Never in the history of the Bratva had not only the Pakhan, but all of his children as well, been kidnapped. If word got out, it could mean the end for the Bratva.
As Aleksandr’s wife, Drea was technically now in charge, but they’d only been married a short time. A few of the Bratva soldiers had already begun to show indifference to her. It didn’t bode well for her, or for us. We needed the loyalty of all the soldiers if we were going to pull off any kind of rescue.
How? Well, I still hadn’t figured that out yet.
Arturo paced back in forth in the office and everyone stayed the fuck out of his way. The anger rolling off that man was enough to make even me steer clear of him. “Who the fuck cares how it happened?” he barked at Mikhail, never stopping his pacing. “The point is that it has, and we need to make a plan.”
Mikhail sat forward and interlocked his fingers, staring Arturo down. “I care,” he said sternly. “If there’s a rat, someone reporting the movements of this organisation to Talon, then we need to know and find them before we come up with any sort of attack plan. Otherwise we’ll just be walking right into a trap.”
“You’re sure it’s Talon that has them?” I asked, frowning in thought. Of course, it made the most sense. It was the most logical conclusion. But we had to be sure.
“As sure as I can be.”
Drea was seated behind the desk in Aleksandr’s chair. She looked even smaller in it, the gargantuan size of the thing almost swallowing her whole. But she didn’t let that affect her. She sat tall and proud, like she had every damn right to be there, in that position. “First things first, we figure out how they were all kidnapped.”
“It was clearly a coordinated strike.” Vladimir crossed his arms over his chest, standing tall at Drea’s side. He’d shown nothing but respect to her and made it clear he was loyal to her and would follow her orders, something that couldn’t be said for some of the other soldiers in the room. Once Aleksandr found out, he’d have them killed. For sure.
“They were each targeted when they were at their most vulnerable. When they were away from the house,” Vladimir finished.
“How could Talon possibly know that though?” my dad asked.
The answer came to me in a lightbulb moment.
I touched the back of my neck. “Their trackers,” I whispered, running a finger along the small scar. I looked at Mikhail. “Is that possible?”
He pursed his lips in thought. “It could be. Especially if they knew what frequency the trackers use. It’s safe to assume that Talon and Dominik are in league with each other. Dominik knows about the trackers. He cut it out of Dimitri before kidnapping him. All he’d need is the serial number from it and then he could use that to hack into the system and track the others. The ones in Aleksandr, Lukyan and Illayana.”
“So Talon used their trackers against them and waited for the opportune moment to kidnap them?” Drea frowned. “Why? What does he want with them? Isn’t his beef with Dimitri? It makes no sense to take them. He has what he wants: Dimitri in chains.”
“Could be any number of reasons,” Mikhail answered. “Maybe to use them to torture Dimitri. It’s well known how much he loves his children. Maybe Nikolai was discovered and Talon decided to capture the others to ensure they don’t interfere in his plans.”
“Or?” Arturo pressed, stopping his pacing to stare Mikhail down. He clearly sensed what I did—that there might be another reason Talon kidnapped them. A reason Mikhail was hesitant to voice.
“Or…he wants to use them in his games. Think about it. Having the heart of the Bratva in such a thing? It would be the game of the century.”
Anxiety, worry, fear…they all gripped me at once and I clutched my chest, struggling to breathe. I knew something was wrong. I’d felt it in my bones, in my soul. And I ignored it.
Arturo cursed in Italian and went back to pacing, his footsteps thumping around the room. His brother tried to offer him support, but he didn’t want to hear a word of it, slapping his hands away when he tried to comfort him.
Drea exhaled, rubbing her temples, her shoulders tense with stress. “I’m leaning towards that.”
A chorus of agreements rang throughout the air, everyone nodding along.
“Alright.” She pushed through the apprehension I could see in her eyes, sitting up straighter and projecting an air of strength and confidence. “So, we need to come up with a plan to—”
“I’m sorry, but why are we listening to you?” It was one of the high-ranking Bratva soldiers. Peter? Paul? No, Perry? Fuck, why was I always so crap with names? “You’re not the Pakhan. You’re just married to him. Just because he’s gone doesn’t mean we have to take orders from you—”
Drea whipped out a gun and shot him in the head with zero hesitation. His body thumped to the ground, blood and brain matter spraying across the wall. Smoke billowed from the barrel of the gun, curling into the air. Nobody moved a muscle, the room going deathly silent. She placed her elbow on the table and leant forward, letting the gun lull in her hand as she lazily pointed it around the room.
“Was there anyone else?” She moved her eyes from person to person, daring them to step forward. Daring them to question her right to be sitting in that chair, to be giving orders.
“No.”
“No.”
“Nyet.”
“No.”
She nodded, satisfied. “Good.” She placed the gun down but kept it in arms reach. “Now, we need to come up with a plan.”
“Any plan we come up with is pointless unless we find the location of that island,” Mikhail said, his voice layered in frustration. “That was the whole reason we sent Nikolai undercover.”
“And there’s no other way we can find out where it is?” Vincenzo asked.
People started chucking out ideas, all of which were crushed by Mikhail. The tension in the room built higher and higher with every suggestion he knocked back, and I felt the hope inside me diminish by the second. I didn’t like feeling so helpless, like there was nothing I could do. The people I loved were in mortal danger and all I could do was stand there and listen despairingly as every idea was squandered. Deemed too risky or with no chance of success.
This couldn’t be how it ended. There had to be something we could do. Talon couldn’t win. He couldn’t be allowed to just come into our lives and take those we loved with no consequences.
“Are you okay?” My gaze cut to my dad who had moved to my side. He watched me with concerned eyes as everyone continued to argue amongst themselves about what to do.
“No, I’m not,” I answered honestly. How could I possibly be okay? The man I loved was going to die…if he wasn’t dead already, that is. Pain squeezed my heart, constricting it to the point that I felt like I was going to collapse from the agony of it. I couldn’t live in a world without him.
My dad laid a hand on my shoulder. “It will be okay. We’ll find him.”
“I thought you’d be glad Nikolai was gone.” It was a mean thing to say. I knew that. But I had a tendency to lash out when I felt cornered, useless.
“How could I be, knowing how much pain it would cause you?” He gave me a small, sad smile. “I don’t like the man, sure. I’ve made that more than clear. But I know how much it hurts to lose the one you love. It’s something I would never wish on my worst enemy, let alone my daughter.”
“You’re talking about Mum.”
“Yes,” he whispered sadly. “You really should give her another chance, Tatiana. She—”
I held up a hand. “This is so not the time.”
“Okay. Fair enough. But we do need to talk about it eventually.”
“No. We really don’t.” That was a conversation I wasn’t even remotely interested in having. Not now, not ever.
The debate flying around the room about what to do next reached a crescendo, everybody yelling and screaming over the top of one another, trying to get their point across. The frustration within me reached boiling point. We were getting nowhere, and the more time we wasted arguing amongst ourselves, the more likely Nikolai and the others would be dead by the time we found them. Drea seemed to be feeling the same frustration I was, because she slammed her hand down on the table, demanding silence. It worked.
The room went so quiet, the only thing that you could hear was people breathing. For such a little woman, she sure held a lot of power over these men. Or maybe none of them wanted to join Percy on the floor.
“Alright. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to worry about finding the island later. Right now, I want to get our soldiers ready so that as soon as we do have the location, we’re ready to go.” She looked at Arturo. “How many can you bring to the table?”
“Forty. Some of them are still in the early stages of training, though.”
Drea nodded. “My brother can bring seventeen. What are our numbers?” she asked Vladimir.
“Our force was recently replenished after the attack. Currently, we have sixty-five. Half of that are the new soldiers sent over from Russia. They’re still in the middle of their evaluation, so I’m unsure of their skill set, but they should all be proficient in basic hand-to-hand combat and weapons training. We could possibly get more if we reached out to Sergei—”
“No,” Drea and I said at the same time. We shared a look with one another. She knew as well as I did that they didn’t have a great relationship with their grandfather, that they wouldn’t want him involved. We had to do this without him.
“We’re not going to Sergei,” Drea said sternly, her voice laced with authority.
Vladimir bowed his head in acknowledgement of her command.
“Where do we sit with weapons?”
“We have enough to supply our own soldiers, but not the others,” Vladimir answered.
Arturo finally sat down but his leg bounced repeatedly, like he still couldn’t keep still. A nervous habit, no doubt. “We still have the shipment of guns supplied to us by Dimitri. It’s not enough to arm everyone, but we can make do.”
“I can cover the rest,” Mikhail added. “Just get me the final numbers and I’ll pull it from my personal inventory.”
Vincenzo pulled his phone out. “On it.”
Drea took a deep breath. “Okay, let’s start getting the soldiers all here. I don’t want to waste any time. I want to leave the moment we have a location.” She raised a hand to silence Mikhail, who had been about to say something. “Yes, I know we haven’t figured that out yet, but we will.”
The man looked doubtful but kept his mouth shut.
To be honest, so was I. Surely if there was some other way to find the island, they would have thought of it the first time around instead of putting Nikolai undercover.
“Mine are already on the way,” Arturo said. “They’ll be arriving within the hour.”
Drea checked her phone for the time. “Good. The cartel will be here roughly at the same time. Now—”
The laptop on the desk dinged with an incoming notification. Drea ignored it, but when she tried to continue on, it dinged again.
And again, and again.
Ding.
Ding.
Ding.
Ding.
Ding.
Ding.
Ding.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” she screeched, picking it up and preparing to throw it across the room.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” I rushed forward and quickly took the laptop from her hands before she could let it go.
Nikolai had a thing about smashing electronics. He was still holding a grudge against Aleksandr for some fancy computer the brute had broken years ago.
Drea growled, releasing it with a huff. “I’m good. I’m good.” She ran her hands down her hair and flicked them down her chest, taking a deep, calming breath.
The laptop was still dinging. Someone was clearly desperate to get a hold of Aleksandr or something. The notifications were going off the charts. Drea’s eyes sliced to it and I swear it looked like she was going to take me out to get to it.
I started opening the laptop. “Okay, I’m just going to shut it off—what the hell is this?”
The entire screen was black, and smack dab in the centre of it was a set of numbers in big, white block font.
“What? What’s going on?” Arturo asked.
I showed Drea first and then turned the laptop around to face the room.
Mikhail frowned and got to his feet, coming closer. “They’re…coordinates. Latitude and longitude.”
Vincenzo’s eyes widened as something flashed across the screen. “Whoa.”
I curved my body over the top of the device so I could see. Text was literally being written across the screen beneath the numbers right before my eyes, like someone was typing it in real time, but no one was.
At least, no one there.
“You’re running out of time.
Save my Lukyan.”
“Save my Lukyan?” Vincenzo read out loud, brows snapped together. “Save my—” he gasped in realisation and pointed vigorously at the screen. “That’s Lukyan’s stalker!”
“She hacked into Aleksandr’s laptop to give us these coordinates to save him?” Christian asked, speaking for the first time.
When Arturo cut him an angry scowl, I understood why he hadn’t said a word before, why none of the four guards responsible for Illayana’s safety had said a word. The poor guys were in trouble for losing Illayana…again.
My dad moved to the window and looked outside cautiously. “That means she’s watching us. Right now. How else would she know we’re around Aleksandr’s laptop to see that message?”
Made sense. From what Nikolai told me of the woman, she was incredibly smart and resourceful. She was also completely infatuated—obsessed—with Lukyan.
Mikhail took the laptop from me, looking it over. “How did she find the location of the island?”
“Who cares?” Arturo jumped to his feet, eagerness in his eyes. “We have what we need. Let’s go.”
Vladimir cleared his throat. “We don’t even know if we can trust this information. For all we know, Talon could have sent that.”
“It’s highly doubtful.” Mikhail typed on the laptop, but nothing happened. The device was being controlled by someone else. “Talon has what he wants. There’s no logical reason why he’d risk sending an army to his doorstep.”
“So we’re in agreement?” Drea looked around the room. “We’ll treat the information as accurate and prepare to strike?”
“Uh, just hang on a second,” I said, raising a finger in the air. “We might have the location of the island now, but how the hell are we going to get to it? Talon surely has some sort of precaution in place for that. Lookouts or something. People watching for intruders. There’s no way we’ll get within ten miles of that island without being spotted.”
“Oh, that’s easy.” Mikhail slammed the laptop shut, clearly giving up on trying to hack the hacker. “I have a submarine.”
