Chapter 22
ADRIAN
Icancel the port meeting because the numbers aren’t holding my attention, and I want to be home with Aurora. Viktor raises an eyebrow from the driver’s seat when I tell him to head back early.
“This isn’t like you.”
“I know.” I don’t explain further because the explanation would require admitting I’ve been thinking about Aurora for the last forty minutes instead of listening to logistics briefings about container routing.
My phone rings. The screen shows an internal number from the legitimate business headquarters, which is unusual because calls from that office go through my assistant. I answer hesitantly.
“Mr. Bugrov, I have a woman on the line who has been calling for nearly an hour. She refused to hang up and kept calling back until someone escalated her to me.” The receptionist sounds equal parts impressed and exasperated.
“Her name is Marisol Cruz, and she says it’s an emergency involving someone named Aurora. ”
My next breath doesn’t come until I’ve already said, “Put her through.”
Marisol’s voice comes through tight and furious.
“Adrian, Eric left a letter on my doorstep this morning threatening Aurora through her mother. I read it to Aurora an hour ago, and she told me she was going to meet him at the marina café near your area. I told her not to go. She hung up on me, and she hasn’t answered my calls or texts since.
I’ve been trying to reach you for almost an hour. ”
I check the time. Aurora has been unreachable for an hour while I sat in a meeting about shipping containers, and Eric Hayes has been planning this since before the ink dried on his suspension letter.
“Viktor.” I say his name once, and the tone is enough. He floors the accelerator, and the SUV surges to ninety on the highway shoulder. Cars blur past on our left, and Viktor navigates around slower traffic with the precision of a combat driver, which is what he was during his time in the military.
“Marisol, which marina?”
She gives me the name from Eric’s letter.
I know it. I know the café, the parking layout, the waterfront approach, and the sight lines from every angle because Viktor surveyed every public venue within ten miles of the house when we moved in.
“Stay on the line.” I pick up my second phone to call Grigor.
After a terse explanation, I say, “Track Aurora’s secure phone. ”
He’s quiet, aside from tapping on the keyboard, for almost a minute. “Her phone shows the waterfront house. She either left it behind or it was taken from her.”
She left it behind. Aurora wouldn’t take the secure phone to a meeting Eric arranged because she knew I’d track it, and she didn’t want me stopping her before she got answers about her mother.
I understand suddenly how well Eric read her.
He knew she’d go alone in spirit even if she brought guards.
He knew she’d leave the phone. He knew her better than I wanted to believe.
“Track Fedor’s phone.”
“Fedor’s phone is pinging at the marina.”
We reach the house in fourteen minutes. It’s empty.
Aurora’s laptop is open on the couch with the hospitality program website still loaded.
The course catalog is on the coffee table.
Her secure phone is on the kitchen counter where she left it, and the sight of it sitting there, abandoned, makes everything narrow until the only thing I can see is the next step.
The house is empty, so at least she took all five assigned to her team, including Fedor. She went to the marina with full security, which means she weighed the risk and went anyway, which is worse than careless because it means she chose this.
“Marina. Now.” I get back in the SUV.
The marina is twelve minutes away, and when we arrive, it’s swarming with police. Patrol cars, an ambulance, and a perimeter of yellow tape surround the café. Viktor pulls into a lot two hundred yards back, and we wait, looking for our people amid the chaos.
Arseny finds us first. He walks out of the tree line beside the lot with a cut above his left eye and blood on his shirt collar. Theo and Yuri follow, supporting Fedor between them. Fedor is upright but unsteady, his right knee swollen and looking thoroughly beaten.
“Where is she?” I get out of the SUV and meet them halfway.
Fedor looks at me, and I’ve never seen guilt on his face before.
As Viktor’s protégé, he’s carried orders, made kills, and managed operations that would break most men, and I’ve never seen him look like this.
“They took her. It was a cargo van with dark paint. There was a logo, but I didn’t see it well enough, boss.
Three men hit me while two more grabbed her from behind.
The whole thing took under three minutes. ”
“She fought,” Arseny adds with a hint of pride. He’s pressing a napkin against the cut over his eye. “She hit one of them so hard he staggered, and she almost made it to the railing before they got her. She screamed loudly enough that half the café called the cops. That’s why the police are here.”
“I tried to stop her from going.” Fedor isn’t making excuses. He’s stating facts, but he’s clearly still blaming himself. “She wouldn’t listen. She told me I could come with her or she’d walk. I chose to go with her because the alternative was letting her go alone.”
I don’t respond to the explanation because it’s irrelevant. Aurora is gone, and every second I spend hearing how it happened is a second I’m not spending finding her. “How long ago?”
“Just over an hour.”
“Viktor, take us back to the house. We need a base of operations.” I glance at the team.
“Are you all able to get back?” At their nods, which makes Fedor wince, I say, “Do it then. One of you call Dr. Zarlova to meet us at the estate so she can look you over. Especially Fedor.” She’s the doctor I keep on retainer, who doesn’t ask questions or file official reports.
The drive back is reckless and silent. Viktor drives at a speed that would terrify me under normal circumstances, but I barely register the road because I’m considering variables, including Karpov’s operational territory, Eric’s knowledge of Aurora’s psychology, and the letter that used her mother as a trigger because Eric knew exactly which button would override her judgment.
He studied her for two years, and he weaponized every vulnerability he noted during that time.
I did this. I left her this morning with a kiss on the forehead and a security detail that she overruled because I need to let her to make her own decisions. I wanted her to have agency and feel like she controlled her own schedule, and the first major decision she made without me got her taken.
I catch the thought and redirect. Blaming myself or even Aurora doesn’t get to the heart of how this happened.
Eric and Karpov did this. Aurora walked into a trap designed by Eric, who spent years mapping her pressure points, and she did it with five armed men at her back because she is stubborn and protective of the people she loves.
Those are the qualities I fell in love with.
I don’t get to resent them because they worked against me this one time.
I’ll find her before Eric finishes whatever he started, and when I do, Eric Hayes will learn what I do to people who take from me.
At the house, I clear the study desk with one sweep of my arm, sending restructuring documents and coffee cups to the floor.
Viktor sets up the encrypted laptop and two secure phones.
Grigor patches in remotely through a speaker I mount on the bookshelf.
Within ten minutes, the room holds more operational hardware than my legitimate office ever has.
I order every available man into motion, lock down all ports and private roads connected to Karpov’s known operations, and have Viktor compile everything we have on Eric Hayes.
“Grigor, I need traffic cameras along every route from the marina heading north, west, and south. The van is dark, unmarked, and cargo-sized. Pull everything from the last ninety minutes.”
“Already running.” Grigor’s keyboard clicks come through the speaker. “I have three possible matches on the A1A corridor heading south, and one on US-1 heading north.”
“Narrow it.”
“I’m running them now.”
Viktor pulls up Eric’s file on the dining table, now covered with tablets, phones, and printed maps. “Hayes’s phone pinged near the marina seventeen minutes before Aurora arrived. He was there, or his phone was.”
“He baited her and positioned his team before she showed up.” I lean over the map. “This was planned. Eric knew his suspension was coming, made his deal with Karpov, and used Denise as the trigger. The letter was the lure. The café meeting was never real.”
“The surveillance man from the college and the restaurant had to have been advance reconnaissance,” says Viktor. “He was mapping Aurora’s response patterns, security detail positioning, and reaction time.”
I nod tersely, agreeing with his assessment. “Grigor, I need everything on Eric’s address. I want the apartment number, building layout, and access points.”
“Give me five minutes.” It only takes three before he says, “Sending now.”
“Get the helicopter ready. Viktor, you’re flying.”
We land on the roof of Eric’s building twenty-two minutes later. The apartment is on the sixth floor, and we enter through the fire escape without resistance. The door is partially open, and I know what I’ll find before I step inside.
The apartment is cleared out. The closets are emptied, drawers open and vacant, and the bathroom is stripped of personal items. The refrigerator is empty and unplugged. I walk through each room and look for anything he left behind or any indication of where he’s operating from now.