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“Can you do it, though? By next week?”
She presses her lips into a thin line, her thin brows stitching together into a contemplative frown. “Yes,” she says. “I can.”
I suck in a sharp breath, doing my best to keep my excitement from spilling out of me. I can taste the promise of freedom on my tongue. Do I dare hope?
“Good. Set up another appointment for next week. Come up with an excuse. I’ll finish up in here and then we can go before Konstantin gets back to the mansion.”
Catherina nods.
I close the door behind me and close out my work. The program is finished. All I need to do is send it off in a mass wave of emails from different, untraceable accounts. It doesn’t matter that Konstantin has several accountants. I only needoneto be careless enough to make the mistake of clicking on my link. Before I shut the laptop off, however, there’s one last thing I need to try.
I need to find a way to contact Mikhail.
There’s no phone in the examination room, so the only option I have is email. But given everything that’s going on, I can’t exactly imagine Mikhail stopping to check his inbox. What I really need is to contact somebody who can contact himforme, and there are only three people who come to mind: his brothers.
They’re a unit, the Antonov brothers. If I can get in touch with one, I can get in touch with all. The only question ishow?
I login to CyberFort’s employee portal, breathing a sigh of relief when it lets me back in without a hitch. I fire off a private message over the company’s servers to Luka. I don’t have a lot of time. I can hear footsteps outside, probably the guards coming to collect me. My message needs to be succinct.
Tell M I’m okay. I miss him.
I slam theENTERkey and close the browser just as Catherina steps in. She arches a brow.
“Let’s go,” she says. “Konstantin has requested our presence for dinner.”
A twinge of confusion makes my chest sting. “Dinner? He’s never asked us to join him for dinner before.”
“Maybe notyou.”
“I’d really rather not break bread with the man who kidnapped me.”
“That’s not up to you, Aurora. You know that. Come, come. We’re burning daylight. We must head downtown to get you fitted for a nice dress.”
“I didn’t realize dinner was such a formal occasion for you people.”
“Not usually,” she admits. “But Konstantin tells me we’re having guests.”
“Who?”
“The biggest players in Moscow.”
Chapter 31
Mikhail
If I were the kind of man who leapt for joy, I would. I don’t, of course, because that would be ridiculous, though Iamelated to have finally found him. It took much too much time, but I finally tracked Nicolai down.
It was a simple matter of asking around, claiming to be an old family friend who’d lost the piece of paper with his address—how silly of me—before a nice elderly man at a fruit stand gave me a general direction to follow. Nicolai was new in these parts and stood out like a sore thumb.
I park my car a good distance away, hidden around the bend of an old service road. The trees provide plenty of cover, but it’s going to be difficult getting anywhere near. He’s taken up residence in an old farmhouse. The address was never publicly listed, which explains why I was having such a difficult time pinning him down. Now that I’m here, though, it’s so obvious.
The windows are all boarded up. None of the lights are on. On the outside, the place looks totally abandoned. Were it not for the active electric fence posted around the small perimeter of the property, it would have been easy to dismiss the place as abandoned. No wonder this guy has been so hard to find. He’s good at hiding in plain sight.
But now the game is over. I’ve found him. It’s time to put an end to this nonsense.
Nobody shoots at me when I stomp up the gravel path toward the farmhouse. No bombs go off, no traps are sprung. Hell, the front door is evenopen. I draw my weapon, prepared for the worst. I was expecting far more resistance. I slowly step inside, allowing my eyes to adjust to the darkness.
Imagine my surprise when I find a man, probably Nicolai, just…sittingthere at the kitchen table. He looks at me, eyes watery and almost lifeless. There are dark circles beneath his eyes. He’s a big man like me, but everything about him seems to wilt. His head hangs low, his shoulders are slumped, his long, greasy brown hair dangling on either side of his bushy, full beard. There’s a gravity to him, an air of defeat. Both his hands are on the table, no weapon of his own in sight. He looks roughly the same age as I, but the weariness in his expression makes him look twenty years older.
