Jumping up, the chain rattling from shaking so hard, I reached for him. “No, please. They don’t care about me. You’ll be sending a lot of body parts with no results. That’s a lot of work. Wouldn’t you rather let me go and save yourself the trouble?”
Ignoring me, he left the room, his goon following.
Guess I only had a few hours left to figure out a way out of here. But for now, my legs gave out, and I crashed back onto the cold dirt floor.
Curling into a ball, I held my legs to my chest, letting the tears flow. The harsh reality of my situation hit me. I had no way to get out.
20
LIAM
Gabriel leanedover the conference table that we’d repurposed as our command center. “She could be anywhere. We don’t have a single clue, and nobody has made contact yet.”
We’d been searching for nearly twenty-four hours, and there was still no sign of Quinn. I’d been tearing the city apart, but she’d disappeared without a trace.
Punching the table, I knocked over a half-full coffee mug. None of us had slept since finding out she’d disappeared. We were all running on empty and were going around in circles.
But while I knew we had to stop and rest, I couldn’t. If she hadn’t found out about the marriage contract, she’d have been with me. I’d have been able to keep her safe. Instead, she was out there on her own because I’d failed her.
Leaning heavily on the table, I couldn’t remember ever having felt so helpless. Maybe I deserved this. But while I might, Quinn definitely didn’t. And I’d find her. Alive. There was no other option.
Lifting my head, I watched Jude throw knives at the wall. “Have you heard anything from Gunner?”
Not halting his destruction of the office wall or looking away, he shook his head. “Not a word. If he had any new information, he would have called.”
I’d called Gunner as soon as I found out Quinn was gone. He’d already been turning the city over trying to find her. But not even his contacts had been able to come up with a location.
“What do you think you’re doing?” a feminine—and all-too-familiar—voice screeched from the hallway. “You let me through right now, or I’ll take that gun off you and shoot you with it.”
Gabriel groaned, and Jude finally stopped abusing the walls. All our eyes went to the door as Freya stormed into the office, her face a thundercloud, her hair a rat’s nest that she’d tried to tie up on top of her head but failed.
She was wearing a holey sweater and ripped jeans. If I didn’t know better, I’d ask her if she needed money. A guy built like a linebacker entered behind her. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place his face.
“She’s been gone since yesterday, and I didn’t know until twenty minutes ago?” She took up position in front of us, hands on her hips. “When were you going to tell me? When they start sending body parts?”
I gulped, now unable to get images of a mutilated Quinn out of my head.
“Nice, sis. Really nice,” Gabriel drawled. “Why don’t you tell us what else they’ll do to her? I think Liam would like to find out more about the torture methods you think they’d choose.”
Freya’s gaze turned to me, her eyes softening when she undoubtedly saw the expression on my face. “I’m sorry, Liam. That was careless.” Face hardening again, she turned back to all of us. “Have you found anything yet?”
Shaking his head, Gabriel dropped down into the closest chair with a loud exhale. “Nothing. She disappeared into thin air.The camera angle was off, only showing her standing up. Then she was gone.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.Youmight not have been able to find anything, butIdid,” the big guy said, and all our eyes snapped to him. “There’s surveillance footage from the shoe store across the walkway. They’ve had a few issues lately and installed their own cameras.”
The guy set a laptop on the table, and Jude handed him a cable to connect it to the screen. Then we watched the grainy footage of Quinn getting dragged through a maintenance door. Now that we had an idea of where she might come out, we were able to find the license plate of the car she’d been taken away in.
I felt like I was going to break out of my skin. The bastards had injected her with something before carrying her away. Nobody had noticed because they made it look like she was drunk and they were helping her walk. “They’ve been watching her. Waiting for the perfect moment to strike. I wonder how long they’ve been planning this.”
“A while. There’d been chatter for weeks about something big going down, though nobody knew what,” Freya piped up. Staring at my sister, I wondered how she had so much information.
Interpreting my look correctly, she shrugged. “Gunner tells me everything. Well, almost everything. Not the gory details, because yuck. He’s been trying to get a handle on who’s acquiring soldiers and equipment as if it’s the end of the world.”
Jude leaned forward, raising a brow. “Don’t be a brat and just tell us what he found out, no matter how much you enjoy having the upper hand.”
Poking her tongue out at him, she turned to the guy who came in with her. “This is Vlad. He’s Aleksándr’s brother. And Quinn’s sous-chef.”
That’s when it all clicked into place. I’d seen a photo of him when I did a background check on all of Quinn’s employees.But there was no mention of a possible connection to Aleksándr. How could we have missed something so big? The reports I’d received regularly only mentioned him as Quinn’s employee and friend.
