Chapter 18 – Samuel
Three days. Three days of turning this city upside down, and I have nothing but a fistful of smoke to show for it.
I stand in the center of my study, the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the grey harbor. On the mahogany desk behind me, three separate secure laptops hum, their screens glowing with active terminal streams, cellular tower logs, and encrypted databases.
I’ve mobilized every resource at my disposal.
Kaplan has been working forty-eight hours straight, running the blocked ten-digit number through our private network, tapping into local telecommunication backbones, and pulling every scrap of digital footprint he can find.
We didn’t just look for a name; we looked for the hardware signature, the routing nodes, the exact coordinates of the cell tower that pinged when that distorted voice crawled through Ashley’s speaker.
And yet, the trail is frustratingly, impossibly incomplete.
“Nothing, Boss,” Kaplan’s voice grates through the speakerphone on my desk.
“The burner was routing through five different spoofed VPNs, bouncing from servers in Zurich to Montreal before hitting the local exchange. And the voice modulation? It’s a commercial-grade, real-time AI synthesizer running off an encrypted dark web protocol.
Whoever did this didn’t just buy a cheap burner at a gas station.
They planned this. They have technical awareness, and they know how we trace people. ”
I grip the back of my leather chair, my knuckles turning white. “I don’t care what it takes, Kaplan. Dig deeper. Check the physical surveillance around her neighborhood. Look for any vehicles idling on her street over the last week. Run every plate.”
“We’re already on it,” Kaplan replies, his tone heavy with the same grim realization settling in my gut. “But whoever this is…they aren’t acting impulsively, Samuel. They’re calculated. They’re watching, and they’re waiting.”
The line cuts, leaving me alone with the quiet hum of the servers.
A cold, dangerous fury claws at my chest. A reckless stalker is easy to deal with—you find them, you break them, you bury them.
But a ghost? A ghost with technical precision and the patience to watch my son from the shadows?
That is a different kind of threat. It means they are waiting for a specific moment. It means they’re close.
I look at the map of the city pinned to my wall, my mind running through every enemy the Rusnak name has made over the last decade. Is it a rival family? A disgruntled associate? Or someone closer? Or is this person completely unrelated to my name?
The lack of clarity is a suffocating weight, heightening a protective instinct in me that is rapidly turning feral. I can’t protect Ethan and Ashley from a threat I can’t see.
Before I can lose myself deeper in the dark, my personal phone buzzes violently against the mahogany wood of my desk.
I snatch it up instantly. Ashley’s name flashes on the screen.
I swipe the screen, pressing it to my ear, my voice deep and instantly alert. “Ashley. Tell me you’re safe.”
“Samuel,” her voice cracks, and the sheer, unadulterated terror in that single syllable makes my heart stop dead in my chest.
She isn’t tight or controlled. She is hyperventilating, her breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps as if she’s drowning.
“Ashley, breathe. Talk to me,” I command, my body instantly locking into a state of high alert.
“He’s…he’s gone, Samuel,” she chokes out, a sob breaking through her words. “I went to pick him up. They…they said someone else already came. They said it was a scheduled pickup. Samuel, they took him. Ethan is gone. Someone took our baby!”
The world goes completely black for a fraction of a second. A cold, violent shockwave rips through my veins, freezing the blood in my body. Our son. Someone bypassed security. Someone laid their hands on my boy.
When my vision clears, a red, blinding fury takes its place. The civilized, corporate mask I’ve worn for years doesn’t just slip—it shatters into a million pieces. The beast is out of the cage.
“Stay exactly where you are. I’m coming to you,” I say, my voice dropping to a low, lethal octave that is terrifyingly calm. “I will find him, Ashley. I swear to you on my life. I’m coming.”
“I’m home. The school told me to go home. They didn’t want bad press.”
“What the fuck? I’m coming!”
I slam the phone down and roar for Kaplan.
The heavy doors to my study burst open before I even finish his name. Kaplan takes one look at my face and stops dead. He’s known me for ten years; he knows that look means someone is about to die.
“Lock down the city,” I growl, my voice vibrating with a quiet, feral rage.
“Deploy every soldier we have on the payroll. I want checkpoints on every major exit out of the state. Tap into the city’s traffic camera feed—I want eyes on every street surrounding Ethan’s daycare from the last two hours.
Call the port authorities, lock down the private airfields.
If a single boat or plane leaves this city, I’ll personally flay the captains alive. ”
“Boss, the federal attention—”
“I don’t give a fuck about the feds!” I roar, slamming my fist onto the mahogany desk, the wood splintering under the force of my blow.
“Someone took my son, Kaplan! My boy is missing. Mobilize the entire network. If anyone stands in our way, run them over. Find the vehicle, find the driver, and find who is holding my son.”
“On it,” Kaplan says, his face turning pale as he immediately pulls out his secure radio and begins barking orders.
I don’t wait. I grab my keys, slide a heavy Glock into the holster at my lower back, and sprint out of the building.
I drive through the city like a man possessed, tearing through red lights and weaving through traffic with a ruthless, calculated desperation. Within fifteen minutes, my tires shriek to a halt in Ashley’s driveway.
I burst through her front door.
“Ashley!”
She’s in the living room, curled into a ball on the floor by the couch, clutching one of Ethan’s small stuffed dinosaurs to her chest. She’s rocking back and forth, sobbing so hard her entire frame is violently shuddering.
The sight of her completely destroyed, broken by the sheer agony of a mother’s worst nightmare, cuts me deeper than any blade ever could.
I cross the room in two strides and drop to my knees, wrapping my massive arms around her.
“No, no, no,” she shrieks, trying to fight me off at first, her small fists weakly beating against my chest. “How did this happen? Where is he, Samuel? Where is my baby? I let my guard down…and now he’s gone—”
“Ashley, look at me,” I growl, grabbing her face in both of my hands, forcing her to look into my eyes.
She is trembling, her eyes wild and bloodshot with panic.
“Look at me. I’m here. I’m not leaving. I have my entire network crawling over this city.
We’re going to find him. Do you hear me?
I’ll tear this city apart brick by brick until he is back in your arms.”
I pull her forehead against mine, anchoring her, letting her feel the solid, unyielding weight of my presence. I ground her, absorbing her terror, channeling it into the cold, sharp focus I need to run this hunt.
“I need you with me, Ashley,” I whisper fiercely against her skin. “I need you strong. We’re going to get him back.”
She lets out a shaky, broken breath, her fingers clutching desperately at the fabric of my shirt as she tries to nod, trying to find her footing in the middle of the storm.
And then, the quiet of the room is pierced by a sharp, digital chime.
Ashley’s phone, lying on the rug beside us, vibrates violently as a new message lights up the screen.
My hand shoots out before Ashley can even reach for it, but she’s already staring at the glowing screen. Her eyes widen, the pupils contracting with a fresh, paralyzing wave of horror as she reads the words out loud in a breathless, trembling whisper:
“I told you to get rid of that man who is with you. I’m possessive and jealous. I won’t share you, my darling. I have your son. Let me know when you’re ready to do as I say.”
The words hang in the heavy air of the room, suffocating us.
It is the ultimate, brutal confirmation of our worst nightmare.
The shadow who has been lingering in the dark doesn’t just want to unnerve Ashley anymore.
He has Ethan. The sick, twisted obsession has mutated from threatening messages into a physical abduction.
He is using our four-year-old boy as a pawn, a bargaining chip to force Ashley into submission, fueled by a deeply erratic, possessive jealousy of my presence in her life.
Ashley lets out a choked, horrified sound, her hands flying to her mouth as she stares at the screen. “He has him… Samuel, he has our baby…”
The raw, bleeding panic in her voice is the final straw.
Inside me, the last remaining thread of civilized restraint snaps. A terrifying, absolute coldness washes over me, replacing the frantic adrenaline with the sharp, clinical precision of a man who has decided exactly how his enemy is going to die.
This is no longer a situation I intend to handle with caution. I don’t care about leaving a trail. I don’t care about the local police, the federal agencies, or the delicate balance of power in this city. They laid their hands on my son to get to her.
I snatch her phone from the rug, my thumb hovering over the screen as I immediately forward the message and the routing data to Kaplan.
“Trace it,” I command the second Kaplan answers the line, my voice dropping to a low, deathly calm that makes the speaker rattle.
“I don’t care if they spoofed the routing again.
Whichever tower received this ping, I want every single device operating within a three-mile radius of that tower cross-referenced.
Find the physical location of that signal. Now.”
“On it, Boss,” Kaplan barks, the sound of keyboard keys clattering furiously in the background. “We’re bypassing the firewalls. We’ll have a location range soon.”
I tuck the phone into my pocket and look down at Ashley. I pull her up from the floor, wrapping my hands firmly around her upper arms, anchoring her to the spot.
“He made a mistake,” I tell her, my blue eyes locked onto hers with a lethal, unshakeable promise. “He thinks he’s playing a game of leverage. But he has no idea what he’s just unleashed. I’m going to tear this city apart block by block, and when I find him, there will be nothing left of him.”
The hunt is no longer a quiet investigation. It is a full-scale war.
The stakes have never been higher. My son is out there in the dark, and I am going to bring him home—no matter how much blood I have to spill to do it.