Page 16 of The Russian's Bought Bride

“That clinic was our entry point,” I continue, pacing now. “The harvesting, their distribution, their buyers…everything ran through that place.”

“And now they’ll find a way to continue elsewhere.”

His words aren’t unkind or wrong, but they grate anyway.

Stopping my pacing, I brace my hands on the desk and keep myself as steady as I can.

“They spooked, and it tipped them off.”

“You want the truth?” Ruslan asks after a moment, giving me the chance to refuse his opinion, which means I likely don’t want to hear it.

I huff out a humorless breath anyway. “Always.”

“You moved too early.”

No sugarcoating and no hesitation, as I expect from him by now.

Straightening slowly, my expression hardens. “I know. I made a call.”

“You did,” he agrees. “And now they’re ghosts.”

Silence stretches between us, both knowing he’s not wrong, and that’s the problem.

I close my eyes briefly and exhale through my nose, forcing the anger down into something usable. Something that doesn’t leave me feeling like all of this was for nothing.

“Where are they heading?”

“We’re still tracking, but we’ve got leads. Just nothing solid yet,” Ruslan responds.

“That’s not good enough.”

“Then we’ll tighten things,” he says. “They won’t stay off-grid forever. Operations like that relocate instead of disappearing.”

He’s right. Men like Malenkov don’t back down at the first sign of resistance. He’ll back off as long as he needs to before getting everything in order and trying again. There’s too much money at stake.

“They’ll be careful now. Paranoid, too.”

“Good,” Ruslan counters. “That means they won’t be operating for the time being. Not for a while, anyway.”

Tilting my head slightly, I consider that.

Pressure forces them into hiding, and it disrupts the network as a whole. It isn’t the outcome I wanted, but it isn’t a complete loss either.

“We still know who they are,” he adds, not letting this be the end of it, regardless of the fumble. “We know how they work, their buyers, their routes…it’s not all gone, just delayed.”

“Delays get more people killed,” I mutter.

“So does rushing.”

I huff out another breath and idly stroke my jaw. He has a point.

“You did what you had to,” he adds after a beat, surprisingly supportive considering the circumstances.

I don’t acknowledge that, because I’m not sure that’s true. Instead, I murmur, “I compromised the operation.”

“You adjusted it. That’s a whole different thing.”

Leaning back again, I stare up at the ceiling now. “It feels the same.”