Chapter 54
Maksim
“So safe to say she ran, no?” Ivan asks, and it takes everything in me not to put my fist through his face.
“We don’t know that for sure,” Vaska says before I can.
I don’t look at either of them. I stare at the couch instead. The couch I fucked her on the first time I brought her to the estate.
I hate this fucking place.
I was shot in the goddamn foyer, nearly bled out on my own floor, and I still brought her here. Kept her here. Took care of her here. Gave her everything she never had the chance to ask for.
Here.
Made space for her inside the one thing I built out of trauma and blood and violence. Handed her the Bratva to stand beside me in, and she—
No.
Pietro’s laptop pings.
The sound cuts through the room like a blade.
“Santo sent train station footage.”
My eyes shut for one hard beat.
Then I open them.
I exhale through my nose, slow and sharp. “Pull it up.”
My voice sounds far away. Detached. Like it belongs to somebody not standing in the middle of his own house trying not to come apart.
“Let’s see.”
Let’s finish this.
Let’s watch her board a fucking train and prove every stupid, weak thought clawing at my skull right.
Pietro turns the laptop.
The footage is grainy. Washed out. Time stamp in the corner. Lower level of the station. Fluorescent lights. Concrete. People half-moving through their own mornings.
Then Ayla comes into frame.
Every part of me locks.
She’s got the bag on her shoulder. Moving fast. Head down. Not running. Not panicked. Just… moving with purpose.
The room goes dead silent around me.
I don’t hear the men anymore. Don’t hear the hum of the lights. Don’t hear my own breathing.
I just watch her.
She cuts across the platform.
Passes one column.
Then another.
And a man in a hood falls into frame behind her. I lean forward before I realize I’m doing it.
Another one appears a second later.
Not close enough to touch her. Close enough to follow.
My pulse changes shape.
“There,” Vaska says quietly.
“I see him.”
Ayla keeps moving.
Then she turns the corner at the end of the platform and disappears out of frame. The first man follows. Then the second.
Gone.
That’s it.
No fight. No scream. No flash of her trying to break free.
Just empty frame and fluorescent light and the blood pounding so hard in my ears it makes the room feel far away.
“What the fuck?” Dimitri mutters.
Pietro is already clicking, pulling up the next camera.
Another angle. Service corridor exit.
Thirty-two seconds later, two men come through carrying a limp body between them.
My body goes cold all at once.
Ayla.
Her head hangs back at a wrong angle. Hair falling loose. Arms dead weight. Boots dragging for one second before one of them readjusts his grip and lifts her higher.
Unconscious.
Not running.
Taken.
The room blurs at the edges. For one second, all I can see is her. Her body hanging there.
Gone boneless.
Gone still.
Something low and vicious tears up my throat.
Not a word. Not a sound I know.
Just something animal and ruined and full of blood.
No one in the room says a fucking thing.
Good.
Because if any of them speak right now, I’m going to put somebody through a wall.
I straighten slowly, every muscle in my body pulled so tight it hurts.
“Again.”
Pietro doesn’t hesitate. He rewinds. I watch the first clip. The men behind her.
The turn.
The disappearance. Then the second clip.
Her body between them.
Again.
And again.
And again until the image burns itself into the back of my skull.
Taken.
My hand braces on the edge of the table hard enough to make the wood creak.
“All available footage,” I say, voice flat enough to sound calm. “Street cams. Traffic cams. Businesses near the station. I want every angle of them coming in and every angle of them leaving.”
Pietro nods fast. “Already pulling.”
“Faces. Plates. Routes. I don’t care how blurred it is. I want something.”
Dimitri is already on his phone. Ivan doesn’t say a word now.
Vaska watches me from across the room, too still.
I drag a hand over my mouth and taste blood where I bit the inside of my cheek without realizing it.
She crushed her phone. Packed her bag. Took the money.
Tried to disappear. And still they got her.
All this time I’ve been trying to decide which truth was worse.
There isn’t one.
They both are.
My eyes go back to the frozen frame on the laptop.
Ayla hanging limp between two men like she weighs nothing.
“Find Kaya,” I say.
The room sharpens instantly. My gaze stays on the screen.
“I want him alive if she’s not with him. Dead if she is.”
***
I don’t sleep.
The house went quiet around me hours ago, but I don’t sleep.
I stay on the couch with one arm thrown over my eyes and the other hanging off the edge, gun still within reach on the table beside me, like I’m going to wake up to her walking through the door and somehow still need to shoot somebody.
The bedroom upstairs can go fuck itself. I’m not going in there.
Not with the sheets still smelling like her. Not with the imprint of her body probably still in the mattress. Not with the ghost of her laugh and her mouth and those fucking eyes of hers still stuck in my head like something sharp under skin.
So I stay here.
Same clothes. No sleep. No peace. The clock on the wall keeps moving.
I don’t.
Every now and then, one of the men passes through the hall quieter than usual, like this place knows something is broken and doesn’t want to say it out loud.
My jaw has been locked so long might as well be permanent. My phone sits on the table in front of me.
Silent now.
Which somehow feels worse. Because every time it rings, it’s bad. And every time it doesn’t, it’s worse.
I drag my arm off my face and stare at the ceiling.
Ayla crushed her phone under her own boot.
Ayla packed a bag. She bought a one-way ticket. She disappeared around a corner in a station and came out unconscious in the arms of two men. Every version of it keeps replaying.
None of them make sense.
The door opens.
I’m on my feet before I even register who it is, gun already in my hand.
Vaska stops in the doorway, unimpressed.
“Relax.”
I don’t lower the gun right away.
He looks at me, then at the couch, then at the untouched glass of whiskey on the table that’s been sitting there long enough to go warm.
“You need sleep,” he says.
“I need her.”
His expression doesn’t change, but something in it hardens anyway. For a second, neither of us says anything.
Then I rub a hand over my face and finally set the gun back down on the table, close enough to grab again in half a second.
“Anything on Kaya?”
Vaska steps further into the room. “Nothing yet.”
The words land badly. Like everything else tonight.
I lean forward, forearms braced on my knees, staring at the floor like I can force it to split open and give me something useful.
“Useless fucking night,” I mutter.
Vaska doesn’t answer.
Doesn’t tell me to calm down. Doesn’t feed me some bullshit about patience. Smart man.
I sit back again, every muscle in my body tight enough to snap.
“He took her once already,” I say.
Vaska’s gaze flicks to me.
I don’t know why I say it out loud.
Maybe because if I keep it in my head any longer, I’m going to break something.
“Beat the fuck out of her. Put his hands on her face. Tied her to a chair like she was nothing.”
My voice goes flatter with every word. Colder.
Meaner.
“And now she’s gone.”
Vaska’s silence stretches.
Then—
A buzz from the intercom panel by the wall.
Both of our heads turn.
Another buzz.
I’m already moving when the guard’s voice crackles through.
“Pakhan.”
“What.”
He hesitates before answering. “Kaya is at the gate.”
I stop dead.
For one second, the words don’t register. Then they do. Something dark uncoils in my chest.
Vaska goes still beside me.
I let out one short laugh with no humor in it. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
The guard says nothing.
“He came alone?” I ask.
“He’s in the car alone.”
I look at Vaska. Then back at the intercom.
“Get him out.”
“Pakhan?”
“Out of the fucking car,” I say, voice turning lethal. “Search him. Strip him if you have to. Then walk his ass to my front door.”
The silence on the other end is brief this time.
“Yes, Pakhan.”
The line clicks dead. I’m already reaching for the gun again. Vaska watches me chamber the rage instead of the bullet.
Then he says, very evenly, “How about we find out where she is before you kill him.”
I check the magazine anyway.
Snap it back in.
“If he’s standing at my gate,” I say, “he better have brought me something worth staying alive for.”
I start for the door.
Cold air knifes across my face the second I step outside.
The yard lights throw hard white over the gravel drive and the black iron of the gate beyond.
Two of my men flank Kaya as they walk him up the path, hands on his arms, another three spread out behind with guns visible and ready.
He’s been searched already. I can tell by the way his jacket hangs open and wrong on him, shirt untucked, hair half untied by someone else’s rough hands.
He looks like shit.
Not scared. Not smug either.
Just tired. Hollow-eyed. Dirt on one sleeve. Mouth set like he knows exactly whose house he chose to walk into and did it anyway.
He’s bigger than me.
Taller by a few inches, broader through the shoulders, built like the kind of man who’s used to throwing his weight around and watching other people move first.
Doesn’t matter.
The second he hits the pool of light in front of my door, I move.
Vaska says my name once behind me, low, cautioning.
I ignore him.
Kaya only gets enough time to lift his head before I drive my fist straight into his face while my men still have him.
Cheap shot.
Don’t care.
His head snaps sideways. Blood spits from his mouth into the gravel and the guards let go at the force of it.
Good.
Now it’s fair.
Kaya straightens slowly, rolling his jaw once. He looks at the blood on the back of his hand when he wipes his mouth, then looks at me.
And laughs. Just one short, wrecked sound like I’ve confirmed exactly what he expected. That makes something hot flare in my chest.
I hit him again.
This time he sees it coming. Takes some of it on the shoulder, some on the jaw, and answers with a shove that knocks me back half a step in the gravel.
There he is. I go for him again.
We crash into each other hard and mean, boots grinding into stone, fists swinging too close for clean form. I catch him once in the mouth, once in the ribs. He drives an elbow into my side that would’ve folded a smaller man. All it does is make me meaner.
I slam him into the hood of the nearest car hard enough to dent the metal. He bounces off it, breathing harder now, blood at his mouth, but still not fully fighting me back.
That pisses me off more than the laugh.
“Fight back,” I snarl.
Kaya spits blood onto the gravel and swipes his mouth with his thumb. “I am.”
“You call this fighting?”
“I call it letting you get it out,” he says, voice rough. Another humorless little laugh. “You’re not going to listen otherwise.”
Rage goes white.
I grab him by the front of his shirt and drive the gun into his ribs. “Where is she?”
He looks down at the weapon, then back at me like he couldn’t care less.
“I don’t have her.”
I pistol-whip him across the face. His head jerks with it. A line of blood opens near his brow.
Still he doesn’t go down.
Just lifts his chin again like a stubborn bastard and takes a breath through blood.
“That,” I hit him again, harder, “is for fucking up her face.”
Kaya’s smile this time is red and wrong.
“And this?” he asks, breathing rough. “This helping?”
I slam him back into the car, gun pressed up under his jaw.
“Tell me where Ayla is before I put a bullet through your teeth.”
For the first time, some of the amusement leaves his face. It turns to something flatter. Colder.
“You’re wasting time,” he says.
“Maksim,” Vaska says, sharper now, somewhere behind me. “Let him talk.”
I don’t take my eyes off Kaya.
“Start talking.”
Kaya breathes once through his nose, blood running down over his mouth. “I don’t have her.”
I shove the barrel harder into his jaw. “Wrong answer.”
His gaze stays locked on mine.
“But I know who does.”
Something cold slices straight through the rage. Kaya’s mouth tips, blood-red and humorless.
“And if you don’t find her soon,” he says, “she’s dead.”