Chapter 29
MIKHAIL
“Did you check her phone?” Andre asked.
I stopped pacing at the warehouse where we’d met. Since we realized Claire had been taken, I hadn’t given up looking for her. Glaring at my son for such a stupid question, I wished I could scream.
Every second that Claire remained missing and unaccounted for was another stroke of hell upon me.
I would go insane worrying about her. I would never forgive myself for letting her walk out of my life, but first, I had to find her and see with my own eyes that she was alive and well to walk away again.
Andre rolled his eyes, just as annoyed with me as I was with him. “I know we checked it before. When we first realized the Giovannis were fucking with us and their talk was a diversion with Anya being taken.”
“Do you mean has anyone checked her phone recently?” Sergei asked, walking a slow perimeter of the empty room.
“Yeah.” Andre nodded. “Has she been moved?”
“No.” Roman held up his phone, checking the map. “It hasn’t moved.”
“So we’re supposed to believe she’s still in the fucking ocean? In the water?” Andre snapped. He shook his head.
“That or she’s on a boat,” Sergei said.
“If she was on a fucking boat, the signal would still move a little,” Roman argued.
“Then maybe it’s just a fucking decoy or something,” Andre said, exasperated.
As they bickered and consulted with each other, I growled and resisted this urge to roar my frustration. It was all my fault this was happening.
No. It’s not.
She chose to walk away. Just like that fucking AMA form that they always offered at the hospital, she’d checked out on me.
She decided to leave and surrender the protection I’d been giving her.
Had she stayed at my building and considered being with me, committing to me, she wouldn’t have been taken at all. Ever.
“It probably is a decoy. A trick,” I muttered, pacing again and wishing I could have a cigarette. I quit the day Andre was born and I’d never felt the urge for that calming hit of nicotine like I did now. Not for thirty years had I needed something to help me get through this kind of stress.
“Another dead end,” Andre agreed.
Sergei got a call and he walked off to handle it.
As much as I was determined to find Claire and was putting all the manpower I could afford into searching for her, we still had other problems to handle.
Businesses were still being bothered and I had to make sure no one dared to start a fight and engage with any Orlovs in an unsanctioned turf war while I was committed to finding the woman I wanted to call mine.
This was all part of the trick. All part of the mind game. When they took Anya, they were trying to throw me off. Now, with Claire, they were fucking with me again.
She has to be alive.
She can’t be gone.
She can’t be dead.
We only just fucking met.
I told my nephew yesterday that I never considered myself a quitter, and that wouldn’t happen here. No matter what it took, no matter how many soldiers and spies I questioned and killed in my path, I wouldn’t give up the search for her.
She mattered too much. Dr. Donovon mattered enough that I’d let her go, dammit.
“Then let’s start from the beginning again. Near the hospital,” Andre suggested.
I shook my head, heading out of the warehouse with him. “You two go through the border to Roberto’s place.”
Sergei and Roman nodded, teaming up to see if they could get any closer to finding a hit on Claire.
Too many properties were out there to be searched, though.
Like us, both the Popovs and Giovannis hid ownership of countless buildings where they could hide someone.
We did it too. Also like us, they had numerous properties and pieces of land outside the city.
It wouldn’t have taken much to transport Claire out of New York.
After all, the last we saw of her on any surveillance footage that my security expert hacked into was when she was carried into a cargo van.
“We will find her,” Andre said once we got in the car.
“Dead or alive?” I asked, hating the possibility of being too late.
“Alive.” He nodded, slitting his eyes as he concentrated and the driver headed out. We moved with minimal backup, ready to search high and low for the woman who shouldn’t have left at all.
“I think this has to do with my mother,” he added. “Something about your actually having a woman you want in your life is too much of a temptation for them to resist.”
I screwed up my face. “What kind of bullshit are you thinking of now? Your mother? Olga? What the fuck would she have to do with this?”
“She was the last woman in your life,” he replied.
I snorted and shook my head again, annoyed with whatever tangent he wanted to spout off with. “She was never in my life.”
He didn’t speak up again, but I knew him too well. He still had ideas about Claire’s capture, and I had to set him straight.
“Your mother was contracted to marry me and hated it. Hated me. She consummated the marriage and ran off to live at home, to have it a marriage in name only. That’s how you were born.”
“I know. I know the story.”
“Then let me finish it anyway and you can see why it’s stupid to even think that Claire has anything to do with the old news.
Your mother never saw me, never saw you, and didn’t give a damn about having a son or a husband.
When her father made her visit with me, she got shitfaced and mistook me for a guard and I mistook her for a dancer from the club.
That’s how Anya came to me. Then the bitch killed herself and wasn’t a mother to her, either.
” I grimaced, hating the aftertaste of even thinking about Olga.
“So what the fuck does any of that have to do with Claire?”
“Because she’s your new woman.”
“If she were mine, do you think she would’ve walked away?” I grunted. “She’s not mine.”
“You acted as if she could be. You spared no expenses or trouble to treat her like you wanted her to be your partner.”
“You’re barking up the wrong tree, Son. She left. That’s all there is to it.”
“That’s not all there is to it.” He smirked at me, like I was the one being dumb. “She’s not like the whores and women you’ve picked up and fucked all this time. She mattered, and you wanted her to choose to stay with you. With the family.”
“So what?” I shrugged, feeling ripped raw with too many defense layers gone. He was hitting too close to the truth.
“So, you either keep her and make sure this doesn’t happen again or you send her away so she won’t be an obstacle to business like this.” He sighed. “Figure it out and handle this without the risk of us being pulled off to find her and save her.”
“You say that like it’s easy.” I stared him down. “Figure it out?”
“Yeah. Figure it out,” he suggested sarcastically, yet he meant every word. “Tell her how it’s going to be. Give her the incentive to stay.”
“You think I didn’t?”
“No.” He rolled his eyes. “You probably just fucked her and assumed that was enough. With someone raised to be a good girl like her, you have to convince her she’s not losing her morality to be with you.”
“And where the fuck have you taken the time to get a degree in psychology, wise ass?”
He huffed and almost smiled. “It’s just common sense, Father.”
The hell it was.
“Anya is worried, too,” he added.
“I have no control over what Claire wants to do.”
He slapped the armrest. “Do you hear yourself? Are you not the boss of the most powerful family around here? The head of the Orlovs? You have no control over what she wants to do? The fuck you don’t!”
“I have no control over her loving me,” I said, hating that he’d twisted my arm to say it. “I can’t make her love me or make her want me.”
He watched me, furrowing his brow. “Claire is not like my mother.”
I sighed, looking out the window for a second.
He was hitting too fucking close to the truth.
“Claire is not like Olga Volkov who only cared about herself. Who was selfish to want nothing to do with her own children.”
I swallowed hard, hating how thick the emotions were in my throat, clogging it.
“This isn’t like before.”
I laughed wryly. “Like you’d know. You weren’t even born yet.”
“I’ve heard. I’ve been with you my entire life and I didn’t need to witness it to understand. I know you’ve always struggled with the lack of being wanted. With your own wife avoiding you.”
“It was a contract marriage, Andre. Of course she didn’t want to be married to me.”
“But that’s not the case now.” He rocked with the car stopping short. “Claire can choose to want a life with you.”
“Not if these fuckers kill her first,” I growled, scanning the surroundings. “What’s going on?”
The driver turned slightly, seeming to split his attention between what was said in his comms unit and the navigation map on the dashboard. “They’re tracking her.”
“She’s moving?” I asked.
The driver nodded. The other soldier, seated next to him, turned more to face us. “She’s on the move and we are waiting for the other team to respond where they’re heading.”
“No.” I shook my head, holding the back of the headrest. “There’s no time for a strategy. Go. Fucking go. Take me to her.”
I wasn’t going to sit back and waste one more second of her being captured. It was risky to throw myself on the frontlines with this, but sitting back wasn’t an option.
Not when it felt like my heart would never slow down without her safe again.
Not when my son was encouraging me to stop being so blind and admit that I had to take the chance that Claire could love me and want a life with me despite the challenges we’d face.
“Go!” I ordered, eager to race to her and end the lives of every single asshole who’d dared to harm her and scare her.
Never again.
As the car sped off again, I vowed to never, ever be so dismissive of her rejection.
Whatever she decided, she would have to be safe and far from my enemies.
But hopefully not far from me. From the beginning, I wanted to believe we could build together.