My chest is a tight drum. Every second hums. We have a lead. We have a place. Now it’s a matter of getting there before they move her again.
The dock smells of salt and diesel when we pull up—sharp, metallic, alive. Roman eases the car into a shadowed cut in the warehouse line; we park where the floodlights won’t pick us up. Everything else falls away. There is only the plan and the men executing it.
We move like a machine. Roman is already in command mode: quiet, efficient, his voice a low thread of orders. He checks weapons with the same methodical calm I’ve seen on the range a thousand times—magazines seated, safeties off, lights and silencers snapped into place.
Mikhail kneels by the console in the back of our car and feeds the live drone thermal into my earpiece. The screen shows the dock like a cold x-ray: heat signatures in stark white against the black. We sweep the bay and mark no movements.
“There’s no movement in the dock,” Mikhail says, his voice clouded with confusion. “Either it’s empty, or something is wrong,” he adds.
“Then let’s go confirm.”
We fan out, sweep the quay on dark boots, drop to our knees in the oily grit, move like men looking for a ghost. Roman cuts through the warehouse; Mikhail tears through the small service sheds and checks the moorings. I run the drone down thelength of the dock again and again until my eyes ache and the screen blinks like a heartbeat gone flat.
There’s nothing.
No heat signature curled against a pallet. No footprints that lead into a waiting boat. No damp drag marks that would have shown a hurried exit. The crates are as they’ve always been—stubborn, indifferent—only the gulls argue overhead. Even the black SUV’s vector peters out into scrub and an old service road, then dissolves into nothing useful. Every angle I thought I’d closed yawns open.
Roman’s voice is a hard whisper at my shoulder. “Empty,” he says. “They cleaned it. Or we were late.”
“Or they baited us,” Mikhail snaps, hands already on his phone, calling teams, rerouting drones wider, pushing the search perimeter out twenty, then fifty kilometers. His pace is instinctive; mine is ice-cold focus.
I taste iron and anger, but the heat of fury is useless without a vector. “Sweep again,” I order. “Every shoreline, every quay slip, every freight lane for ten klicks. Pull phone pings, plate reads, port manifests—now.”
“Yes, Boss.” He hurries away.
Roman disappears too, leaving me alone.
I walk into the warehouse again, this time not looking for Sasha, but for any clue that can help me trace her.
My boots echo across the concrete as I move deeper into the warehouse. The air smells of salt, dust, and diesel—old shipments, long forgotten. My gaze cuts through the room like a blade.
Then I see it.
A small glint by one of the support beams—barely visible under the dirt. My pulse stutters. I walk faster, then run, the sound of my steps crashing against the hollow walls.
It’s her bracelet.
The gold catches the light, smeared with grime but unmistakable. I crouch down, pick it up, and turn it over in my hand. It’s warm from her touch.
“She was here,” I whisper. My throat feels tight.
Roman and Mikhail appear in the doorway behind me, watching. I don’t look at them. I keep staring at the bracelet, fingers clenching it like a lifeline.
“She was here,” I say again, louder this time. “They moved her.”
The air leaves my lungs in a shudder. She’s alive. She had the mind—the courage—to drop this for me to find. My Sasha. Always thinking. Always fighting.
I tuck the bracelet carefully into my pocket, straighten, and turn toward the others. “She’s alive,” I tell them, voice steady now. “And we’re getting her back.”
Roman rubs his hands together and asks, low, “What now?”
“No rest,” I say, the words like an order and a promise. “We trace that SUV back to the last read. Pull every highway cam, toll camera, port feed—everything with a timestamp. Cross-check it against burner pings and any recent boat hires in the northern quays.”
We move without hesitation, because we all know the rhythm by heart. I feel the engine of the operation kick over in my chest—cold, efficient. There’s no room for shock, no room for doubt. There is only motion: evidence, vectors, response.
“We find the car,” I add, voice flat. “We follow the chain. We pick every lead they left for us and tighten it until they can’t breathe. Then we pull them out, and we bring her home.”
Roman nods, that familiar hard set to his jaw.
