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I already know the day her name stops tightening my ribs will never come, no matter how hard I keep wishing the feeling away. There is no point pretending otherwise to myself, not when my cock is stiffening at the bare memory of her. So I keep numbing the ache and my musings with work in my office high above the city, because only columns of numbers give me any relief at all.

My office door slams open with a deafening crack, and Maksim bursts through it in a panic. His tie is dragged sideways, his hair is wild from the wind, and he looks thoroughly beat.

“Delaney is missing,” he grunts out.

My chair crashes backward against the floor, and my control snaps. I’m across the room before I decide to move, and my fists clench in his collar.

“You lost her,” I snarl. “I handed her to you, and you lost her.”

“You never trusted her for one second,” Maksim throws back, shoving at my chest. “She is not property. She was never yours to hand to anyone in the first place, you fucking tyrant.”

The words land exactly where I didn’t want them to, and I flinch. I make myself let go of him.

“Then why the fuck are you standing here instead of out there searching?” My voice is low, venomous.

Maksim shoves me off fully. “The door was pried open. Her phone was on the floor, the screen cracked and frosted with splinters. I called you a dozen times and got nothing, so I drove straight here from Philadelphia.”

My heart slams against my ribs and a cold sweat comes on, because a pried door and an abandoned phone mean she is in real danger, the kind that doesn’t resolve itself.

“Yuri,” I bark into the line already open in my hand. “Pull every camera and every scrap of surveillance within ten miles of that building. I don’t care if it is overkill. Every airport, every station, every private strip. Now.”

Maksim paces the length of my office, breathing too fast and too shallow to think straight, one hand raking through his hair, his jaw twitching.

“Sit down,” I tell him.

“I’m not sitting,” he snaps.

“Then stop circling my desk like a caged animal. You’re no use to her spinning like a fool.”

“This is your fault,” Maksim says, and he doesn’t care who hears him lay the blame. “You dragged her into your world, and she followed you like prey walking willingly into the dark. Now look.”

My phone vibrates before I can answer him. An unknown number. The first photo loads sickeningly slowly.

Delaney is bound to a chair, tape sealed across her mouth, her face pale and fragile under the bad light. But her eyes are open and burning, glaring straight into the lens with open defiance.

Even now, even tied to a chair, she refuses to hand her captors the fear they want from her. That fierce, defiant look shows through everything, and it guts me and steadies me at the same time.

A second message arrives from the same number, signed with a name I know too well, and it is Yelena, and time cracks.

Yelena

Come alone, Lev.

You blocked my number. I noticed.

Maksim snatches the phone from my hand and sees the photo, and every drop of color drains out of his face as he reads Yelena’s name aloud, voice trembling.

A third message follows with an address well outside the city. I recognize it at once as an old Lebedev warehouse, its beige siding blistered and peeling, one they moved through a chain of shell companies years ago to cover their tracks, so that nothing points cleanly back to them.

They planned this exit long before tonight. Yelena knew, all along, that Delaney draws me the way a magnet draws iron, that I would walk into any trap on earth for her and the baby, and she built the trap around that certainty.

“Building plans, everything you can pull,” I tell Yuri as he strides into the office, and I take the phone back from Maksim and hand it to him. “Trace this number too.”

Maksim slams a fist down on my desk hard enough to rattle it, his exasperation spilling over.

“Stay calm,” I murmur.

“How the hell am I supposed to calm down when she is kidnapped, Lev?” His voice cracks. “We drive out there right now.”