“Yes,” I tell Mila. I pull her back against me. “We’re going to be okay.”
Alexei looks up at me from the floor. “Papa’s coming,” he says. Not a question.
“Papa’s coming,” I tell him.
And for the first time since I walked out of that estate with my bags and my children and my certainty that I could handle everything alone, I believe it completely.
The light overhead flickers once and holds.
Outside the walls, somewhere across the city, Renat’s message is already moving toward my husband.
And God help everyone in this building when it arrives.
35
LUCA
I’m back home,in my office, frustrated that I still don’t have a location for my wife. I don’t know where they took her. I read the message again.
I have your wife. Your children. Her parents. You know who this is. You’ll receive a location within the hour.
I read it twice more.
Then I stand up and put my fist through the wall.
The plaster gives. Pain shoots up my forearm. I don’t care. I pull my hand back and look at the hole in the wall for one second, just one, and then I turn to Pavel, who’s just received a call from the men guarding Viktor’s house.
“Talk,” I say.
“It happened forty minutes ago. They moved to Viktor’s house in the afternoon. Four vehicles, eight men. Our people on the street were two.” His voice is flat and fast. “They held them off long enough for one of them to get a call out to me before they were overwhelmed. Both men are alive. Badly hurt, but alive.”
“Where were they taken?”
“We don’t know yet. The vehicles split after leaving the neighborhood. I have people tracking the routes now.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“I know that.”
I move around the desk and pick up my own phone. Call Grigor, who runs my eastern district contacts and knows the Malikov network better than anyone I employ. He answers on the second ring.
“I need the location of a Malikov holding site outside the city,” I say. “They moved people in the last hour. Four vehicles are leaving the Kestrel neighborhood heading east. Find it.”
“Luca, that’s?—”
“Find it. You have thirty minutes.”
I hang up before he can tell me it’s complicated.
Pavel is already on his own phone in the corner of the room, speaking quietly and quickly to someone I can’t identify from the tone. He holds up one finger at me. Wait.
I don’t want to wait. Every part of me wants to get in a car and drive east and start working through buildings until I find the right one, which is exactly the kind of thinking that gets people killed, and I know it, so I stand in the middle of my study with a bleeding hand and force myself to stay inside the room while Pavel works.
I call Maxim.
