Chapter 30
CHAPTER 30
KOSTYA
“ S titch faster,” I demanded, my patience wearing thin.
“Stop moving,” Mikhail shot back, his steady hand piercing my skin with the needle and thread again and again.
Normally I didn’t have a problem sitting still to be patched up.
It was strange, but in most circumstances, I savored these moments. Being forced to sit while someone doctored my wounds gave me an opportunity to plan my retribution.
I ran every contingency in my head, prepared myself for every possible outcome.
Not this time.
This time, sitting here with Mikhail stitching me back together was just wasting time.
With each moment I sat here, doing nothing, Marina was in danger .
She got further from me with every passing second and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.
Through the glass walls, I could see Gregor on his phone, pacing back and forth, threatening the police commissioner to ensure he covered for the shoot-out.
Gregor didn’t want any of this damn attention.
The last thing he needed was a detective, or worse, a journalist, sniffing around asking questions.
If he couldn’t get that shut down, it was going to be my ass on the line.
Damien was a few feet from him, busy bribing the hotel manager to put a cap on absolutely everything else.
The manager would do it, of course, as would the police commissioner.
They really didn’t have a choice in the matter, but still Gregor and Damien offered the bribe as a show of respect. It kept the hostility and complications to a minimum.
They would get this done, and the manager and commissioner would make a fuss about it, but they would be happy enough to take the money. That part was standard operating procedure.
What wasn’t standard was having me sit in the office off of the hotel lobby surrounded by bloody towels, waiting for something, anything, that would give me something to do.
Marina and the dead men who took her never made it to the lobby.
They had just vanished.
Gregor thought maybe they were still in the hotel, but I knew better .
If Marina were here, I would know.
I wasn’t sure how, but I would know.
I would be able to feel her if she was still in the building.
“It’s been handled,” Gregor said as he came into the room, slamming his phone down on the table. “Now tell me what the fuck happened.”
I had already been through everything three fucking times and I did not have the patience or the will to go through it again.
“You know what happened. More importantly I want to know what’s being done to track down Marina.”
“Do not forget who you are speaking to,” Gregor said, slamming both his hands on the table and staring me down. Pinning me in place with a glare that promised intense violence.
The men who spoke of the Ivanov blood going thin after Gregor’s marriage had clearly not faced the man in person.
I bit my tongue, holding back the rage that begged to be unleashed on him and anyone else that stood in my way. It would not do a single fucking thing to help me. I needed Gregor’s help, so pissing him off even further was the last thing I wanted to do.
“Go through it again,” Gregor demanded, and I gritted my teeth. Then sucked in a deep breath through my nose and let it out through my mouth.
I didn’t have time for this, but I also had no idea what the next move would be.
Solovyov had Marina.
There was no telling where the fuck he took her .
If she was still alive, I had absolutely nothing other than the events that had already happened to help me find her. So we went through it again.
“I was going through the bag trying to find what was so important about that money?—”
“Was there anything else in the bag?” Mikhail asked.
“No, it was just the stacks of rubles.”
“But it wasn’t enough money to warrant this kind of reaction?” Gregor asked again, clarifying.
“Correct. It wasn’t even enough money for a halfway decent bribe, or even to pay for a hit. I had thought that there may have been something hiding within the stacks, a microchip or maybe a prototype for printing the rubles?”
“Anything like that at all?” Mikhail asked.
“No,” I answered automatically, and then I remembered what I had found seconds before I caught a bullet.
In all of the chaos, I had forgotten.
“One bill had a series of numbers printed on it. I didn’t have time to figure out what they were, but that had to be what he was looking for.”
“Numbers? Like a bank account?” Gregor asked.
“It was sixteen digits, so too long to be a phone number, but maybe coordinates?” I said, sitting back as Mikhail finished the last stitch and tied off the thread with a sharp tug that stung.
He gathered the towels he had used to soak up my blood, piling them at one end of the table. It looked like he had treated a small army instead of only a single man.
“You should rest,” Mikhail said .
“I will rest when Marina is safe, not before.”
Mikhail nodded as if he understood.
He didn’t understand. How could he? No one could understand what it was like to fail their woman so completely. I needed to make this right.
“Drink this,” Mikhail said, handing me a large bottle of water. I ignored it.
“I have the hotel manager scouring the security feeds to figure out where she went,” Damien said, coming into the room and sitting down at the conference table, leaning back in his chair and propping his feet up on the table. “Security is already clearing the floors, and they’re positive she’s no longer here, but not sure how she left yet.”
“Find her,” I demanded, getting to my feet.
Mikhail grabbed my good shoulder and pulled me back down in the chair, pressing the bottle of water into my hand.
“Drink, or I will drown you with it.”
Asshole , I thought as I opened the bottle and drank the cold water down in a single pull.
“The numbers,” Gregor said, pulling my attention back to him. “You said eight digits? You think they are coordinates? For what?”
“A hit maybe?” I said, shrugging and ignoring the pain and limited movement in my right shoulder. ”There wasn’t enough money to pay a pro, but maybe if it was a deposit and the rest of the payment was to be delivered upon completion?”
“Do you remember the numbers? ”
I rattled off the digits and Mikhail grabbed his phone and started typing while I reached into the first aid kit and finished wrapping my shoulder. If I was going to get her back, it would be easier if I could keep the rest of my blood inside my body.
“Was there anything else in the bag that may have explained the digits?” Gregor took a seat at the head of the table.
“Nothing that I saw,” I said. “But I had just found the numbers when those dead men walking broke into my room.”
“Fuck.” Mikhail stood, knocking his chair to the floor.
“What?”
“The coordinates. They’re for the compound in Virginia. The girls, the kids, they are all?—”
Damien and Gregor stood staring at Mikhail for a moment.
The room was completely silent for a single heartbeat, the implication clear.
Solovyov had put out a hit on Gregor himself, or worse, a member of his family.
This wasn’t a cunning move from a ruthless boss.
This was an act of war.
All at once, the room erupted in chaos. Gregor grabbed his phone and called his man at the compound, ordering the women and children to be taken to a safe room and the compound to be locked down.
Mikhail was barking orders to someone on his line, demanding a helicopter.
“Sir.” The hotel manager came into the room and headed to me, the only man not on the phone snarling out frenzied orders.
“What did you find?”
“The men who took the girl? They went to a service elevator. Someone shot them, and took the girl, leaving out the back garage meant for deliveries and?—”
“Do you know what car, or where they went?” I asked, interrupting him.
“No, not yet. They are looking at the tapes now. I will?—”
“We’ve got the helicopter landing on the roof and Mikhail and I are heading to the compound now. You and Damien meet us there, but first, take the Mercedes. Catch up with them. Run them off the goddamn road if you have to.”
“On it,” Damien said as he checked his gun and threw a spare at me.
The gun was fully loaded and I tucked it away then grabbed the extra clip Damien tossed at me.
As the manager ran out of the room and Mikhail and Gregor headed to the roof, Damien and I ran to the waiting car.
Damien’s phone rang as he pulled the driver out of the car and got behind the wheel, not trusting a man that was hired as a chauffeur.
I got into the passenger seat, feeling the cold metal of the gun biting into my back.
Damien hung up the phone. “We are looking for a black Cadillac. The police already have the license plate and are searching for it now. They will let us know when they find it, but let’s hope we get to them first. ”
I didn’t give a fuck who got to it first.
It wasn’t going to change a damn thing.
Whoever took Marina from me was going to die, police witnesses or not.
I just prayed she was still alive when we found them.