Chapter 35 Luca
LUCA
I’m back home, in my office, frustrated that I still don’t have a location for my wife. I don’t know where they took her. I read the message again.
I have your wife. Your children. Her parents. You know who this is. You’ll receive a location within the hour.
I read it twice more.
Then I stand up and put my fist through the wall.
The plaster gives. Pain shoots up my forearm. I don’t care. I pull my hand back and look at the hole in the wall for one second, just one, and then I turn to Pavel, who’s just received a call from the men guarding Viktor’s house.
“Talk,” I say.
“It happened forty minutes ago. They moved to Viktor’s house in the afternoon.
Four vehicles, eight men. Our people on the street were two.
” His voice is flat and fast. “They held them off long enough for one of them to get a call out to me before they were overwhelmed. Both men are alive. Badly hurt, but alive.”
“Where were they taken?”
“We don’t know yet. The vehicles split after leaving the neighborhood. I have people tracking the routes now.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“I know that.”
I move around the desk and pick up my own phone. Call Grigor, who runs my eastern district contacts and knows the Malikov network better than anyone I employ. He answers on the second ring.
“I need the location of a Malikov holding site outside the city,” I say. “They moved people in the last hour. Four vehicles are leaving the Kestrel neighborhood heading east. Find it.”
“Luca, that’s—”
“Find it. You have thirty minutes.”
I hang up before he can tell me it’s complicated.
Pavel is already on his own phone in the corner of the room, speaking quietly and quickly to someone I can’t identify from the tone. He holds up one finger at me. Wait.
I don’t want to wait. Every part of me wants to get in a car and drive east and start working through buildings until I find the right one, which is exactly the kind of thinking that gets people killed, and I know it, so I stand in the middle of my study with a bleeding hand and force myself to stay inside the room while Pavel works.
I call Maxim.
He picks up on the first ring, which means he’s been waiting for this call. “I heard. Pavel texted me.”
“I need you here.”
“I’m already in the car.”
I hang up.
The study feels too small. I walk to the window and look out at the grounds and think about Mila asking me to read the next chapter of the dragon book.
About Alexei lining up his toy cars with that precise spacing he can never quite explain.
About Anna in Viktor’s living room, telling me she can’t trust me with her chin up, her hands steady, and her eyes giving nothing away.
They have my children.
They have my wife.
The anger is not the hot kind. It hasn’t been the hot kind since I was twenty years old and still made mistakes because of it.
It’s the cold kind, the kind that doesn’t shake or shout or lose its footing, the kind that moves in a straight line from where I’m standing to the thing I need to destroy and doesn’t stop for anything in between.
Pavel ends his call. “One of my contacts in the eastern network says the Malikovs have a secondary site. Industrial complex near the river, forty minutes outside the city. Disused mostly, they use it when they need somewhere quiet.”
“Is he certain?”
“Certain enough. He says there was movement there this afternoon. Vehicles arriving. More security than usual.”
“That’s it.”
“Probably.”
“Not probably. That’s it.” I move to the cabinet behind my desk and open it. “Get the vehicles ready. I want six men minimum, more if you can pull them in the next twenty minutes. Armed. And I want a medic on standby outside the perimeter.”
“The medic is already arranged. I called when I first got word.”
I look at him. He looks back at me.
“You knew they’d take them,” I say.
“I knew it was a risk when you told me to double the team, and it wasn’t enough. I should have pushed harder to get Anna back inside the estate.” He holds my gaze. “That’s on me.”
“It’s on me,” I say. “I’m the one who let her stay there.”
I pull on my jacket and check the weapon at my back. Pavel starts making calls. The house shifts around us, staff clearing out of corridors as my security team begins moving through it with the particular energy of men who know what’s coming and are ready for it.
Maxim arrives in twenty minutes. He walks straight past Elena without stopping, finds me in the foyer, takes one look at my wrapped hand, and says nothing about it.
“What do you need from me?” he asks.
“You stay behind the first line. You’re coordination, not contact. If something goes wrong with Pavel, you’re the one giving orders.”
“Understood.”
“And Maxim.” I look at him. “If the twins are scared when we get in there, you stay with them. You don’t leave their side.”
Something moves across his face. “I won’t leave them.”
Six vehicles pull around to the front of the estate. Fourteen men. Pavel runs through the layout of the industrial complex from a map pulled up on his tablet, entry points, sightlines, and where they’re most likely holding the family based on the building’s structure.
I look at the map for thirty seconds. That’s enough.
“Pavel.” I pull on my coat.
“Yes.”
“Nobody in that building walks out except my family.” I head for the door. “Make sure everyone understands that.”
“They understand.”
The convoy moves out through the estate gates, and I sit in the front vehicle with my eyes on the road ahead and my phone in my hand, and I type and delete a message three times before I finally send it to Anna’s number, even though I know she won’t see it until this is over.