Page 123 of Cruel Submission

“Her panic button.” I reverse out of the space fast enough that the tires scream against the concrete. “Mirabel’s panic button has been activated.”

“Blyad!” Yanis spits out. I hear movement on his end—chair scraping, his footsteps quickening. “I’m going to check the boutique. Hold on.”

“Don’t hold on. Move.”

I tear out of the parking garage and merge into traffic, cutting off a delivery van whose driver lays on the horn for three solid seconds. I don’t register it. The road ahead is a sequence of obstacles between me and the person I need to reach. Every red light, every dawdling sedan, every pedestrian who takes one second too long in a crosswalk makes me want to tear someone to shreds.

My phone sits in the dashboard mount, Yanis’s call on speaker. I can hear him moving, the ambient noise shifting from restaurant chatter to the bustle of a busy street. Then his voice, sharper now, directed at someone nearby: “Excuse me, has anyone seen a woman—pregnant, dark hair, green dress?”

Muffled response. Nothing useful.

“She’s not in the boutique,” Yanis says, back on the line. “I’m checking with the security detail—”

“How the fuck did we lose her, Yanis? We had six men on her!”

“Big crowd. The place is heaving. She was only going two stores down—”

“Two stores is enough. Two seconds is enough. You know this. I know this. We’ve run ops where the gap was less than five feet, and we still lost people.”

I hear the guilt land. The type of silence that means my brother is swallowing something he wants to say and replacing it with something more productive. Good. I don’t need his apologies. I need his brain.

Then realization dawns on me.

“Give the phone to Debra.”

“What?”

“The phone, Yanis. Hand it to Debra. Now.”

Shuffling. A murmured exchange I can’t make out.

Then Debra’s voice, tentative. “Arkady?”

“Debra, listen carefully.” I weave between two lorries, the gap narrow enough that my wing mirrors nearly kiss their flanks. The speedometer reads seventy in a forty zone. “Are you sure—absolutely sure—that my father does not know about Mirabel? That you have an identical twin?”

“I never told him,” she says. Her voice is steady, but I don’t think it will stay that way. “I wanted to protect my sister. I didn’t want Gavriil to know about her. Unless he did his own investigation, he doesn’t know. Not from me, anyway.”

My thumb is pressing so hard into the leather of the steering wheel that the nail bed has gone white. I force myself to ease the pressure before the tendon cramps.

“So when he crashed the engagement party,” I say, fighting to keep the words from rushing out, “he thought I was proposing to you?”

“Could be,” Debra says.

I blow through a red light. A taxi swerves. Someone screams something I don’t catch and don’t care about.

“Oh God,” Debra husks out. She’s beginning to understand, too.

Fuck.

Fuck!

I pull up the security app with my free hand, thumb jabbing at the screen while my other hand holds the wheel steady through a roundabout at a speed the engineers never intended. The panic button GPS shows coordinates. I know these coordinates. I’ve memorized every property my father owns, every safe house, every bolt-hole registered through his web of shell companies and offshore trusts. I tracked them two years ago with Stefan, plotted them on a wall like surveillance targets, because that’s exactly what they are.

These coordinates belong to Gavriil’s primary residence.

Mirabel is in my father’s house.

The same house where my father kept trafficked women.