23. Lev
LEV
“What happened?”
I turned toward Alexei, who was waiting in the passenger seat with me. Mila had been there, but once she got out at the drop-off spot, he came forward from the backseat to take her place.
I’d driven off so no one would spot the car. Nikolai was waiting on the other side of the massive compound hidden at the base of some rocky formations that preceded the end of the mountains here.
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.
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.
“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.