Pinpricks of pain lit up along my spine and back as I dropped onto my bed. It wasn’t a graceful fall, but I didn’t give a shit.
Nothing mattered anymore.
The only thing I could concentrate on and notice was Sadie’s absence.
The second I woke up every morning, I latched on to the unfinished business of finding her.
The minute I crashed every night, I succumbed to sleep with the image of her in my mind.
There was no end to the agony of losing her. Not only because I missed her and was eager to really, officially start the rest of our lives together, but also because of the way she was taken.
I’d failed her.
I hadn’t kept her safe like I thought I could, but then again, neither of us were aware of how far word was spreading abouther. How much interest was put on her since the FBI fired her, since they’d set her up and then gotten rid of her.
Growling low at the renewed reminder of how they’d wronged her, I endured the lancing heat of fury. It never died out. It never cooled. Burning and building gradually, I felt like a ticking bomb about to explode.
Because the instant I found her, I would unleash the beast within me. Killing others was a job. Like this, it would be so fucking personal, it should be marked in the history of mankind.
I would eliminate everyone involved. A total annihilation was coming.
If I can just get a fucking lead.
Draping my arm over my eyes, I waited for the tension in my chest to fade. The aches all over my body. The dull throb in my head.
I’d just spent the last two days chasing a lead about where Sadie could be. This time, I flew out to Moscow. The assholes there didn’t know who she was, but when they taunted me about missing a pretty piece of ass and joked that they’d keep her comfy if they found her, I beat the shit out of all of them. If Alexsei hadn’t been there to pull me back in and help me rein my temper, I would’ve wasted more time in taking my anger out on them for merely talking trash about it.
For weeks, I followed every clue about where she could’ve been taken.
For over a month now, I’d stalked, spied, hunted, and researched for any indication of who could’ve had her taken. Itwasn’t an amateur job, but there were countless organizations with the skillset to have her taken like that.
Despair filled me as I sank against the mattress. It pulled me down, wearing on my bones, but I wasn’t exhausted enough. I had to physically push myself to the extremes of passing out to rest. That was how all-consuming this fear and fury had become.
Breathing in steadily, I waited for sleep, just so I could recharge and resume the fight to get my woman back the next day.
Instead, as the quiet gnawed on my nerves, I thought back to how fiercely I’d had to convince my father that Sadie had been taken. That first day was hell, spending so much time insisting that she had been kidnapped. He, of course, worried that I was being played, that she had run to avoid talking to him. But when I lost my temper and yelled at him that he was testing my patience when the mother of my child was out there, potentially hurt or near death, I got through to him.
Gabby had chosen that moment to enter his study, and when I dared him to think about losing her, about his pregnant wife being taken, he changed his tune.
From that moment on, when he witnessed how crazy it was making me to know Sadie was kidnapped, he didn’t fight me as much. He gave me the resources to find her and get her back.
That was fucking weeks ago, and still, she was lost.
The door to my room burst open suddenly. It was flung open so fast and with so much force, the panel swung back and dented the wall.
Shooting upright, I popped my eyes open and watched Raisa sprint in. I was already swinging my legs over the side of the bed,rushing to get up. My heart raced double time, triggered with her unusual arrival.
“Come on!”
She ran toward me, arm out and urging me to get moving.
No one rushed into a room like that if they weren’t bringing urgent news.
“They have a lead?” I could barely get the words out with the punishing dread of getting my hopes up high. “They found her?”
“Come on!” She shook her head, grabbing my arm and forcing me to run with her.
If anyone else had ever dared to burst into my room like that, they’d be getting an ass kicking. Guards had more respect than that. But this was Raisa. Unlike Gabby, she was cool under a crisis, ready to get serious and disregard decorum and manners.
