Chapter 22
VALENTIN
The tracker embedded in one of Katya’s earrings stops moving at fourteen-twelve.
I’m in the restricted section with Zavid when Nadia’s voice comes through the earpiece, urgent in the way that means she’s already three steps ahead of whatever she’s reporting. “Margot’s signal is stationary. Sublevel of the courthouse annex. She hasn’t moved in ninety seconds.”
I pull up the tracking app on my phone. The dot sits beneath the courthouse building, in the service corridor that connects the main structure to the archived evidence storage wing.
She should be moving. Kolya should be driving her back to the compound.
The dot should be traveling north on Clark, not sitting motionless beneath a building I told Kolya to stay outside of.
I call Kolya’s phone. It rings four times and goes to voicemail.
I call again. Voicemail.
Nathan crosses the restricted section in three strides when he sees my face. “What?”
“Margot’s tracker is stationary under the courthouse annex. Kolya isn’t answering.”
Nathan’s expression shifts from concern to the kind of anger I’ve only seen twice before, both times involving family. “Why was Kolya allowed to take her alone?”
“Because Nadia’s data cleared his console activity an hour ago. A new Josef transaction surfaced that made Kolya’s access look routine.”
“You trusted the data?”
“I trusted the data because the data has been the only objective tool we have.”
“The data that routes through Kolya’s security console.
” Nathan grabs his jacket from the back of the chair.
“You trusted the system the traitor built to tell you the traitor was safe. I told you in the conference room. I told you when my name showed up on the access list. I told you when you authorized the false-schedule method against your own brother while Kolya sat in the same room and watched you do it.” He pulls on the jacket.
“You were watching me. He was watching you watch me. While both of us were busy being investigated, he walked Margot out the back door.”
Zavid steps between us. “Blaming each other wastes the minutes Kolya just bought himself. Nathan, how fast can you get to the annex sublevel?”
“Four minutes if I run.”
“Then run. Valentin, stay on comms with Nadia. I’ll coordinate from here.”
Nathan is gone before Zavid finishes speaking.
I follow him. The corridor blurs. My hands are shaking for the first time since Daria, and the woman carrying my child is with Kolya, who has been betraying me for months.
I take the stairs three at a time. Nathan is already at the vehicle. Nadia sent the address to his phone while I was still in the stairwell. We drive.
Nathan doesn’t speak for the first four blocks. He drives fast, precisely, and angry enough to break the speed limit without caring.
“I’m sorry.” The words come out raw. “I should have listened to you.”
“Save it.” Nathan takes a hard left. “Apologize after we get her back. Right now I need you thinking, not feeling.”
He sounds like our father. The thought hits me, and I let it pass because Nathan is right about the priority even if his delivery comes from a place he’d rather not examine.
Nadia’s voice comes through the earpiece again. “I’m pulling the courthouse security feeds. Internal cameras, service corridors, loading dock angles. Give me two minutes.”
Two minutes pass as we search. Finally, Nadia speaks.
“I have footage. He returned to the courthouse. At fourteen-oh-three, Kolya pulls through the service entrance gate using a maintenance access code that isn’t in the standard rotation.
Fourteen-oh-four, Margot exits at a run.
Kolya follows with blood soaking the shirt sleeve over his right forearm. ” She pauses. “Margot cut him.”
She used Nathan’s blade.
“Fourteen-oh-six, Kolya enters the annex service corridor with Margot. She’s hooded and being carried.
Two additional men are with him. They move through the maintenance corridor toward archived evidence storage.
” She pauses again. “At fourteen-oh-two, one of the cameras we installed on the service level before this operation went dark. The disable command was issued from Kolya’s console access code. ”
I frown. “Why just one camera?”
“He disabled the camera that covered the corridor between the service entrance and the storage wing. The other cameras are still active, which is why I can track his route. He only killed the one angle that would have shown the handoff.”
Zavid sits down at the evidence table and opens his legal pad. “What about the data that cleared him? The Josef transaction?”
Nadia’s typing is audible through the earpiece.
“The Josef transaction that surfaced an hour ago was planted. It copied the unique marker from Josef’s false schedule and was routed through a laundering channel associated with Ludis Krupin, who manages secondary financial processing for Armen Sidorov.
The transaction was backdated to match Josef’s standard payment cycle, and it was inserted into the log through a direct edit on the warehouse account, not through Josef’s automated system. ”
“How?” I’m terse but incapable of anything else right now.
“A direct edit requires console-level access. The edit was made from Kolya’s security console at oh-seven-fifteen this morning, six hours before the courthouse exchange.”
Eleven years of trust, and it was built on corrupt data. Kolya planted the transaction that cleared himself. He chose my blindness like a weapon and aimed it at Margot.
Zavid stops writing. He looks at me, and whatever he sees on my face makes him close the legal pad quietly, the way you close a door when someone on the other side needs a moment alone.
The restricted section door opens. Anya walks in with her medical bag and a phone pressed to her ear, speaking in the low, urgent tone she uses with patients in crisis.
She ends the call and looks at me. “Kimberly Ward just called the emergency line Zavid gave her. Margot missed their scheduled check-in twenty minutes ago. Kimberly broke their established protocol because she’s sure something is wrong. She’s panicking.”
“Kimberly has the emergency line?”
Anya nods. “Zavid set it up as part of the contingency protocol.” She sets her bag on the table. “There’s something Margot wouldn’t tell you.”
I freeze. Zavid looks up from his legal pad. Nadia’s typing stops.
Anya seems to be picking her words carefully. “Margot took a home test three weeks ago. The pregnancy test was positive. She told Kimberly and she told me. She didn’t tell you.”
The word pregnant stops me cold. I’m going to be a father. The woman I love is carrying my child, and she’s been carrying this alone for two weeks because every instinct she built surviving Grant told her to wait, watch, and see if the man who locked her door would build a nursery or a prison.
I think about her pressing her hand against her stomach when she thought I wasn’t looking. I thought it was nausea, but it was protection.
She didn’t trust me enough to tell me, and her reasons are things I built with my own hands. My stomach cramps, and I barely manage not to bend forward.
“We’re estimating she’s about eleven weeks along, but I can’t confirm exact gestational age without imaging.
” Anya picks up her bag strap. “She postponed the bloodwork and ultrasound I recommended. I doubled her vitamins, routed her folate through a general supplement order, and adjusted her anti-nausea dosage, but I haven’t been able to do a proper prenatal workup.
” She doesn’t look away. “Stress, physical restraint, and untreated nausea become dangerous faster in the first trimester. If she’s being held in a situation that involves any of those, the window for safe intervention is hours, not days. ”
I start to sweat. “What happens if the nausea isn’t managed?”
“Dehydration and electrolyte imbalance. If it escalates to hyperemesis, she’ll need IV fluids within twenty-four hours or the risk to both her and the pregnancy increases significantly.
” Anya doesn’t soften the assessment. “She’s been managing with oral medication and willpower, which has worked because she’s been in a controlled environment with food access and medical proximity.
Captivity removes all of those advantages. ”
Two people knew besides Margot, and I wasn’t one of them. She trusted Kimberly, Anya, and her own judgment over the man who told her the next move was hers. I built the conditions that made telling me dangerous.
The morning she locked the office door. Her pressing her hand against her stomach when she thought nobody was watching. Even the way she’s started skipping sugar in her coffee. The signs were there, but I attributed them to stress because stress was easier than the truth.
Kimberly is still on the emergency line. Anya hands me her phone.
“Valentin Bykov.” Kimberly’s voice is steady enough, but she’s clearly controlling her fear. “I’m not going to apologize for calling your emergency line. Margot missed our check-in twice. I’m supposed to wait twenty-four hours, but something is wrong. I just know it.”
I clear my throat. “You’re right. She’s been taken.”
Three seconds of silence. When Kimberly speaks again, the steadiness is gone. “By whom?”
“By the man I trusted to protect her. My security chief.”
“Kolya.” She says the name like she’s been expecting it. “Margot told me about him. She wasn’t sure she could trust him.”
“She was right about that too.”
“She’s right about most things when it comes to dangerous men.” Kimberly’s voice hardens. “She’s pregnant. She didn’t tell you because she needed to see you make a choice that proved you’d protect her, not assets. She ran out of time.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because she’s missing, and she’s there because your plan to impersonate someone else put her there.”
I don’t defend myself. There’s nothing to defend.
Kimberly is describing the situation accurately.
I used her as Katya, dangling the prospect of bringing her sister’s killer to justice.
I took her, kept her, and treated her like a tool for my empire.
I’ve tried to do better, but I’ve failed her. “I’m going to get her back.”
“Get her back alive, and I’ll forgive the rest.” Her voice catches on the last word. “That woman is the bravest person I’ve ever met. If you let her down, I won’t need your emergency line. I’ll find you myself.” She ends the call.
I believe her.
Nadia’s voice cuts through. “I found a deleted message on Kolya’s console backup, sent to Armen Sidorov’s encrypted channel at fourteen-oh-eight, four minutes after he entered the annex with Margot.”
“What does it say?”
“One line.” Nadia reads it reluctantly, like she wishes she hadn’t found it. “The mother is secured.”
The mother.
Kolya knew she was pregnant before he took her. My own systems told him. He must have pieced it together from the vitamins and the folate order from Anya.
I grip the edge of the table until my fingers ache.
For eleven years, Kolya sat in my strategy room, stood in my corridors, and ate at my table.
He watched me fall in love with Margot and calculated her value in terms I haven’t processed yet.
The pregnancy made her more valuable to Kirill, and Kolya delivered that information efficiently, without sentiment, on schedule.
Nathan tried to save her. Kolya sold her. I watched the wrong man.
I look at Zavid. He’s already writing. He knows what I’m going to say before I say it because he’s been my counsel long enough to understand.
“She’s eleven weeks pregnant and being held by a man who sold her to a criminal network.
” My voice goes flat. “Every second we spend coordinating is a second she’s in a room I can’t see. ”
Zavid puts his hand on my arm. “Then let’s stop talking and start moving.”
“Lock down every Bykov route. Target bridges, tunnels, highways, and secondary roads within a forty-mile radius. Nathan’s team handles the physical perimeter. Nadia tracks every signal from Kolya’s devices and every account connected to Armen Sidorov.”
Zavid nods. “What about the building?”
“Pull every property tied to Grant’s evidence chain.
Every fugitive-recovery office, every storage facility, and every address that appears in Mabel Jimenez’s filing records or Ludis Krupin’s laundering channel.
” I turn to Nadia. “The courthouse annex is where he took her, but it’s not where he’ll keep her.
That was just the hand-off point. Kolya knows we have camera access to this building.
He’ll move her to a secondary location, and that location will be somewhere connected to the same evidence-laundering network that buried Mara’s case. ”
She nods in agreement. “If there’s a digital link, I’ll find it.
” She resumes typing, faster now. In minutes, she says, “I have three properties linked to the Grant evidence chain through Ludis Krupin’s laundering records.
There’s a shuttered fugitive-recovery office on West Pershing, a storage facility near the rail yards that was flagged in Armen’s financial channel, and a records-processing center that Mabel’s office used for off-book document transfers. ”
“Which one connects to the archived evidence storage?”
“The fugitive-recovery office.” Nadia pulls up a map overlay.
“Not officially. On paper, the evidence transfers went through the records-processing center, but the receipt numbers resolve to a courier account registered at the West Pershing address. Four of Mabel’s weakened cases touched that account, including Mara Carlstrom’s. ”
She taps the screen again. “The office is listed as shuttered, but the utility account is still active. Someone is paying the electric bill.”
That sounds like the most promising lead. “How far is it?”
“Twelve minutes from the courthouse annex. If Kolya moved her within the last twenty minutes, he’s already there or close to it.”
Zavid stands. “I’ll coordinate the legal authorization for entry. We’ll need it clean if any of this evidence is going to survive a courtroom.”
“The entry won’t be clean.”
“Then I’ll make it clean after.” He picks up his legal pad. “I’ve been making your decisions look legal for nine years. I can do it one more time.”
I walk to the restricted section door. Zavid stops me with one word.
“Valentin?”
I turn.
He offers unsolicited but sound advice. “She didn’t tell you because she didn’t trust the world you built for her.” He caps the pen. “Fix the world first, then earn the trust.”
I walk out of the restricted section and into the corridor, breaking into a run.