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Alexi is the one I’m worried about. He pulls at his hair way too often, goes on cleaning raids of the room, and he can’t seem to stay in a single outfit for more than two hours. Last night, he just stripped his clothes off and laid on top of the blankets naked for hours.
I think he slept for an hour before getting a call about someone he could go torture. I’ve lost count of the deaths. They don’t matter anyway. If they can’t help us get to her, then they deserve to die like the traitors they were.
Even ifsome of them only fed information to Adrik about our movements, they still died. They led to our girl being taken and that will never be acceptable. The ones that we found to be more heavily involved, and hoping for a higher position with Rostya, they suffered the most. I think Alexi and Damien managed to keep one alive for three whole days.
An unrelenting burn touches my eyes as I sit at my desk. The brightness from the screens is going to cause me to need glasses one day. But I can’t seem to look away from the tiny dot on the screen showing me her last location, hoping as each second passes that something will ping.
They have to be underground or somewhere deep in a mountain. The technology in her bracelet is smart enough to tell me she’s still alive, which is a relief. In fact, I believe it’s the only thing keeping me tethered to this earth at the moment. It has a heat sensor that would notify us if it were taken off. And while the location isn’t pinging, the heat sensor is.
When Alexi and Damien aren’t out murdering anyone who worked with Victor Tamm, they are here with me, staring at the screen. We sleep together in Alexi’s bed, my alert system set as loud as it can be while we wait with what seems like empty hope that we can bring our girl home.
The latch to the door opens and Damien walks into the room. I’ve seen him look like a shell of himself before, but I’ve never seen him like this. His hair is starting to grow out and it falls into his face as he storms to the bathroom, likely to change out of the very bloody shirt he was wearing. He hasn’t been shaving either and his beard has grown out. It makes him look so much older. His shoulders are tight with tension even when we lay together. He’s so angry I can’t understand how he relaxes enough to sleep even with the medications.
Sometimes I catch him staring at his hands, as if he had somehow done this. I try to comfort him when he does that, threading our fingers together and holding him close. If only I could use my words I could explain that none of this is because of him. It’s just the fucked up nature of our world.
We’ve dug up everything we can on his father, and Alexi already took the news to Boris. Right now, we are trying to stay quiet about it in hopes that Boris can find Rostya and we can get him to spill what’s been happening. But Rostya must have known we found evidence that he reported everything to Adrik because he’s been radio silent since that night.
At this point, we’ve come to assume that Adrik and Rostya are working together, but we can’t figure out why.
“Anything?” Damien asks, his voice cracking with the last few shreds of hope we’re all clinging to.
I shake my head, unable to create words. I haven’t spoken once since we got back to the house six days ago. I’ve never been a big talker, but losing her broke something deep inside of me.
Damien seems to understand, but Alexi is frustrated. I get it, I’m frustrated too. It’s not that I don’t want to talk, it’s that I just can’t.
He walks to my side and wraps a hand around my shoulder. Even when he looks ready to fight a pissed off lion, Damien finds a way to be soft with me.
“You need to eat, baby.”
His voice is gentle, and I know he’s only looking out for me, but I shake my head.They probably aren’t feeding her, so why should I eat?But the moment the thought sparks in my mind, Damien is already responding.
“We can’t force ourselves into her pain. It will only make us weaker.”
I look up at him, the deep purple rings under his eyes make him look a special kind of terrifying, but not to me. Even in his pain he looks out for my well being. He won’t let me go without eating, and don’t even get me started on how many times a day he reminds me to drink water.
His hand combs through my hair, trying to help me relax. My jaw tenses as tears fill my eyes. Some of the tension leaves his shoulders as he leans into me and I let myself fall apart in his arms.
‘I can’t’ I try to say. I try and fail because nothing will come. Instead, I allow the tears to fall and let the only piece of my heart that’s left help me to bed. We lay by each other while I try to focus on breathing.
But as I do, all I can think about is every moment I looked into my lucky charm’s eyes and coached her in the same exercises.
Then, I let the thought we all can’t even begin to process overtake me.What if we never see her again?
Chapter 3
When I repeat in my mind ‘this is all my fault’ as I ride around the track, taking my bike at top speed, it is not one of those moments where I search for pity. It is simply the basic fact that it is the truth. I should have stayed with her when she told me to go to my father, simple as that. But she asked for me to respect her wishes, and I did what I could then to follow them.
I will not make that mistake again. Lev, Damien, and I have already had trackers inserted beneath our skin. Ones that are so high tech, I would be able to find you buried two hundred feet under the snow in Antarctica. I offered one to Laney, but she won’t talk to us right now. My father is the only one besides Levwho has access to the trackers, and the moment we bring our princess home, she will be getting one too.
I don’t even care if I have to do it against her wishes at this point. I will tolerate her wrath over feeling this soul consuming hollowness taking over my brothers and I.
Besides the fact that I am truly worried Lev will never speak unless we find her, I am fighting every demon I can find just to keep my mind intact. I bend my bike around the track, my knee scraping the ground and tearing a hole in my jeans but the burn never sinks in. Nothing seems to register until another bike is pulling alongside me.Her bike.
My first reaction is to run it off the track, no one should be allowed to ride her bike. That is until I see who is riding it. I swear to the demon goddess herself if it were literally anyone other than Havoc, I would shoot them in the head and deal with the repairs on the bike later.
Havoc revs the engine and pulls out in front of me, goading me. He has been trying to get me to talk, but the only thing I am interested in talking to him about is the game plan to get our girl back. I know he likely feels like a failure after everything happened, but I need answers. I need to find her.
We glide around the track for a bit, blowing off steam by racing each other on the straightaways and getting way too close in the turns. When he sits up and waves me to the side of the asphalt, I follow. Parking my bike next to him, I kick down the stand and remove my helmet. He does the same and we stare out at the landscape.
