Page 63 of Bought By Sin

And watch.

Then the feed slid to the side.

It went too fast for it to be natural.

The camera bounced, like she’d been hit and her head was down. As the camera shook slower until it stopped, the view was all off.

“Fuck.”

The view was of an office room, but from the wrong angle. She was down, or her hat was. The direction of the camera was too low, projecting upward.

“Fuck!”

I didn’t press the button for her to hear me via the comms unit.

Gripping the steering wheel and tensing up at the suspense of waiting for her to move, for the feed to change, or for a sound of what was going on, I swallowed hard and tried to breathe through the agony of the unknown.

I wasn’t there with her. I couldn’t control a single fucking thing, and the loss of power acted like a stranglehold on me. Like a crushing weight I couldn’t overcome.

Alexei turned to frown at me, clued in to my distress.

“Where is she?” He held up his phone with the tracking app.

The green dot indicating her location was gone.

She must have disabled her tracker… or someone else had. That synced with the lack of sound coming in from her.

Only silence met my ears now.

Someone had taken the comms unit from her ear or she’d disabled it herself. Of the two options, I prayed it was the latter.

“Where the fuck is she?” Alexei asked, gruff and impatient.

“I don’t fucking know.” As I said it, the camera feed went dead. A blank screen of dark gray filled the tablet, the standard standby image that would fill in when the camera was turned off.

“Fuck!” I slammed my fist to the steering wheel, pissed that something could’ve happened to her. Frantic that someone could have gotten to her.

“Was she captured?” Nikolai asked, hearing and seeing the same things that I could.

“I don’t know,” I shot back. Rage consumed me, mixing into a dangerous concoction with the concern and terror that had me nearing a breakdown. “I don’t fucking know.”

I didn’t care if my composure cracked. I didn’t give a shit who saw me snap and lose my temper. Nothing could be okay about this situation and I was too close, too invested, not to care. I couldn’t try to mask my fear and anger if I tried.

“I don’t fucking know.” I tried again and again to refresh it all. Her camera feed. The comms unit which had the tracker. The tracking app.

Nothing worked.

She was off the grid—invisible and lost to us on the outside of the compound.

“Or she disabled it.”

I swung my head toward my brother, glaring at him for even going there. For thinking of that at all.

“Maybe she saw the need to stay hidden and worried that something could pick up on her tech,” a soldier said from the backseat. A third car with four soldiers was parked nearby. We had backup, and they were all witnessing the same lack of connection with her.

“No.” Alexei shook his head and furrowed his brow at me. “No. I mean maybe she disabled it all because she’s turning on us.”

I gritted my teeth and resisted the urge to punch him.