Chapter 18
NIKOLAI
Fourteen days. Three hundred thirty-six hours. Twenty thousand one hundred and sixty minutes since I woke up to find her gone.
I’ve torn Chicago apart looking for Jenna Reeves. Every safe house, every underground network, every fucking shadow she could have crawled into. Nothing. She’s vanished like she never existed, and it’s driving me insane in ways I didn’t know were possible.
The mark I’m tracking now is Michael Torres, a contract I committed to weeks before Jenna escaped.
One of the names on my list, and he earned his place on it.
For eleven years he ran intake at two of the eastern facilities, the man who looked at frightened children and decided which ones showed promise and which ones were surplus.
Mid-thirties now, works IT for a logistics company, building a quiet civilian life on top of everything he signed off on.
Should be simple. I’ve been watching him for three days, memorizing his patterns.
Coffee shop at seven-fifteen, same parking spot, same route to work. Textbook predictable.
But my focus keeps fracturing. Instead of studying Torres’s security habits, I’m scanning every woman who passes. Dark hair catches my eye. A particular walk. The set of shoulders that could be hers.
Focus, Nikolai.
Torres emerges from the Starbucks right on schedule, checking his phone while he walks.
I shadow him from across the street, maintaining the forty-meter distance that’s become second nature.
He turns down the alley that leads to his building’s employee entrance—the choke point I identified yesterday.
This should be routine. The same thing I’ve done to every name on my lists before him: approach from behind, syringe to the neck, drag him to the van Damon’s idling just down the alleyway.
He’ll wake up somewhere he can’t talk his way out of, and he’ll answer for the children he helped move before he answers for anything else. Clean, efficient, well-earned.
But when I move, my timing’s off. Torres hears my footstep on the wet pavement and spins around just as I’m reaching for the sedative.
“What the—”
I adapt, grabbing him by the throat instead of going for the injection site. His eyes go wide with terror as I slam him against the brick wall, but he’s fighting now, thrashing and trying to scream. Amateur hour bullshit that would have gotten me killed during training.
“Please, I have kids, I—”
The syringe finds his neck on the second try. He goes limp in my arms, but the whole encounter took twenty seconds too long and made enough noise to wake the dead. Sloppy. Dangerous. Unacceptable.
I drag Torres to the van, where Damon’s waiting with the engine running and a raised eyebrow.
“Everything alright? You look a little—”
“Drive.”
He doesn’t push, but I catch him watching me in the rearview mirror. Damon’s good at reading people. Right now, he’s reading someone who’s coming apart at the seams.
The Wisconsin facility processes Torres without incident. Dr. Morrison signs the intake forms, and another name gets crossed off another list. The whole operation takes four hours round trip, during which I say maybe ten words total.
By the time we get back to Chicago, it’s past midnight. I should go home, crash for a few hours, and start planning the next acquisition on the list. Instead, I tell Damon to drive to Infinity.
The club’s fifth floor is alive with activity when I arrive. Ezra’s hunched over three laptops at once, probability matrices scrolling across multiple screens. Theon’s explaining something to Dominic while gesturing with a beaker full of clear liquid that definitely isn’t water.
“—synthesis pathway creates a delayed reaction, roughly six to eight hours depending on body weight. The beauty is it mimics natural cardiac arrest, so—”
“Evening, ladies.” I drop into my usual chair, interrupting whatever chemical horror Theon’s describing.
Lucien looks up from his tablet. “How’d the Torres acquisition go?”
“Clean. He’s processed.” The lie comes easily. No point in advertising my deteriorating focus.
“Good, because we’ve got bigger fish to fry.” Ezra swivels his chair toward me, pulling up a new display. “Remember that financial investigator Marcus flagged two weeks ago? Jennifer Walsh from the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Division?”
I nod, though I barely remember the briefing. Everything from the time Jenna escaped feels like it happened to someone else.
“She’s been busy. Very busy.” Charts and spreadsheets cascade across the screen. “She’s traced seventeen shell companies back to our operations. The thread’s thin, but it’s there. If she connects the dots—”
“She becomes a problem,” Raphael finishes, settling into the chair beside me with a whiskey in hand. “The kind of problem that requires permanent solutions.”
Theon sets down his beaker carefully, as if handling liquid death. “I could arrange something. Heart attack, stroke, aneurysm—take your pick. Natural causes are my specialty.”
“Too obvious.” Dominic’s voice carries that flat affect he gets when he’s thinking three moves ahead. “Treasury investigator dies of mysterious natural causes right when she’s closing in on financial crimes? That screams assassination.”
“So we make it look like something else,” Darius suggests from across the room, where he’s preparing what looks like a very late dinner. “Accident. Robbery gone wrong. Domestic violence if she’s got an ex-boyfriend with a record.”
Marcus shakes his head. “I’ve been monitoring her communications. She’s careful, paranoid even. Varies her routes, checks for surveillance, the whole nine yards. Getting close enough for any of those scenarios would be—”
“Challenging,” I interrupt. “But not impossible.”
The room falls quiet. They’re all looking at me with expressions I can’t quite read. Concern? Calculation?
“You want to take this one personally?” Ezra asks.
I should delegate to someone whose head isn’t full of gray-green eyes and dark hair. Someone who isn’t dreaming every night about a woman who played him perfectly and vanished into thin air.
“Yes.”
Raphael leans forward. “Nikolai, with respect, you’ve been… distracted lately. Maybe someone else should—”
“I said I’ll handle it.” The words come out sharper than intended, carrying enough edge to make Damon shift in his chair.
Silence stretches for a few beats before Darius breaks it.
“Well, while our fearless leader plots federal assassinations, does anyone want to hear about my day? Because I had the most interesting conversation with a certain pharmaceutical executive who thinks he can short-change one of Theon’s shipments.”
Theon’s expression darkens. “Which executive?”
“Peterson from Meridian Industries. Apparently, he’s under the impression that synthetic opioids are commodity products with negotiable pricing.”
“I’ll have a conversation with Mr. Peterson,” Theon says in a tone that suggests the conversation will be entirely one-sided.
The banter continues around me—shop talk disguised as dark humor, the kind of casual discussion of violence that would horrify normal people. These are my brothers, my family, the only people in the world who understand what we’ve become.
So why do I feel so fucking disconnected from all of it?
Lucien’s describing a potential fighter he’s scouting when my phone buzzes with a security alert. An alert on the facial recognition database I set up to scan for Jenna. Probably another false positive, I’ve had dozens over the past two weeks.
But I check anyway, because I always check.
The image loads slowly, grainy surveillance footage from some shithole in Chinatown. A woman in dark clothing, face partially obscured by shadows.
“Found something interesting?” Marcus asks, noticing the sudden attention I’m paying to my phone.
I study the timestamp. Three hours ago. Less than five miles from here.
“Maybe.” I pocket the phone and stand. “I need to follow up on something.”
“Want backup?” Raphael offers.
“No. Keep working on the Walsh problem. I’ll be back in a few hours.”
Darius calls after me as I head for the elevator. “Try to get some sleep, Nik. You look like shit warmed over.”
If only he knew. I haven’t slept more than two hours straight since she left. Every time I close my eyes, I see her—spread out on my bed, begging me to fuck her, looking up at me with those impossibly beautiful eyes while I planned all the ways I’d keep her forever.
The parking garage is empty except for my Audi. I sit behind the wheel for a moment, staring at the blurry surveillance image on my phone screen.
It might not be her. Probably isn’t her. But the possibility is enough to make my hands shake as I start the engine.
Fourteen days of searching, and every lead I’ve had has led me to disappointment.
When I find her—and I will find her—she’s going to learn exactly what happens to prey that thinks it can escape the hunter. She’s going to remember who she belongs to, even if I have to break her to make the lesson stick.
I pull out of the garage and head toward Chinatown, following the ghost of a woman who’s haunted every moment of my thoughts since she disappeared.
The hunt is back on.