Page 62 of Bought By Sin

But once I parked, we both settled in to watch out for anyone spotting us and approaching. When one of us was looking out, the other viewed the live feed of what she captured from the tiny camera sewn into the hem of the hat she wore. It provided us almost with an accurate show of what she saw, and the footage was… grisly.

Torture.

Murders.

Filthy, disgusting living quarters.

Within the first five minutes of what she captured, I’d seen more than enough to know that Yusef Antonov ruled with fear. With violence and the threat of punishment.

Not loyalty.

This wasn’t a family in any sense of the word.

If this was how Gregori wanted to build a new empire and gather up a network of rivals and enemies to come at us, then he was doing so with the gritty threat of death and pain.

Not honor.

“Lev.” Alexei didn’t look at me as he swatted his hand out. He was still looking out the windows for any threat coming to us as we sat and waited for her to get in and out. “What happened?” Without breaking his surveillance, he gestured for me to answer him.

But I couldn’t.

I was too tense, filled with this burning urge to run out there and get her back to safety. I couldn’t claim to know why she’d stayed still and unmoving on the tracking monitor. She had stopped, and when the feed from her cam stayed still as well, I feared that she’d been shot. Killed. Drugged.

Anxious about sending her out like this, I was captured in a sickening spiral of dread that something could happen to her.

It wasn’t because she was weak. It wasn’t because she was unskilled and an amateur at sneaking around or running fast.

It was because I couldn’t stomach the idea of losing her. At all.

“She choked,” Nikolai said through the comms units we all wore. “I think she choked and had to pause for a moment.”

I nodded, staring at the screen, zoning out with tunnel vision. “I think she did.”

“She moving again?” Alexei asked.

“Yes,” I answered before swallowing hard.

She’d gone still and silent for that one minute, but all it took to prompt her into action was my asking if she was still with me. It destroyed me that she wasn’t literally with me, within my reach and somewhere that I could protect her. But I wouldn’t deny that she was ideal for this mission. And this mission would make a difference in terms of tracking Yusef Antonov and Gregori. They were both too damn secretive and too good at hiding so that no one could get a solid location on them.

I watched the monitor, seeing how the bright green dot demonstrated her progress through a building.

Her sneaking around outside the compound was one thing. She could hide and run. But inside somewhere? Any number of perils could be waiting for her without an easy escape.

I watched the live feed from her camera as she slowly and carefully snuck through one hallway after another. Through one corridor then the next. Up flights of stairs.

“Maybe she should’ve been armed,” Nikolai mused.

I winced, not liking that detail. We’d decided that she shouldn’t be armed when she hadn’t been trained with weaponry yet. No Cartel had given her the privilege of handling a gun, probably assuming she’d use it against them. No “owner” ever let her have power. But here, where she would need to defend herself if anyone spotted her, I debated whether we were only acting like that too, reluctant to arm her.

I wasn’t worried about her using a weapon on me. But I had been too stressed about the chance that someone could have found her armed and used that weapon against her. Siccing her in this high-stakes situation with a gun that could have easily been taken off her and used against her wasn’t a mistake I was willing to make. There was nothing within my control about that scenario. No matter how many times I thought it through and discussed it with my brother and cousins, I came to the same conclusion. Giving her a weapon without the knowledge of how to use it would only be that much more dangerous.

She turned. The camera swung in the direction of another room, but no lights were here to show her the way. Squinting to make out more details of the blur of her recording, I leaned forward toward the tablet I watched on.

My heart felt high up and stuck in my throat.

My lungs felt too stiff and unable to fully inflate.

Adrenaline fired me up, but all I could do was stay tense and wait.