Page 64 of Bought By Sin

“I know you don’t want to hear it, but she could have,” he insisted bluntly.

“No.” Nikolai scoffed. “She’s not turning on us. On him.”

“She could.” Alexei shook his head, not backing down. “She could have disabled it all and taken this chance to be free. To escape.”

“No.” I shook my head until I wasn’t trying to even see straight. “No. She wouldn’t. She⁠—”

“She could’ve seen this as a goddamn chance to take off,” Alexei insisted.

“No!” I roared it, too livid to hear his reasoning.

Because in the back of my mind, that possibility was always there. I kept her with me nonstop except when she went to the safehouse to sleep. And there, she couldn’t take off because my property was guarded and under patrol.

Until this mission, she had no chance to run off and disappear.

“No,” Nikolai argued. “She wouldn’t have. She wouldn’t⁠—”

I growled. “She wouldn’t have fucking waited until she was in to try to run. She wouldn’t have followed along and subjected herself to getting on the inside and seeing all that shit to linger and then run. She would’ve run before she cut her way into that motherfucking fence.” Spittle flew with my harsh words at my brother. But as my pulse roared in my ears, the fact that time sped by without any connection to her, I did my best to ignore my heartless brother who’d assume that bullshit about her.

She hadn’t run.

I didn’t care if he’d accuse me of thinking that because I didn’t want to consider the possibility that she would desire distance from me like that. It was a fact as far as I was concerned.

Mila wouldn’t have given up on us and escaped, dammit.

She was captured, and I wasn’t going to sit here and wait for her to show up, to let anyone harm her and use her.

“She didn’t fucking run,” I said, lashing out to expend the last of my negative energy. Hating how out of control I felt, so near the verge of rushing out of here and letting my fear dictate me to run in there and save her, I heaved in a desperate inhale of air and tried to keep my cool.

“We’re going in.” Twisting to face the soldier in the back seat as I pressed the button to speak into the comms, I glared at my brother. I dared him to question me. “We are fucking going in there and getting her out.”

“How?” Nikolai asked.

Alexei narrowed his eyes, likely thinking I had no clue what I was doing and why I’d be this worked up over losing a woman who had shown up in our lives as a slave. He could disagree with me all he wanted. He could assume she’d taken this first opportunity of being away from me to run.

But he wasn’t such an asshole that he wouldn’t help me launch an impulsive campaign to go in there and retrieve her.

“You can take your backup in from the west entrance near what we identified as their main gate to that warehouse on the compound,” he said, monotone yet irritated. “And we can stagger in a few men approaching in her wake.”

I grabbed my gun and reached for the door handle, ready to take off and kill anyone who stood in my way from getting Mila back.

24

MILA

Iclamped my mouth shut as the man ambushed me from the side. His arm smacked into my side with the force of a two-by-two crashing into me like he was up at batting practice. The impact stole my breath. It stayed in me as I tensed, locking into full panic mode.

It wasn’t the sickening anxiety of it that triggered me.

It was the survivalist instinct kicking in.

He surprised me around the turn into another office, this one holding far fewer copies of paperwork and maps and correspondence. I’d just stepped in, and he was there, lunging out like a monster in the dark.

I didn’t have a chance to gasp.

To suck in more air.

To think. To speak. To shout.