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None of the lights are on when I enter the living room. It’s perfectly still. Not unusual, given the late hour, but something doesn’t sit right with me. It’stoostill.
“Alina!”
I check her bedroom. She’s not there. Same with the kitchen and the living room. Alina is nowhere to be found.
Fuck.
It’s not clear what hits me first—panic or confusion. I race upstairs and pound on Luka’s door. He emerges from his room like a bat in a cave, bleary-eyed and pissed.
“Dude, what the fuck?”
“Where’s Alina?”
“How should I know?”
“You’ve been home all day.”
“I didn’t get up until a couple of hours ago.”
“And what have you been doing in the meantime?”
“Working on CyberFort’s annual server updates.”
“And you haven’t left your room once?”
“Nope. I’ve got a bathroom and a mini fridge in here. I only leave to do my laundry.”
“God, you’re a fucking animal,” I hiss under my breath as I pull out my phone.
I immediately dial Ben’s number. He should have been posted in the lobby to keep an eye on things. I took Alina at her word when she promised not to run away again. I’m worried our argument might have upset her enough to try—and this time, successfully. Unfortunately, the call goes straight to voicemail. I try again, but I’m no luckier the second time.
Double fuck. Something definitely isn’t right.
I scroll through my phone until I locate the tracking app I installed. It’s been a while since I’ve had to use it. I don’twantto have to use it again, but the feeling in my gut tells me something terrible is happening. If Alina’s phone is on, I should be able to locate her within a few seconds. I press the button and activate the app.
A map pulls up on the screen, zooming in bit by bit as the device triangulates her exact coordinates. For a moment, I think the app is glitching out. Her little icon pops up, but it’s traveling at an inhumanly fast speed over the Atlantic Ocean. Did she manage to sneak onto a boat? No, this is much faster. A plane, then?
“Luka, can you get me a list of chartered flights scheduled for takeoff in the last hour?”
My brother nods, slipping back into his cave of a room. He plops down in his chair and rolls up to his impressive desktop setup. He has three different screens, one of which is an ultra-wide with the other two mounted vertically for the sake of programming. His fingers fly over the keyboard, the rapidclick-click-clicklike heavy rain on a metal rooftop.
He pulls up a website called Flight Radar, a free global flight tracking service that provides real-time information all over the world. It’s kind of astounding how detailed the map is, thousands of little yellow plane icons littering the map of the world. Luka scrolls in to get a better look at New York and the East Coast.
Luka taps the screen. “This one just left. A private jet. Country of registration is Russia. Headed directly to Moscow.”
I glance down at my tracking app and cross reference it with the plane symbol on Luka’s screen. They match. Alina is on that plane.
I’m at a loss. What am I supposed to do? Should I go after her? Do I call Mikhail and Dimitri and let them know to intercept? Did she really run away, or is something more nefarious going on?
“I need you to locate Ben for me,” I order Luka. “Can you hack into his phone?”
Luka snorts. “Is water wet?”
“Just do it, little brother. Quickly.”
While he works his magic, I pace anxiously around the room. This whole time, I thought Richard was the one trying to sabotage us, but now I realize there’s another player on the scene. Alina could very well have been in real danger all along. She knows as well as I do what will happen if this marriage falls apart. Alina doesn’t have a malicious bone in her body, which is why I know she would never leave me like this. The only conclusion I can draw is that somebody took her. How else would she have been able to charter a plane? I’m not sure if she even knows how to do that.
“Got it,” Luka announces, pulling up a digital copy of Ben’s phone. We can see every single app, phone call, email, and text message mirrored onto our screen.
