4. Ciel
CIEL
It felt like a lifetime.
She’s gone.
The words sent chills down my spine. They played again and again inside my overactive brain.
As soon as I got Wynn’s phone call, I’d sprung from my bed and screamed for the rest of the guys.
It had only taken us an extra three minutes to leave the penthouse.
When we’d found him passed out in the street surrounded by the bodies of the men he’d killed, I thought…
I thought my chest was going to cave in on itself.
His pulse had been so fucking weak beneath my fingertips.
We’d gotten him to an underground clinic nearby the penthouse that we’d used before, and then immediately called Willow.
She and Fallon helicoptered to the city, and as soon as she got here, she’d taken over his treatment.
She gave him a blood transfusion and then performed surgery to remove the bullet from his abdomen.
He was stable now—clearly fighting for his life to get back to Leona—but we’d just have to wait and see. When he woke up, we’d know more .
Willow was staying with him at the clinic until he was stable enough to move home.
I’d barely torn myself away from him—but Leona . It was torture trying to wait for him during surgery, but knowing she was gone?
We’d almost lost him.
We had lost her.
But we’d get them both back. As soon as I could find her, I’d make us whole again.
She needed us—she needed me .
The only thing keeping me on track was years of training for situations exactly like this. We were highly trained assassins. Emergencies were our daily lives. We could keep our heads on straight while the world literally blew up around us.
As soon as I was able, I’d followed her tracker through the city until it reached a shipyard. The signal cut out after that, and I’d been working ever since to pick it back up again. Only once had it resurfaced since, miles into the Atlantic, before it cut out again.
She was on a ship. That was all we knew.
It was fucking killing me. It was killing us all. My hand—still healing from Lucia Greco’s stab wound—screamed with every movement of my fingertips, but there was no way I could stop or slow down. The farther she got from us, the harder it would be to get her back.
Obi threatened the entire dark web, promising retribution if whoever took her did not return her to us immediately.
He’d called contacts all over the city, trying to track down who took her.
He’d set up his computer in my room so we could work together, and he hadn’t stopped pacing around my room.
I’d be pacing right there with him, except I kept my fingers glued to my keyboard and my eyes glued to my screens.
My bad hand throbbed in pain, but I had to push myself to the limit.
Ryu and Cas had been turning over every square inch of the shipyard, trying to find clues or information or even the name of the fucking ship she was on.
Anything that could give me a trail. I’d tapped into the cameras there, but they were positioned so fucking weird, pointing at all the wrong angles.
My guess was that someone had repositioned them to hide something.
“Anything, Ciel?” Obi asked from behind me after hanging up a phone call. He leaned over my shoulder and stared at my screens.
My lips pressed together. “Not yet.”
“Fuck,” Obi hissed. He stood straight and rubbed his eyes while muttering to himself in his native language, Igbo. “We must get her back.”
Obi rarely ever cursed, and I didn’t think I’d ever heard his voice so desperate.
“We will. We’ll find her and—” I swallowed, trying to keep my voice level. “We’ll find her and bring her home.”
It was the middle of the night now, and we were all running on fumes, but we couldn’t stop. Every second that passed, she felt further and further away.
“I will turn the world over piece by piece,” Obi muttered. I couldn’t quite tell if he was talking to me or himself. “How dare they think they can take her from us? I will burn them all down. She is ours .”
I turned back to my computer, trying to hack one of the twelve satellites equipped with camera capability currently rotating in the atmosphere within the grid I thought she’d be in.
If I could start scanning the ocean, or if I could get a map of all ships currently traveling, maybe I could find something.
Obi’s phone rang, and he immediately answered. “What?” He paused, then put it on speakerphone. “Ryu.”
“We found the ship.” Ryu’s voice.
Obi and I locked eyes. “Tell us.”
“There were four ships that departed the shipyard during the window in question this morning,” he answered. His voice sounded coiled with tension .
“We finally got a hold of the transit logs,” Cas added. “There’s only one option that makes sense. It’s called the Red Talon .”
The Red Talon . My fingers flew across the keyboard, and I cringed at the strain, but I couldn’t slow down now.
Cas and Ryu had been searching for hours. They’d immediately latched onto one another as soon as we’d realized she was missing. Neither of them could sit and wait for news; they had to be out, searching.
“Where was it docked at the yard?” Maybe I could find a camera nearby that showed them taking her onto the boat. If I could find one that pointed to anything at all.
Ryu read off a berth number, and I searched through the shipyard records until I found it. Within a minute, I had the feeds up and was cycling back through the earlier hours of the day.
The first two cameras were pointed away from the berth, but the third was at an odd angle and hidden half behind a pole. Whoever had repositioned them must have missed this one.
“I have eyes on the berth,” I said, so Ryu and Cas could hear too. Obi loomed behind me. “Searching through the footage.”
The video rewound, showing the time the ship departed at 9 o’clock in the morning.
Leona and Wynn were attacked shortly after 8 o’clock, so if she was brought here, we would see her on the footage between that time frame.
I scrolled back through the recording, but didn’t see evidence of Leona being brought on board.
Obi and I exchanged a frustrated glance.
Maybe I could keep looking backward to get a clue of who boarded the ship. It might lead us to her.
“Oh, fuck,” I breathed, eyes glued to the monitor.
Behind me, Obi tensed. I could feel his disbelief and glower combine into radiating dark waves. “Ciel, are we seeing what I think we are?”
“What is it?” Cas asked, voice raising.
“Max Volpe,” I breathed. On the video, Max’s arms were bound behind his back, and four men were manhandling him down a gangway and onto the ship. The timer on the clock read 6:21 a.m.
“He’s behind this?” Cas ground out. A hollow sound echoed in the background, like he kicked or hit something. “We knew it.”
“I’ll fucking kill him,” Ryu shouted. “I’ll gut him and strangle him?—”
“No, Volpe appears to be a captive as well,” Obi interrupted. “They’re taking him aboard the ship bound and gagged.”
My eyes scanned the transit logs of the Red Talon . If Max didn’t take her, then who the fuck did?
“No , ” I whispered. The answer stared back at me.
“What, Ciel?” Cas demanded.
“The ship is sailing under the company name Adriatik Maritime Limited. The flag state is Malta, but the company that owns and operates the ship is Albanian.”
“Albanian?” Ryu’s voice was hollow, distant.
A chill rolled through my body. Albanians took her. All four of us went silent as we tried to process what this meant. I could see fear on Obi’s face as clearly as it was on mine.
“The Albanians kidnapped Max, too?” Cas finally asked.
“It looks like it,” I responded slowly. “She has to be on that ship.”
Why? What was going on?
She wasn’t just surrounded by Albanians, who would do God-knows what to her. I shuddered to even consider it. She was also on the same ship as the man who’d tried to kill her multiple times. Our number one enemy.
“I’ll call Giulio,” Cas said. “We need to talk to the Family. Maybe they know more about what happened.”
Obi took two full breaths to get his emotions under control before he stood, and our leader took over. “Yes. Get as much information as you can, Caspian. If they took Volpe, we can use the combined force of the entire Italian mafia to bring them down. ”
“Got it.”
“What else do we know about the ship?” Obi asked.
I read off the details. It was a container ship with cargo listed as “industrial refrigeration units” and “replacement tooling.” Approximately 140 meters long. Max travel speed at 15 knots.
Calm filtered through my chest. Data . I had data.
With this information, I could calculate a more accurate search window, based on how many hours had transpired since the ship sailed.
The name of the ship would be connected to maritime records across the world.
Satellites could give me a precise location.
The company that owned it would lead us to exactly who was responsible.
We had enough to go off now to at least get us closer.
“Find her, Ciel,” Ryu urged, voice strained. “Please.”
“I will,” I promised. This was what I was good at.
I would find our girl. I’d bring her home.
“The Albanians will pay for this,” Obi said darkly. “I know their Clans operate in liquor stores, strip clubs, and pawn shops, all up and down the East Coast. Someone must have more information.”
“I can get you a list of businesses or known locations.”
He shook his head. “Focus on the Red Talon first. Then, I want everything you can find on Adriatik Maritime Limited,” Obi said as he grabbed his phone and headed toward the door. “I will look into their other operations. Caspian, Ryuji, I will text you an address where to meet me.”
“Where are you going?” I asked, rubbing my thumb into the palm of my bad hand to loosen the muscles.
His face hardened. “We’re going hunting.”