Everyone around the table had the good sense not to reply.
So where was she? He got curious looks when he growled with frustration and frowned.
“Celina?” Alexei asked him when the meeting drew to a close.
“Have you seen her?” He stared at each of his colleagues in turn.
“She’s out there somewhere,” Cesar commented unhelpfully.
“Cesar,” Dante reprimanded with a look. Dante Formosa, Diego’s Argentinian teammate, was another recent convert to the world of romance. “For God’s sake, show some heart.”
“How can Cesar do that when he doesn’t have one?” Alexei commented dryly.
This produced a half-hearted laugh, but Diego didn’t rise to the bait. Even if he was the only one who was worried about Celina’s disappearance, the team could at least pretend to be concerned. She was still their employee. They had a duty of care.
“All right, all right! I give in! What’s bugging you, Diego?” Alexei asked.
“I have to go find her. If she’s left here and is trying to get back to Eastern Europe, she’s bound to run into the slavers.”
“If she’s gone home, that’s why,” Cesar commented with a shrug. “She was invaluable during that raid in Monte Carlo. Celina doesn’t strike me as the type to settle back into a comfortable life while all hell is breaking loose in her village. She’s the best chance we’ve got to crack what remains of that gang wide open.”
“What do you mean?” he demanded tensely, standing up.
“She knows the individuals concerned,” Cesar elaborated, “and she’s fearless.”
To hear praise for anyone from Cesar was rare, but Diego’s stomach clenched to hear his suspicions confirmed. Celina had an overdeveloped sense of her survival skills. The slavers were evil personified. They would remember her. “But why would she leave without telling us—telling me?” he mused out loud.
“Because you’d stop her,” Alexei said. “And because she doesn’t trust anyone. Betrayal is all she knows,” the big Russian remarked. “She has no experience of family support. She’s new to our ways, Diego. For fuck’s sake, can’t you cut her some slack?” They all turned at the sound of a discreet knock on the door. “I called the support staff in to the end of the meeting,” Alexei explained, “to see if they’d heard or knew anything.”
With a glance at his phone, Diego reluctantly sat down again. “Thank you,” he gritted out as Alexei flashed a glance his way. He was on edge. Time was passing. Celina could be anywhere by now.
He barely gave the staff a chance to settle into their seats before grilling them. “Has anyone seen Celina? Someone must know,” he insisted when a tense, unhelpful silence swamped the group.
“Ease up,” Alexei muttered discreetly.
Easier said than done when no one would meet his eyes. He thought back to the last thing Celina said. It had made no sense at the time.Check in with Amber?Springing up, he pushed his chair back so violently, it fell over. “You’ll have to finish this without me,” he called out as he left the room.
“If you need us,” his colleagues chorused.
“I’ll give you a call,” he promised grimly.
~~o0o~~
The journey took longer than she’d thought. She’d flown into the country bordering hers, as it was untroubled by war. She had hoped to cross the border on a bus but had learned that there was no official transport into the war zone. She was lucky that a farmer going her way was willing to give her a lift. “No one comes in,” he explained, scanning her face inquisitively. “Everyone who can do so leaves here as fast as they can.”
“Except you,” Celina observed with a smile.
The old man shrugged as she shared her meager rations of airport sandwiches. “Living here is all I know,” he explained. “It’s too late for me to go anywhere.”
“Maybe not,” she said gently. “I’ve got friends who could help you.”
“And where would I go? I don’t want to leave. This is my home,” he protested.
She couldn’t argue with that, and they fell into silence as his ancient vehicle bounced along. The familiar forest stretched away on either side of the narrow road, but with every mile traveled, she felt more apprehensive, and more certain that she had come too late to save Marissa. Craning her neck, she stared out the windscreen, marveling at how tenacious the trees were as they clung to seemingly bare rock on the lower slopes of the mountains. But she couldn’t feel the same affinity as the old man obviously did with a land that had rarely been kind to her.
Knowing so little of her history before she was left on the steps of the orphanage, she’d didn’t even know if she belonged here, and now she felt nothing but a faint sense of dread. She thought back to what she’d learned about the trade of human trafficking. She knew the route through Europe the slavers took to sell off some of their stock, as she’d picked up the different languages at the various stopping places and her fellow captives had told her they held auctions right here in the place where she’d grown up.
“Is it a man that brought you back?”
