Page 65 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride

I stand.

I have not brought anyone else into this room with me, which was a decision I made when we arrived at the facility. Timur must have understood the meaning behind it when the door closed behind me.

It’s in his eyes, as he looks up at me from the chair, a man who has made his peace with his choices.

“Mikhail,” he blurts out.

When I look at him with a brow raised, he only stares at me impassively.

Whatever he was going to say, he doesn't say it. He closes his mouth and he nods once, as if it’s an appropriate goodbye to everything we had and built together.

I give him the same nod back, because fifteen years does not become nothing in the face of betrayal, even a betrayal of this scale, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

If it was anyone else, any other traitor, they would have been made an example of. The Korovin Bratva is not to be played with, and everyone knows it like they know the sky is blue and the sun is hot.

But in the face of this man, with my pistol raised between the both of us, I can’t see the reason for making an example out of him. The weight of his betrayal has robbed my insides of a flame that fury feeds on.

When his skull rebounds, the chair toppling with the impact of the bullet, I stand there, all alone. His body lies there, a pool of blood appearing beneath him.

Then I do what needs to be done.

Nikolai is already waiting when I walk through the other secure room.

He looks at my face when I enter and asks nothing about the room I have just come from, because he knows by now.

“What do we have?” I say.

He opens the tablet on the table between us and turns it toward me. “The syndicate's active safe houses in the greater Athens region. We have identified four, two are compromised by prior Korovin intelligence and would not be used for a high-value extraction. The remaining two are viable.” The tablet shows the first location. “Warehouse facility, eastern port district, active utility connection registered to a shell entity we have traced through three layers to an Irish-linked holding company, and the second is a residential compound in the northern suburbs,purchased through a similar shell structure fourteen months ago.”

“The compound,” I propose.

“My assessment also,” he says.

The satellite image on the tablet shows the compound's footprint, the perimeter, the access routes. I run the approach options quickly.

“How long till the team assembles?”

“They're already assembled,” Nikolai says. “I began the process when you went into the room with Timur.”

I nod once.

“Good,” I say.

Studying the compound's layout for four more minutes, I glare at the screen intensely because I cannot get this wrong.

Zara's parents are inside that perimeter, or somewhere connected to it, and Zara herself is in the room at the end of this facility's corridor, ridden with grief that has been building for fifteen years.

I think of her face on the street, her voice echoing in my head:the exact night I finally had them.

I set the tablet down.

“We move in two hours,” I instruct Nikolai. “I want darkness and the eastern approach. The perimeter has a structural gap in the northeast corner. Whoever planned the compound's security did not notice the sight line difference at night.”

“Understood,” Nikolai says.

I move toward the door.

The facility corridor is clean and fluorescent, and at the end of it is a woman who is going to ask me when I come through the door whether I know where her parents are, and I am going to tell her the truth.