We get back into the car while I try so hard to ignore my sinking heart.
Where did they take her?
I swear I’ll kill all of them.
The car barely idles down back at the estate before I throw the door open and move like a man with a fire under his ribs. Roman and Mikhail hang back by the vehicle; they don’t follow. They know when to step in and when to let me burn this out alone.
I close the door of my study behind me with more force than necessary and drop into my chair. The laptop wakes under my fingertips; the array of feeds and indices I’ve built over the years blooms into life. I pull up the SUV’s vector again—the noisy line that dies into scrub—and start hunting backward from the dock timestamp.
It’s a game of ghosts. License plates scrambled, transponders spoofed, burner phones dropped and swapped. Whoever planned this covered tracks like an expert. I run plate recognition across toll cams, then cascade to traffic cams, port manifests, and even private CCTV feeds. I spin the satellite strip slower, then faster, overlaying cell-tower handoffs, Wi-Fi pings, ferry logs. Each filter thins the noise but never gives the clean line I want. The screen fills with red exclusions and gray unknowns.
Frustration builds a hard edge in my chest. I throw the mouse, lean forward, fingers flying—pattern recognition, anomaly detection, then manual cross-check. I taste copper and pressure. Every dead end irritates me like a cut. I won’t leave this chair until something moves for me: a misread plate, a careless uploader, one phone that didn’t get dumped on time.
Midnight passes, and I’m still there, not even taking a second’s break. Mikhail came to invite me for dinner, but one glare had him disappearing. How can I eat anything when Sasha isn’t here? I haven’t seen Roman since I left him in the car hours ago, but I know he’s around. He would never leave me at this stage.
Midnight comes and goes, and I’m still glued to the desk, eyes burning from the screen glow, fingers steady, relentless. The coffee went cold hours ago, but the drive in me hasn’t.
The hours drag into dawn. My screens blur, maps overlapping until it feels like the world itself is one giant maze I have to crack open. Then—finally—something flickers.
A feed. A partial hit.
I freeze, staring. The same black SUV. Caught by a portside camera at 3:17 a.m., heading toward the southern docks. Another abandoned yard—no manifest, no traffic. Exactly the kind of place they’d think I wouldn’t find.
My pulse spikes. I slam the laptop shut, grab my jacket, and stride out.
The house is quiet except for my steps pounding through the hall. In the foyer, Roman and Mikhail are already there—as if they knew.
Roman straightens. “You got something?”
I nod once. “Another dock.”
He doesn’t ask more. He just looks at Mikhail, then back at me. “Let’s go.”
And we do. No hesitation. Just the sound of doors slamming and engines roaring into the early morning dark.
Almost thirty minutes later, we’re close enough that the dock’s silhouette starts to resolve out of the dark. Mikhail eases the car down the narrow access road; the headlights throw jagged lines across rusted metal and salt-stiff rope. The air tastes of oil and brine, the kind of scent that sticks in your sinuses and makes your teeth feel colder. Roman scans the shadows like a hawk, jaw clenched, his hand hovering near his sidearm.
The place is too quiet. Shipping containers loom along the edge like stacked graves; an idle crane towers overhead, a black skeleton against the sky. The water slaps the pilings with a hollow, metallic thud that sounds louder than it should.
Mikhail stops the car and runs a quick sweep on his handheld thermal imager, the screen a pale ghost in the dark. “Three clustered near the warehouse,” he says. “One on the pier. Security pattern is light—two at the main gate, patrol loop every seven minutes according to my count. Cameras line the north side, but there’s a blind spot by the old crane.” He points to the feed, and we all lean in.
We don’t talk after that. I check my pistol, the familiar weight grounding me; Roman does the same. Mikhail straps on comms and tosses a micro-breacher to the seat beside him. We load quickly and silently, the motions practiced and precise.
We leave the car and fan out, moving like shadows stitched together. Roman center, Mikhail rear, me left. Roman ghosts forward first, silent as smoke. He moves like a blade, closing the distance to the gate guards before they register the cut of his silhouette. The nearest man breathes a curse; Roman’s hand clamps over his mouth, and his elbow snaps into the jaw—in and out before the cough can form. The second man reacts, reaches for a radio, and Roman’s knee hits the wrist. He knocks the gun free with a small, precise strike and presses the man flat into the gravel, fingers finding the carotid in a practiced choke until the pulse thins. No shots, no flare—only the soft fall of a body and the night swallowing the sound.
Mikhail’s voice, low and sharp: “Gate clear.” He’s moved with the ease of a man who knows how to keep a perimeter. From my flank, I watch him sweep the pier line; his flashlight is a ghost, his rifle angled low. He catches a silhouette moving toward the water and drops two quick, suppressed rounds—soft cracks in the dark—and the figure goes down without a scream.
I don’t hesitate. Roman’s hand flashes the signal, and I move to the crate stacks. One guard is slumped against a container, cigarette ember still glowing; the other is pacing with his back to me, casual, overconfident. I step into his shadow andlet my fist do the talking—a horizontal strike to the ribs, then a shoulder to the back of the head that sends him face-first into the gravel. He twitches, then stills.
Movement on the pier—another shape trying to use the old crane’s blind spot. Mikhail’s whisper in my ear: “Pier neutralized. Two down.”
Now the door. Roman plants the breacher, a soft mechanical pop, and the chain cracks like thin bone.
“Go get your woman,” he says roughly. “Mikhail and I will hold the perimeter down.”
I slip through the crack in the warehouse door like a shadow, breath slow, senses stretched thin. The dark inside tastes of oil and old rope. My boots find nothing but grit and silence. I walk all the way into the warehouse, and finally, I see Sasha.
But Christos assaults my vision first.
