Chapter 17
Salvatore
The fire door gave beneath the twentieth blow.
Steel screamed. The lock tore free. I drove through it hard enough to hit the corridor wall with my shoulder.
Smoke burned my throat.
The hallway beyond was wrecked. Sprinklers hissed overhead. Water ran black across the carpet. One of my guards lay on his side near the service lift, blood spreading beneath his shoulder. Angela was crumpled against the wall ten feet away, one hand pressed to her temple.
Yelena was nowhere.
For one second, my mind refused to accept it.
She had to be there. Behind the overturned chair. Inside the lift. In the stairwell with one of my men shielding her.
“Lena!” I shouted.
Nothing answered except the alarm. I dropped beside Angela.
Her eyes opened halfway. Grey-green. Unfocused.
“Sal,” she whispered.
“Where is she?”
Her mouth moved. No sound.
I saw the blood on her hair. The bruise already rising along her cheek. My guard made a wet sound behind me, trying to breathe.
“They took her,” Angela managed. “They put her on a medical gurney. Fake firefighters. A fake doctor—”
My stomach fell through the floor.
“Which way?”
She lifted one trembling hand toward the service lift.
A medical gurney. The service lift. They had taken her down towards the loading bay.
Something glinted in the water near the doors. I reached for it.
A silver crescent earring lay crushed beneath someone’s boot heel.
Yelena had worn them on our date. She had chosen them herself after telling me abundance could become another kind of refusal. I had fastened one for her that morning while she stood in front of the mirror, pretending she did not like how gently I touched her.
The broken silver cut into my palm.
“I’ll find her,” I said.
My voice did not sound like mine.
Pietro’s voice came through my earpiece. Gunfire cracked behind him.
“We have Kiryl moving. The convoy is pinned but holding.”
“Forget the convoy.”
A silence.
“Sal—”
“Track the vehicles that left this building. Look at the feed from every traffic camera. Every car, van, truck, ambulance, whatever. Now.”
I stood. The corridor tilted once beneath my feet.
I did not let it take me
Angela’s hand caught weakly at my sleeve.
“She fought,” she said.
I looked down at her.
Her expression sharpened through pain.
“She fought them.”
“I know,” I said.
I had heard her scream once through that door. I had heard the sound of men taking the woman I loved while reinforced steel kept me on the wrong side.
I had stayed.
I had promised her I would stay.
And I had still failed.
Building security pulled the loading-bay footage before I reached the stairs. Two men in paramedic uniforms wheeled a covered gurney out of the service lift and into an ambulance waiting beside the loading dock.
City dispatch had no record of an ambulance being sent to the building. The plates belonged to a suburban hospital vehicle reported stolen less than half an hour earlier.
“Find it,” I told Pietro. “Every camera. Every toll reader. Every signal that vehicle gives off.”
The ambulance transponder appeared forty-three minutes later.
A vehicle registered to a suburban hospital had transmitted from the legal tower’s service lane. It had moved south, then east, then vanished near the industrial waterfront.
Pietro met me in the armored SUV outside the building.
His shirt sleeve was dark at the cuff. Not his blood, I thought. I did not ask.
“Angela?” he said.
“She’s in hospital. Awake. Doing well. Don’t worry.”
“The guard who got shot?”
“Alive but angry.”
“And Yelena?”
I looked at the tablet in his hand.
A blinking dot sat over a warehouse district near the river.
“She is in that ambulance.”
Pietro’s face went still.
He did not tell me it might be a trap. He did not tell me to wait for more men.
He only gave the driver one word.
“Drive.”
The city broke around us in wet grey streaks. Sirens. Trucks. Winter trees. Every red light was a personal insult.
I called Yelena’s phone.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
It rang until voicemail took it.
I ended the call before the message began. I could not hear her voice yet. Not while I still had a chance of reaching her.
The warehouse stood behind a chain-link fence with a Halberd logo half-peeled from the loading door.
The gate had been cut open. No guards. No lights. No movement. Pietro’s team went in first. I followed before anyone could order otherwise.
The ambulance waited in the center of the loading bay.
Genuine. Empty.
Its back doors stood open.
Inside were discarded firefighter coats. Cheap masks. A medical bag filled with nothing useful. A spent syringe. A black restraint loop cut clean through, though not by Yelena. The plastic was too thick. Too deliberate.
On the concrete beside the vehicle lay an evacuation hood.
Clear plastic. Yellow collar.
Dark honey hair caught in the seal.
I picked it up.
My hands were steady. That frightened me more than if they had shaken.
“She was transferred,” Pietro said quietly.
“To what?”
“We don’t know.”
I stared into the hollow ambulance.
I imagined her waking there. Her wrists bound. Her mind already working. Desperately looking for a way out. She would fight, I knew. She would try to escape. She was resourceful, my love.
The thought should have made me proud.
Instead, it made something inside me tear.
My phone rang.
It was Tonio.
I answered at once.
“Tell me.”
His breathing was rough. Behind him, men shouted. Engines idled.
“Kiryl’s safe.”
The relief struck so hard I had to brace one hand against the ambulance door.
“Are you certain?”
“I’m looking at him.” Tonio’s voice broke around the edges. “He’s scared. But he’s alive. Pietro’s people forced the trucks apart. These bastards pulled back the second reinforcements showed.”
“Did they breach the SUV?”
“No. Never close.” His voice grew hotter. “They didn’t have enough men. They had noise. Guns. Lorries. They wanted us looking here. Like it was a big distraction.”
My eyes closed.
Gianni had not wanted Kiryl. He had wanted me pulled from Yelena’s side.
No. Worse.
He had wanted every resource pointed toward Kiryl while his men took her through a door I had allowed her to enter.
“Sal?” Tonio said.
“Get him underground.”
“What about you?”
I looked at the evacuation hood in my hand.
“Find every place Gianni ever breathed in this city.”
By dawn, we had hit empty rooms.
Mill Basin offices. Empty.
Halberd storage sites. Empty.
Apartments held under shell companies. Empty.
A private dock tied to Sokolov trucking. Empty.
We shut down roads. Watched airports. Put eyes on marinas, freight yards, private hangars, every route out of Chicago.
Nothing.
Gianni had taken Yelena without leaving a trail I could use.
The townhouse was too quiet. Not peaceful, but empty.
Guards moved through the front hall in pairs. Phones rang behind closed doors. The operations room had become a place of low voices and screens full of maps.
But the kitchen was still. I stopped in the doorway, and looked at the blue bowl sat beside the stove.
White waves around the rim. The small flaw in the glaze.
My future kitchen, she had said.
Maybe our future kitchen.
I put one hand on the counter because suddenly I could not trust my legs.
Serafina needed me upstairs. Pietro had sent three messages. Tonio wanted orders. The entire city was moving because Yelena was gone.
Still, I stood in that kitchen and spent precious moments looking at a fucking bowl.
Then I went upstairs.
Her side of the bed remained disturbed from the morning. A pillow dented where her head had rested. One of her hair ties lay on the floor near the nightstand.
The firebird notebook sat beside the bed. I knew I should not open it.
It was hers. Her private place for wants. I had promised not to turn every small thing she gave me into something I owned.
But she was gone.
My hands opened it anyway.
The first line was the one she had shown me.
I want another date.
The second came several pages later.
I want a home with you.
After that, nothing. Blank pages. Dozens of them. A book of opportunity, of the future. Snatched away from us.
I sat on the floor beside the bed with the notebook in both hands.
Blank pages waiting for her life.
A kitchen. A room for coloring. A city near water. Another date. A home.
I had promised her that fear would never make her face surrender alone. I had written it into our agreement. I had looked into her eyes and told her she only needed to tell me when she began believing self-destruction was strategy.
She had trusted me.
Then I had put her in a legal suite because it was the right move. I had allowed her to enter that room because I respected her choice. I had accepted twenty feet and one closed door because the law required the appearance of independence. Gianni had turned that respect into the opening he needed.
I called her phone and it went straight to voicemail. I wasn’t ready to hear her voice, but I couldn’t hang up.
She was soft and clipped.
You have reached Yelena Sokolova. Leave a message.
The beep sounded.
I could not speak.
I sat there with my forehead against the edge of the bed, phone held tight in my fist, while silence filled the message she might never hear.
When the tone sounded again, I made myself breathe.
“I’m sorry, little one,” I said.
My voice broke on the last word.
I ended the call.
For a moment, I looked at the whisky bottle in the cabinet across the room. It would have made the ache dull. It would have given me an excuse to stop hearing every possibility my mind was building.
Then I saw Yelena’s face in my memory. Her pale eyes. Her small, fierce voice.
Daddy.
If she was alive, she needed me clear-minded.
I put the notebook inside my jacket, directly over my heart.
Then I stood.
I would find her. I had to.
By the time I entered the operations room, Tonio was already shouting.
He stood at the far end of the table with a bandage visible beneath the torn collar of his shirt. Stitches pulled at his shoulder. Blood had dried in a rust-colored line near his sleeve.
He looked like he wanted someone to give him permission to become a weapon.