31. Vadim
VADIM
For the first time in three nights, Sloane is back at the apartment.
I know because the light in the bedroom came on twenty minutes ago, and because one of the men watching the hospital called as soon as she left Ethan’s floor and got into the cab that brought her here.
Most nights she stays beside her brother until morning.
When she does come back, it’s usually for an hour or two at most, long enough to shower, change clothes, and sleep until whatever sense of responsibility she has toward herself loses another argument to the need to return to him.
I have known her routine for nearly a month.
I shouldn’t be standing across the street watching the window.
My men already know when she leaves the hospital, when she returns, which pharmacy she uses, which café she occasionally stops at when somebody convinces her to eat, and how long she usually remains inside this apartment before going back.
There’s nothing I’m going to learn by being here myself.
I come anyway.
The curtain moves and Sloane appears behind the glass, wearing something loose, her hair falling around her shoulders while one hand rests against her stomach.
For a moment she looks directly toward the street. I stay where I am, hidden beside the car, and feel the same vicious pull I’ve felt every time I have seen her since we found her.
She has no idea. We located her last month and made no move. I didn’t drag her back to me and demand answers, even though every instinct I have told me to do exactly that.
Because Petrov visits her.
That changed everything.
The first time surveillance caught him near the hospital, I thought it was coincidence. The second time, I stopped believing in coincidences.
Then came the photographs.
Petrov sitting across from her in a café.
Petrov walking beside her.
Petrov speaking to her as though he had every right to be there.
Once, his hand rested briefly against the small of her back while they crossed a street, and I stared at that photograph long enough that Anton eventually took it away from me without asking.
I nearly broke his wrist for it.
A fucking masochist. That’s what I’ve become.
I tell myself I keep coming because Petrov is careful and because one mistake could be enough to lose him again, but the truth is uglier.
I want to see her.
Even now. Even after everything.
The curtain falls back into place.
I should leave. Instead, I remain where I am all right and let my mind return to the same question it has circled for months.
Mila. We still don’t know where she is. That’s the part that keeps the rage alive even when everything else becomes too complicated to understand.
The footage from the road outside the estate was poor, but not useless.
Daniel was driving. Sloane was in the back seat. A woman sat beside Daniel in front, her face partially obscured by darkness and the angle of the camera, but I knew her anyway.
I knew the way she held her shoulders. The tilt of her head. The fall of her hair.
Mila.
My sister disappeared the same night Sloane did. Now Sloane is here, and Mila is not. That fact has lived inside me like poison ever since.
I let Sloane into my home.
Into my family.
Into my bed.
Into parts of myself I spent years making inaccessible to anyone who wasn’t blood.
I stopped watching her as a threat. That was my mistake.
I trusted her with Anya. With Mila. With the people I would kill to protect. Then the house came under attack, and Sloane disappeared with my sister.
The footage from Paris came later.
I still remember Iosef carrying the laptop into my study. He hadn’t fully recovered from Camille’s attack, though he ignored every instruction to rest and moved around the house as though stubbornness could repair blood loss.
He placed the laptop in front of me. “We believe Sloane knew Petrov before Bucharest.”
I looked at him. “What does that mean?”
“We found footage.”
“From where?”
“Paris.”
Something inside me tightened. “When?”
“When she was still flying commercial, we believe.”
I stared at him. “That’s not possible.”
Iosef said nothing. He only opened the file.
The video was grainy, pulled from a club camera that had never been designed to preserve faces clearly, but I recognized her before the image settled. Sloane stood near the bar with a drink in her hand, dark hair loose around her shoulders, laughing at something someone had said.
Then Viktor Petrov moved into frame. He stood close to her. He leaned toward her while she spoke. She looked up at him and smiled.
I watched the clip once.
Then again.
My stomach turned harder each time.
“We believe she met him there,” Iosef said.
I kept my eyes on the screen.
Petrov touched Sloane’s arm. She didn’t move away.
“That’s where he turned her,” Iosef continued.
Marek gestured toward the footage. “If he approached her before you ever met her, then the rest begins to make sense.”
I remember sitting there with my hands flat against the desk, trying to find one piece that didn’t fit. “Do we know what they discussed?”
“No.”
“Do we know whether she contacted him after this?”
“Not yet.”
“Then we know nothing.”
Iosef’s expression barely changed. “We know she lied about knowing him.”
That was the part I couldn’t argue with.
Now, standing across the street from her apartment months later, I look at the dark window and wonder how much of what I remember belongs to me and how much belongs to Petrov.
Anton is still speaking when movement behind the curtain changes again, but this time I force myself to turn away from the window.
Standing here achieves nothing except giving me another opportunity to remember what it felt like to wake with her beside me and another reason to hate the man I became after she disappeared.
The months after the attack were not kind to anyone who gave me a reason to doubt them.
I stopped pretending patience was a virtue.
Men who had spent years relying on my willingness to negotiate discovered that willingness had limits.
Two businesses connected to Petrov disappeared beneath investigations that began with information nobody could trace back to me.
A warehouse outside Constan?a burned after its owners refused to tell Anton who had been using it.
Three men who had taken money to compromise security at my home were found within eleven days, and by the time I finished with the last one, Marek stopped asking whether I wanted him alive for questioning.
I wanted answers. What happened to the men afterward ceased to interest me.
There had been a time when I distinguished between necessary violence and anger. For several months, I stopped caring about the difference. Work became easier that way.
If a man lied, I assumed the worst version was true until he proved otherwise.
If someone hesitated when asked about Petrov, I treated the hesitation as knowledge.
Agreements that would once have taken weeks were settled in hours because everyone understood I was no longer interested in arguments about what was reasonable.
They started watching me differently. Even my own men.
Anton never said anything about it.
Marek did, once.
I broke his nose.
He came to breakfast the next morning, looked at me across the table and said he still considered himself correct. I didn’t hit him again, and that was perhaps the closest I came to admitting he was.
None of it found Mila.
None of it gave me Sloane.
So when we finally found her, the fact that I didn’t immediately tear through her door surprised everyone, including me.
Petrov was the reason. Petrov, and the possibility that for the first time since this began, Sloane might lead us somewhere he believed was safe.
I hate that strategy every time I see him near her.
Tonight there has been no sign of him.
I look at Anton. He starts the engine.
We’ve barely moved when the radio comes alive. “She’s leaving the building.”
I look back automatically. Sloane steps out onto the pavement a few seconds later, pulling her coat closed with one hand while adjusting the strap of her bag with the other.
She looks exhausted even from this distance, but she’s moving with purpose, heading in the direction of the hospital like she has done almost every time she has come back here.
I say nothing. There are men already positioned along the route. They know not to approach her. They know not to let her see them. They also know that if Petrov appears, nobody moves until we know where he goes afterward.
Anton glances at me. “We can leave.”
I should agree. Instead, I watch Sloane reach the end of the street and turn the corner.
“Drive.”
Anton doesn’t ask where. He already knows.
We keep well behind her, far enough that she can’t possibly notice the car and far enough that I can continue pretending this has something to do with surveillance instead of the fact that I can’t make myself stop watching her.
She walks three blocks before slowing near an intersection. Her phone is in her hand. She looks at the screen, then across the road, apparently trying to decide whether to continue straight or take the narrower street running behind the row of shops.
She chooses the narrower one.
Anton looks at me.
I keep my eyes ahead. “Let her go.”
He says nothing.
The surveillance man on foot follows at a distance. There’s no reason to interfere. She’s not in danger simply because I don’t like where she’s walking.
Then two men step out near the alley ahead of her. One of them looks at Sloane, and the other says something to him.
She keeps walking. My instincts start to tickle, but I hold myself back.
Sloane is supposed to be bait, nothing more.
The plan is simple enough when Sloane is reduced to a name on a surveillance report and a moving point on a map: we let her live her life, we make Petrov believe she’s beyond my reach, and we wait for him to become careless enough to come close.
She’s supposed to draw him out without ever knowing she’s doing it, and every man involved has been instructed not to interfere unless there’s an immediate threat to her life.
The problem is that whatever discipline I have left disappears the moment Sloane is involved.
I can tell myself she’s an asset in an operation, that interfering too early could ruin months of work, that Petrov may be watching to see whether anyone reacts to her.
None of it matters once I think she might actually be in danger.
Because when it comes to Sloane, reason has never survived very long.
The first man moves partly into her path.
I stay where I am. Anton’s hand rests near the door handle, but he doesn’t move either.
Sloane says something and tries to walk around him.
He lets her pass, and for half a second, I think that’s the end of it.
Then the second man follows her.
Still, I wait.
I hate every second of it, but I wait.
Sloane has dealt with men bothering her before. She doesn’t need me. I know the way she lifts her chin when she’s trying to keep control of a situation she already dislikes.
Still, I wait.
I tell myself that this is exactly why we have men close enough to intervene, that she’s being watched from three directions, that nothing is going to happen to her while I sit here and let the plan work.
Then the man reaches for her bag. She jerks it away sharply and turns on him.
Something inside me goes hard.
He reaches again. She steps back. I’m already leaning forward.
Anton says my name quietly. I ignore him.
The man catches Sloane by the wrist.
Fuck the plan.
I’m out of the car before Anton can say anything else, crossing the street fast enough that one of the drivers coming through the intersection leans on his horn, but the sound barely registers because all I can see is Sloane twisting against the man’s grip while the second one reaches for the strap of her bag and drags her half a step backward.
She drives the heel of her hand toward the first man’s face, forcing him to loosen his grip for a second, but the second uses that opening to pull harder on the bag and nearly takes her off her feet.
I hear her shout, and something inside me turns vicious.
By the time the first man notices me, I’m already close enough to hit him.
My fist catches him across the jaw and sends him sideways into the brick wall beside the alley entrance, and before he can recover I grab the front of his jacket and drive him back into it again, hard enough that his head snaps against the stone and his knees buckle.
The second man lets go of Sloane. He reaches inside his coat, and I turn before he can bring his hand out.
There’s a knife in it.
He swings with more panic than skill, and I catch his wrist, force the blade away from my body, then twist until his fingers fail and the knife drops to the pavement between us.
He tries to hit me with his free hand. I take the blow against my shoulder and answer by driving my fist into his ribs, then again into the side of his face when he folds forward.
He goes down.
The first man pushes himself away from the wall and comes toward me from behind.
Anton reaches him before I do. There’s a brief struggle, then the man is face down on the pavement with Anton’s knee between his shoulders while he curses and tries to pull one arm free.
I barely look at him.
My attention has already gone back to Sloane. She’s standing against the wall where they dragged her, breathing too quickly, one hand wrapped around the strap of her bag and the other pressed against the front of her coat as though she’s holding herself together by force.
For months, I imagined seeing her again.
In some versions, I dragged her into a car before she could speak.
In others, I demanded Mila’s location before I allowed myself to ask anything else.
Sometimes I imagined her lying convincingly enough that I would almost believe her.
Sometimes I imagined hating her.
I never imagined this.
She looks at me as though the street has split open and produced something she thought she had escaped.
Her face changes slowly, recognition arriving before she seems willing to accept it, and when her lips part I hear my name in a voice so quiet that it nearly disappears beneath the noise of traffic behind us.
“Vadim?”
I think about everything I had to face the last couple of months, how brutal Mila’s disappearance has been to my family. None of it disappears, but for one reckless second all of it becomes secondary to the fact that she’s standing in front of me and she is alive.
I take one step toward her.
She presses farther back against the wall.
I stop immediately. That movement cuts deeper than it should.
She’s afraid of me.
After everything I have done, perhaps she should be.
I look at her face, at the faint shadows beneath her eyes, at the exhaustion I’ve been watching from across streets and through photographs for weeks, and there are a hundred things I want to say. So many answers I want to shake out of her.
Instead, what comes out is quieter than all of that.
“Hello, Sloane.”