Page 87 of Sexting my Bratva Daddies

I dropped my phone face down on the desk before they saw I’d been reading our old messages to Peyton on the app. I did that every day. Hour after hour, I scrolled through those messages, our one link to Peyton. When I wasn’t reading those messages, I was scrolling through her family’s social media pages. Obsessed was a kind way of describing me.

Her family did not have a broad presence on social media, but they did have old pictures of Peyton, and her sisters looked enough like her that it kept her alive.

It kept me alive. At this point, that was good enough.

Viktor sank into the chair in front of me, Misha bypassing the chair for the liquor cabinet.

“Anyone else?” The words came out guttural and harsh. Probably because it was the only thing he’d said in a week.

“Me.” I resisted the urge to bury my hands in my hair and pull until the pain gave me something else to think about. “We have meetings in an hour.”

“I know.” Misha poured me a glass of whiskey, carried it over, and sat down with the bottle. He hadn’t shaven in days, and dark circles ringed his eyes.

Five years and we still were not sleeping well. Not eating well.

Hell, we didn’t do anything well anymore. We did what we absolutely had to do and nothing else.

I drank the whiskey and held out the glass.

Misha topped it off and sat back with a sigh, closing his eyes.

Within minutes, he was snoring, his head cranked back at an uncomfortable angle.

Viktor took the decanter from Misha’s grasp and handed it to me after taking a generous swig. “What the hell are we going to do, Leo?”

“I don’t know.” I blew out a slow breath and scrubbed both hands over my face. Whiskers rasped, and I realized I hadn’t shaved either. We were all coming apart at the seams, unraveling stitch by stitch.

Honestly, I was surprised we’d made it this long.

“I’m canceling the meeting. We can push it till next week.” Viktor stood and made his way to the door. He paused behind Misha’s chair, his face twisting as the grief we all tried to bury came roaring to the surface. “I’m worried about him.”

“I’m worried about all of us.” I was failing them, and I barely had enough cognitive thought to wish things could be different. We were ruined. We couldn’t even bring ourselves to hire someone to fill Peyton’s position. Five fucking years and her desk sat empty, her stuff exactly where she’d left it.

Viktor blew out a breath. “Yeah.”

He barely made it to the door before I’d picked up my phone. I switched from Intivibe to social media, my thumb in constant motion as I scrolled.

An image flashed past, and my heart jumped into my throat. I jabbed my thumb onto the screen and pulled down, bringing the picture back into view and reading the caption. Welcome to the family!

A picture of one of Peyton’s sisters filled my phone screen. She stood in the center of the image, a baby in her arms. A man stood beside her, his arm over her shoulders as they both looked down.

Cute, but not what had stopped me in my tracks. No. A person in the background held that honor. In the corner, tucked so deep in the shadows of a tree that I almost missed it, stood another woman, one who looked so remarkably like Peyton that every cell in my body jumpstarted. I had to be wrong. A trick of my imagination. After missing her for so long, I’d finally cracked and started seeing her. I pressed my thumb against the image, then downloaded it to my phone, moving it to a folder so I could zoom in.

I counted people first, stacking what I knew and had learned about Peyton against the number of people in the image. Yep. All her sisters were accounted for. And her mother.

I zoomed in until the image started to blur.

The face was unmistakable. Even from a distance, in shadow, and with everyone else almost blocking her entirely, I knew Peyton too well to be mistaken. I’d know her face anywhere.

I flipped back over to social media, going straight to the page where I’d found the image.

Gone.

My eyes narrowed, and I checked the name at the top of the page. Maybe I’d been so excited I got it wrong. With Misha snoring in a drunken stupor in the chair, I checked every single family member’s profile. The image had been taken down.

Five minutes. That’s how long it had taken them to remove the image.

Which meant one thing.