Page 61 of Ruthless Bratva's Forced Virgin
I opened my mouth. A hand covered it. The woman in front had stepped aside and there was the corridor Viktor had flagged and the gap at the exit that he had said he would fill with a third man, and I was moving through the corridor with the enclosed speed of someone being moved rather than moving, and the ballroom’s sound was already muted behind the service door swinging shut.
I bit down.
The hand adjusted–professionals adjusted, this was the thing about professionals, they had encountered resistance before and had methods for it–and the adjustment removed the leverage for a second attempt. I tried to plant my feet and the grip became two grips and I was being moved efficiently through the kitchen which was the kitchen, exactly where Viktor had said the corridor led, and there were kitchen staff who were not looking and I understood with horrible clarity that the staff not looking had been arranged for.
The loading dock. The east alley.
One man on each end, Viktor had said. He was adding a third at the exit itself. The dock exit door opened. The man who should have been at the exit was not at the exit.
And then I was outside.
The alley was dark, the street sounds arriving from both ends, a vehicle idling twenty feet from the dock exit with its lights off and its engine running and the specific professional patience of a driver who had been waiting for exactly this and was not going to wait much longer.
I did not stop fighting. I twisted and I scratched and I got one elbow into something that connected and produced a grunt and then I was in the vehicle with the door closed and the locks engaging and the alley moving past the windows. My heart was doing something that was not rhythmic.
I pressed my back against the door and looked at the two men in the front seats–the driver and the man from the corridor, the professional, who was examining his hand with the expression of someone making a calm assessment of minor damage.
The vehicle turned away from the Strip. Away from the manor. Into the parts of Las Vegas that the tourist maps didn’t include, that existed in the geography of the city the way that certain things existed in the geography of any large place–present, functional, completely invisible to the portion of the population that had not been introduced to them.
I thought about Mikhail.
The diversion had been timed. Both sides, simultaneous, the Vasin contact and the woman with the cover story arriving at the same moment to separate us in two directions. He would know immediately–within seconds, once I failed to reappear at his side–and knowing Mikhail, the operational response was already in motion.
But the vehicle was moving and I did not know where it was going. I was being taken.
He would find me. I did not say this as hope or as prayer. I said it as a fact about what I knew of him, assembled from weeks of close observation–the man who did not stop until he had what he was looking for.
I had been a mechanism before without knowing it. And now here I was again, being positioned as a weapon against the man who has saved me before. The man I’d betrayed.
Chapter Twenty–Mikhail
Four minutes and twenty seconds.
That was the interval between the moment Elena had been at my side and the moment I understood she was not coming back to it. Not lost in the crowd, not drawn into a conversation I could locate from where I was standing. Gone.
I knew it at the four-minute mark.
At four minutes and twenty seconds, I had Viktor’s arm.
“She’s gone,” I said.
He was already moving.
The next twelve minutes operated in the compressed register of a system executing at full capacity without the interference of anything that was not relevant to the objective.
Viktor cleared the ballroom exits at four-thirty. Not a public scene–the Golovin training did not produce public scenes, produced instead the quiet, comprehensive efficiency of men who had practiced for this configuration and were executing the practice version with the precision of a mechanism that hadbeen built for exactly this load. Exits covered. Guest movement halted under the social pretense of a security concern with the venue’s systems. The Vasin brothers informed in thirty seconds, adding their own personnel to the configuration without requiring explanation.
Alexei had the venue’s camera system in six minutes. The loading dock feed showed the east alley, showed the vehicle, showed the timestamp, showed Elena being moved with the specific professional efficiency of people who had done this before and had done it in this specific venue, which required advance knowledge of this specific venue’s layout that someone had provided.
The third man at the northeast exit.
Pavel’s report arrived at minute nine: the man assigned to the exit had been diverted four minutes before Elena’s removal by a credible report of a disturbance at the venue’s south entrance. The report had been fabricated.
“Vehicle,” I said to Alexei.
“East on Flamingo to the highway. We lost the feed at the junction–private road at mile marker seventeen. No public coverage.” He was already at his laptop, the financial brother converted entirely to intelligence function, the two capabilities he possessed running simultaneously. “I’m cross-referencing Volkov’s property holdings east of the junction.”
“How many?”
