Chapter 38
DAMIEN
Alex and I clear security and get on the elevator at Mount Sinai without speaking. We stop outside Clara Hewitt’s door. We stand there a second before I turn to him.
“We’re going to find her,” he says.
“I’m only going to ask you once,” I say. “Your brother.”
His jaw ticks. “My loyalty is to you.”
“If he’s tied to this—”
He cuts in, his voice low and steady. “My loyalty lies with you, and I’ll prove it over and over until the day I die. Look where I am, Damien. Here, with you. Not with him.”
I study his face for any hesitation or dishonesty. I don’t see any. I nod. “I shouldn’t have asked.”
“You should,” he says. “But now we move.”
Two of our guards nod us on ahead.
Clara is petite, but there is nothing small about the way she looks at me. Her blonde hair is pulled back, she’s awake and sitting up. Her expression is all no-nonsense.
“Um, hello?” she says, more offended at our barging in than worried. “Can’t a girl recover from open heart surgery in peace?”
I flash her a smirk. “Figured I’d swing by so you could thank me in person for footing the bill.”
Her eyes flash. In about two seconds, she realizes who I am, what I’m doing there.
Clara sighs. “You two look like trouble,” she says. “Close the door so the nurses don’t see my room just got invaded by mobsters.”
Alex huffs a laugh. I close the door.
“How do you feel?” I ask.
“Like I lost an argument with a truck,” she says.
“Where is your sister?”
Not even a twitch as she answers. “Isn’t she with you?”
I almost smile. “You know she’s not.”
She arches a brow. “Oh, you think so?”
“She flew the coop,” Alex says. “And I’m confident she wouldn’t leave without telling you where she was going.”
Clara opens her mouth, ready to argue.
I raise my palm. “Don’t bother. Cassandra’s not safe, and every second you bullshit me is a second I can’t protect her.”
That does it. Clara’s posture sinks.
“She came here, yeah. But she didn’t tell me where she was going. I swear.”
Shit.
Concern forms on Clara’s fairy-like features. “She’s in trouble?”
“We think so,” Alex says.
Clara sighs. “You have to find her.”
“We will,” Alex assures her, and he means it. I can hear it in his tone.
Alex tries Cassandra’s phone again. Straight to voicemail. He checks a second line, the one I gave her. Nothing.
“I’m going downstairs,” he says. “Security desk, garage cameras, street cams if they’ll share. I’ll pull what we can.”
“Go,” I tell him.
He nods to Clara. “You need anything, you tell the nurse to call for Officer Durov.”
“Bring me a cinnamon roll and my sister,” she says. “In that order.”
He smiles for the first time all day, then leaves.
The room is quiet, except for the beeping of the heart monitor. I sit in the visitor chair and fold my hands.
“I owe you honesty,” I say.
“Yes, you do,” Clara replies. “And an apology. But start with honesty.”
“I love your sister,” I begin. The truth sits clean between us.
Clara studies me. “You don’t look like a man who says things he doesn’t mean.”
“I’m not. And I intend to keep her safe.” I pause and hold her gaze. “To keep them safe.”
Her eyes flash. Her voice lowers. “You know.”
“I do. I will protect Cassandra and our child with everything I am.”
Clara swallows. Color skates across her cheekbones. “I wanted her to have a boring life.”
“She won’t,” I say with a small smile. “But she will have a safe one. That I can provide.”
Clara gives me a genuine smile. It is permission. “Then do whatever it takes.”
“I will.”
My phone buzzes with a text from Alex.
You need to see this.
I’m on my way.
I turn back to Clara. “I’ll bring her home.”
“You’d better,” she says.
I leave the room, take the elevator down, and walk the long clinical hall to the security office. Alex is inside with a supervisor who understands our urgency without needing the story. Two guards lean over a bank of monitors.
Alex points at a frozen frame. “Start here,” he tells the guard. The footage rolls.
We glance at the time stamp on the lobby camera, it’s early morning. Cassandra’s hood is up, her head down, moving like a woman on a mission who does not want to be noticed. She crosses the frame and vanishes into a blind spot.
“Next,” Alex says.
East garage elevator. The doors open. She steps out, a duffle bag on her shoulder. She looks left, then right. She moves toward the exit ramp. Two men split off from a column and seamlessly fall in behind her. I feel heat climb the back of my neck and try to keep my hands still.
The angle changes. The first man closes in and presses a gun into her ribs from behind. The second takes her elbow. They steer her toward an unmarked parked van. She goes stiff for a second, then forces herself to walk. She does not panic.
That’s my girl.
My jaw twitches. I let the rage form but stay calm. There is more to see. We watch another camera view where the van door slides open and another man reaches out, cupping her head and forcing her in. The door shuts. The van drives away.
“How long?” I ask.
“Two minutes,” the supervisor says. He has the street feed up already. We watch the van glide into traffic, then disappear between a bus and a delivery truck before the camera loses it.
“Another angle,” Alex says.
We shuffle through more feeds. The van doesn’t show again. Whoever did this knows where the other cameras are.
The supervisor rewinds on his own, unprompted. “You’ll want to see this.”
It’s a new angle, a different lane of the garage. A pearl-colored coupe eases out after the van with a vanity plate I’ve seen more than once.
Raquel.
The frame is grainy, but the flare of a familiar hood ornament and the custom rims are enough to confirm it’s her. She idles, lets the van clear the ramp, then slides out. The time stamp shows it all happened within three minutes.
Alex exhales through his teeth. “That’s her car.”
“Yes, it is.”
We watch the coupe merge onto the street, signal properly, and vanish in the same direction as the van. A sharp tension noses in around the edges of the room
“Full pull on that garage,” I say to the supervisor. “Every camera. Copy to this drive.” I drop a flash drive on the table. “We’ll have a subpoena within the hour if you need one.”
He shakes his head. “I didn’t see anything.” He plugs the drive in and starts copying.
Alex looks at me. We don’t need to say out loud what this means. It’s personal. It’s not just Ivan. It’s Raquel’s vanity and ugly appetite. It is betrayal with fresh lipstick.
“Raquel and Ivan,” Alex mutters. “We had an inkling. Now we have proof.”
“We have enough,” I say. “And if this tie goes where I think it goes, your bloodline is in it.”
“That’s why I’m here,” he replies. “Keep me in the loop. Don’t let me stand alone with anything tied to him.”
I nod. “You know I won’t.”
The drive finishes copying and I take it. We step out into the hall again, where the fluorescent bleaches the color out of passing faces. No one here knows that a price was just put on the wrong woman.
“Where do you want me?” Alex asks.
“Back on the van,” I say. “Street cams within a mile. Construction sites. Any private buildings that point east. Run plate readers for the next hour on all the edges. It won’t be legit, but a shadow will show.”
He is calling it in before I finish speaking.
“I’ll check the hospital garage exit in person,” he says. “If they staged a second car, a foot soldier may have seen something and didn’t know it mattered.”
“Do it.”
As we pass the lobby, I pause. I promised Clara I would bring Cassandra home. I mean to keep that promise.
“Damien.” Alex holds up his phone, screen toward me. It’s a text from one of our street crews. An image of a van the right color and model crossing an intersection two neighborhoods away.
“Breadcrumbs,” he says.
“Let’s follow them.”
He peels off, already in motion. He knows which line to walk and how to stay under the radar. For now, I trust him, though I will verify every step as we go.
I call Mina. She answers on the second ring. “Tell me something useful,” she says.
“Cassandra has been taken. Mount Sinai east garage. We have video. We also have Raquel leaving the same structure minutes later.”
A delicate inhale. “Ah.”
“I want private eyes on Raquel’s travel grid, including all of her usual hotels.”
“They already are,” Mina confirms. “I will also post someone at the garage she uses when she wants to be seen and the one she uses when she doesn’t. You know which one.”
“I do.” It’s the one under the building her sponsor owns, the sponsor who is not smart enough to know when a favor stops being free.
“And Ivan?” she asks.
“He is part of this. We will treat him as such unless proven otherwise.”
“Alex,” she says firmly. I know what she’s thinking.
“I already asked him,” I tell her. “He chose a side. We’ll keep him working with people in pairs. No solo assignments that smell like family.”
“Good,” she says. “I’ll have Orlov build a bubble around Clara’s floor from our end. Two guards you sign off on. Put a nurse on our payroll if needed. I prefer the kind who knows when to look away.”
“Do it. And pull a file on every contract Raquel has taken in the last month. If any of them touch a Koretsky warehouse, I want names.”
“Already in motion,” she says. “Bring her home.”
“I will,” I say, and hang up.
I go back upstairs and stop outside Clara’s door. I don’t go in. She needs rest, not noise. I stand there long enough to make sure the guard recognizes my face and then step away.
When I hit the street again, the winter air takes a bite out of my lungs. The city is in its quiet week, the soft space between holidays, when even cab horns sound like they are trying to be polite. It won’t stay that way. Not for long.
I get in the car, the plan stacking itself in my head with the easy weight of habit.
Raquel first. Her friends. Her phone. The tracker she didn’t know was in her wheel well.
Then Ivan. His pride. His men. The ratholes they think I don’t know about.
And underneath it all is a line back to Cassandra.
Because every road I take today is for her.
I set the drive next to me on the seat and watch the city slide by. I keep my hands open on my knees so I don’t clench them into the shape of a throat I can’t reach yet. I let the rage breathe. It will be useful when it is time. Not before.
At a light, my phone buzzes. It’s Alex.
Pulling more traffic cams. Possible sighting toward the river. Working it.
Good.
The light turns green. We move.
I picture Cassandra’s face when she told me about the baby in that hallway. I think of the ribbon on her wrist. I think of a tiny spark that may not even know it is a life yet, and I think of the men who chose to make my family a target.
They made a mistake.
I will correct it.
For now, we hunt.