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“I have to go find her. If she’s left here and is trying to get back to Eastern Europe, she’s bound to run into the slavers.”
“If she’s gone home, that’s why,” Cesar commented with a shrug. “She was invaluable during that raid in Monte Carlo. Celina doesn’t strike me as the type to settle back into a comfortable life while all hell is breaking loose in her village. She’s the best chance we’ve got to crack what remains of that gang wide open.”
“What do you mean?” he demanded tensely, standing up.
r /> “She knows the individuals concerned,” Cesar elaborated, “and she’s fearless.”
To hear praise for anyone from Cesar was rare, but Diego’s stomach clenched to hear his suspicions confirmed. Celina had an overdeveloped sense of her survival skills. The slavers were evil personified. They would remember her. “But why would she leave without telling us—telling me?” he mused out loud.
“Because you’d stop her,” Alexei said. “And because she doesn’t trust anyone. Betrayal is all she knows,” the big Russian remarked. “She has no experience of family support. She’s new to our ways, Diego. For fuck’s sake, can’t you cut her some slack?” They all turned at the sound of a discreet knock on the door. “I called the support staff in to the end of the meeting,” Alexei explained, “to see if they’d heard or knew anything.”
With a glance at his phone, Diego reluctantly sat down again. “Thank you,” he gritted out as Alexei flashed a glance his way. He was on edge. Time was passing. Celina could be anywhere by now.
He barely gave the staff a chance to settle into their seats before grilling them. “Has anyone seen Celina? Someone must know,” he insisted when a tense, unhelpful silence swamped the group.
“Ease up,” Alexei muttered discreetly.
Easier said than done when no one would meet his eyes. He thought back to the last thing Celina said. It had made no sense at the time. Check in with Amber? Springing up, he pushed his chair back so violently, it fell over. “You’ll have to finish this without me,” he called out as he left the room.
“If you need us,” his colleagues chorused.
“I’ll give you a call,” he promised grimly.
~~o0o~~
The journey took longer than she’d thought. She’d flown into the country bordering hers, as it was untroubled by war. She had hoped to cross the border on a bus but had learned that there was no official transport into the war zone. She was lucky that a farmer going her way was willing to give her a lift. “No one comes in,” he explained, scanning her face inquisitively. “Everyone who can do so leaves here as fast as they can.”
“Except you,” Celina observed with a smile.
The old man shrugged as she shared her meager rations of airport sandwiches. “Living here is all I know,” he explained. “It’s too late for me to go anywhere.”
“Maybe not,” she said gently. “I’ve got friends who could help you.”
“And where would I go? I don’t want to leave. This is my home,” he protested.
She couldn’t argue with that, and they fell into silence as his ancient vehicle bounced along. The familiar forest stretched away on either side of the narrow road, but with every mile traveled, she felt more apprehensive, and more certain that she had come too late to save Marissa. Craning her neck, she stared out the windscreen, marveling at how tenacious the trees were as they clung to seemingly bare rock on the lower slopes of the mountains. But she couldn’t feel the same affinity as the old man obviously did with a land that had rarely been kind to her.
Knowing so little of her history before she was left on the steps of the orphanage, she’d didn’t even know if she belonged here, and now she felt nothing but a faint sense of dread. She thought back to what she’d learned about the trade of human trafficking. She knew the route through Europe the slavers took to sell off some of their stock, as she’d picked up the different languages at the various stopping places and her fellow captives had told her they held auctions right here in the place where she’d grown up.
“Is it a man that brought you back?”
She brushed off the old man’s question with a smile. She didn’t want to think about her imprisonment in Monte Carlo or the fact that she’d fallen in love with the hero who rescued her, and that now she must draw Diego back into danger so they could crack the gang. “Has there been much trouble while I’ve been away?” she asked instead, hoping to learn something new.
“Apart from all the villages from here to the border being left in ruins by the rebels, do you mean?”
She gave the old man a sympathetic look that prompted him to continue.
“There’s talk of human trafficking. Slavers in the area,” he said with a worried glance in Celina’s direction. “You’ll need to take care. They’re taking advantage of the lawless situation to ply their vicious trade.”
She made a sound of concern as if this was all new to her. “Any village in particular?”
He named two. One was where she’d taught school, and the other was even more remote, but just a few miles away. “I’ll be careful,” she promised.
“If I were young like you, I’d head straight back to the border and get out of here fast.”
She said nothing. She had no intention of leaving until the job was done.
The old man shrugged, and they didn’t speak again until he dropped her off within walking distance of the village where she’d taught school. “I can’t take you any closer,” he said, drawing his ancient vehicle to a grinding halt. “It’s too dangerous.”
