Chapter 5 #3
I unlocked the door and opened it to find the room empty.
Natalia wasn’t on the bed. She wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
Not only that, but she’d ransacked my room.
The blankets were tossed on the floor. All the drawers in my dresser had been opened and rifled through.
She’d gone through my closet and the attached bathroom.
My palm itched. I wanted to spank her really hard, but at the same time I wanted to praise her on the fierceness of her courage. It was also kind of arousing to realize that she’d bested me in a way.
The door to the outside was open, causing the curtains to flutter a little in the breeze. I walked out, fully expecting her to be waiting outside for me, but she wasn’t there either.
She had disappeared.
My bedroom had been locked. From what I could tell, there was no evidence that she’d picked the lock or escaped that way. There were no other ways out from my bedroom other than that and the balcony just outside it.
It was night, but I could see just as much detail as if it were day. I studied the railings and took a deep inhale. Her scent was everywhere. There was no doubt in my mind that she’d come out this way, but I had no idea how she did it.
I leaned forward, searching for any sign of her and found nothing more than that. For the first time ever in history, I’d underestimated a human.
I shouldn’t have left her alone. I wouldn’t make that mistake again.
With a sigh, I walked back into the bedroom. Her guns were missing, but the vibrating dildo was left at the center of the bed. I drew closer to it, reaching for it and closing my fingers around it. I couldn’t help but smirk at what I found along its surface.
She may have outsmarted me, but she hadn’t escaped me right away. She had suffered on that toy for me first. Perhaps more than once.
The scent of her release was all over it.
I would find her again. I knew I would because she was my mate. She was the one fated to be mine.
I’d already long decided to take her as mine and the fact that she was making me chase her was an enticing challenge that I wasn’t going to resist. I would catch her again and I would take her.
Then I would show her exactly what it means to belong to me, over and over again until she admitted it herself.
* * *
The next day I met with my pack. I circulated Natalia’s and Irina’s pictures and when they got to Enzo, he grinned.
“Sisters, boss? Isn’t that awfully greedy of you?”
I took Natalia’s image back between my fingers, staring at her sheer perfection. I glided my thumb over her face.
“Ahh. I stand corrected. Natalia, then?” Enzo added quickly.
“She is exquisite,” I murmured.
“She’s your mate, isn’t she?” he asked carefully.
“She is. The next time I get my hands on her, I’m going to make sure that she is properly claimed,” I vowed.
The rest of the men sitting around the table nodded with understanding. Once an alpha found his mate, they knew that nothing could get in the way of that. She was fated to be mine and I didn’t plan on letting her go.
Ever.
I sat back, surveying the table. Enzo still had Irina’s image in his hands. He looked down at it curiously, as if he was memorizing the nuances of her face. If I wasn’t so distracted with my own mate’s disappearance, I would have made a note of it.
“I want everyone on the ground looking for her,” I demanded. I reached to the side and tossed the torn remains of her dress in the center of the table. “This carries her scent. Memorize it and find her for me. Everything else is secondary until she is safe back in my bed.”
Every member of my pack at that table nodded. They knew I wouldn’t give such a directive lightly.
“I want a skeleton crew on the casino. Everyone else I want working on finding out whatever you can about this gathering that the Asamire are holding soon. I want names. Locations. Times. Whatever details you can give me,” I continued.
“We’ll find them both, boss,” Enzo vowed, and I nodded once. He was a man of his word and that was one of the many reasons he was my beta.
“Good. Now get to work. I need to make some more phone calls,” I commanded. Within a minute, the room was empty, and I pulled out my phone.
I started by calling Vinny first.
“Good afternoon, Adrian. How did the meeting with Miss Kotova go?” he asked.
“I should have listened to your warning,” I chuckled, and he snorted with amusement in response.
“I told you she was one that you didn’t want to mess with,” he laughed.
“Despite the fact that she was naked, bound, and locked inside my bedroom, she managed to escape,” I explained.
“She’s determined and incredibly resourceful, that’s for sure. She hasn’t come by here, but I haven’t been looking for her either,” Vinny replied.
“Would you do me a favor? Keep your ear to the ground. If you hear anything, I would appreciate a call,” I requested.
“Of course,” Vinny replied. “Did you find anything more about that Irina girl she was looking for?”
“Yes. Irina Kotova is Natalia’s sister,” I explained.
“Ahhh, interesting. It all makes a little more sense now,” Vinny said.
“How so?”
“Well, after she left, I did a bit more digging about the Kotova family. I didn’t find much other than some information about a man named Viktor Kotova.
Irina is his daughter. Turns out, there’s evidence suggesting that he was a former KGB agent, but nothing I could find was conclusive.
Now, though, he’s a pretty well-known arms dealer that operates out of Belarus.
I didn’t find anything about another daughter though.
There was no mention of a Natalia anywhere,” he murmured.
I could tell he was getting more interested by the second.
“That would explain her weapons knowledge. She fired her gun at me no less than three times,” I exclaimed.
“Did she hit you?” he asked, chuckling once again.
“Yes!”
The boisterous sound of his laughter only heightened on the other line. I waited until he was done.
“If you have the manpower, I’d really appreciate anything you can find out about her. That’s not the only reason I called though. I know that the Asamire are planning something, and I can’t shake the feeling that it’s pretty big,” I began, and he quieted much more quickly now.
“What did you hear?”
I explained all the intel I’d gathered thus far, including the poker game where I’d met the Russian vampire, and the increase in vampiric presence on the strip. He grunted with unease when I was finished.
“I think you’re right to be concerned. The Asamire don’t often hold gatherings like this.
They’re not the type to have a party just to have a party.
They’re known for keeping to themselves and don’t usually cause trouble, but there have been several times in the past that they’ve ignored those principles for great political or territorial gain,” he explained.
He’d been here on the strip for far longer than I. He had insight that I didn’t.
“Adrian, they’ve been more insistent on collecting women from me recently.
They’ve been clamoring for more and more virgins.
I don’t know what they do with the women after they buy them from me, but it’s been at least thirty of them in the past six months,” he warned, and I stroked the hair of my beard as I thought about what he said.
“Virgins,” I repeated.
“Yeah. That’s all they ever want to buy from me. They’re never interested in anything else,” he replied.
“Huh. Interesting,” I echoed.
“I wonder who else the Asamire plan to invite to this little shindig of theirs,” Vinny continued.
“I’m not sure, Vinny, but I plan to find out. I’ll call you if I find anything out,” I replied.
“Sure thing. I’ll do the same,” he said. I hung up the phone and crossed my arms over my chest.
The singular detail about the Asamire’s need for virgins stuck out to me as a critically important one.
I knew that when a vampire drank the blood of a virgin, they experienced something called a blood drunk.
A virgin’s blood gave them an intoxicatingly intense high.
It was a delicacy shared amongst the royals of the vampire world throughout history.
Sometimes, they even turned it into a sordidly tempting orgy or occasionally, an all-out massacre. A blood drunk vampire would lose control, and it was impossible to predict the result.
I suspected something far greater than a drunk orgy and I was going to put in work to find out what was going to happen.
* * *
For the next several days, my pack searched for Natalia, but found only small traces of her.
Enzo had picked up her scent in the Venetian once, but she’d been long gone by the time he picked it up.
I programmed my casino camera feeds to search for her face within the footage, but that didn’t show anything either.
I paid off a number of my tech-savvy connections to create a profile on her and when it got back to me, the contents were pretty shocking.
My feisty little human mate was an assassin.
A really good one at that. She was known simply by the nickname Nat.
Her picture had been captured on cameras around the world.
She pulled off a number of disguises, but through facial recognition software, she’d been captured in a number of places with different colored hair and clothing depending on her location.
There were at least a hundred deaths that had loosely been associated with her at the helm.
She was very good at what she did. One of my men was even able to come across a pricing scale for her services and it was staggeringly high.
There was no hint to the names of the clients that hired her, but I was certain that only the richest people in the world could afford her.
It made me even prouder to call someone like her my mate.
She would be a powerful woman to have at my side, a worthy ally. She would be my queen in all ways. I just needed to find her again.