Page 57 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride

I got the sub-region wrong.

My methodology was sound, conclusion close. And I will only get closer.

Mikhail is curved over the adjacent table, his own operational reports from deployed teams to cross-reference location data, communication updates from contacts across southern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, all spread out before him.

His brow is furrowed, mouth a straight line as he works.

He passes me a document across the table without speaking, a satellite cross-reference for a coastal zone in the Ionian that one of his teams flagged overnight. Our fingers almost brush against each other as I take the file, the proximity sizzling like it always does.

I should be used to it by now.

Taking the document without deliberately looking at him, I keep my eyes focused on the file. Looking at him will lead to one thing, and I cannot afford that right now if I want to use the next twenty minutes.

By the third day of this dance, I call Elena.

She is the person I call when my approaches have become the problem rather than the solution, when I need a mind that looks at the same evidence from the outside and finds the corner I cannot see because I am standing too close to the center of it.

She picks up on the second ring, and forgoes any greeting. “You’re back from Greece.”

“I’m back from the wrong part of Greece,” I sigh.

She pauses briefly, and I can almost see her pursing her lips. “Tell me what you have.”

I give her all the analysis: the light data, curvature and the sort. The sound of her nails clacking against the keyboard comes through the line before I have finished the second sentence, and the typing continues steadily as my words keep pouring.

“The Ionian range is interesting,” she murmurs. “There are three island groups in that window that have the stone type you’re describing and the orientation. The smallest one has almost no room for tourism, which is—”

“—the exact place that would be chosen in this scenario,” I finish.

“Yes.” She breathes down the line, before her voice softens a smidgen. “How are you?”

The sudden shift in her voice is so weirdly abrupt and so Elena that I laugh—actually laugh a full-belly giggle, and the sound of it in the tense room is so foreign that Mikhail looks up from across the table.

I turn slightly away from him. “I’m functional,” I tell her.

“That is not what I asked.”

“I know. It’s the answer I have right now.”

She sighs. “I’ll send the Ionian data to you in an hour. Be careful, Zara. Whoever is feeding you misdirection has resources and patience, and those are a more dangerous combination than whoever is just trying to stop you.”

After I hang up, my phone stays clenched in my hand for a moment. A strange warmth blooms in my chest that I’ve never felt—at least, not by anything Elena has said. It’s weird hearing her warn me so blatantly. It’s a weird kind of sweet. A good weird.

“What did she say?” Mikhail asks from across the table.

“She’s sending Ionian data,” I narrate. “And she confirmed that I had been misdirected. Whoever sent the package knew enough about me to predict which conclusions I’d reach from the photographs.”

He is quiet for a moment, his pen still against the paper in front of him. “Which means they also knew the photographs would produce a result close enough to be convincing.”

“Close but wrong. Designed to move me somewhere specific without letting me know anything.”

Our eyes meet across the table and the truth finally comes clean in front of our eyes.

He holds my gaze for one second more, something searing behind them that he hides immediately.

“Eat something,” he grumbles, which is not what the look was about and we both know it. He can try to hide it or lie to me, but I’ve grown way too familiar with his bullshit by now.

I pull the next photograph toward me, taking a bite out of the ham sandwich he brought a few hours ago, sitting at the edge of the desk.