Page 49

It isn’t long enough.

I gasp despite myself, the chemical filling my lungs, and the fight starts draining out of me in pieces, my arms growing heavy, my legs losing whatever strength they had left.

The street tilts sideways, the van’s open door swimming into blurred focus, and somewhere in the chaos I think of the baby, one hand flying to my stomach on pure instinct even as everything else in me goes soft and unresponsive.

My vision narrows down to almost nothing, edges going dark first, the middle holding on a few seconds longer than the rest.

Please, I think, not able to form the word out loud anymore. Please let it be okay. Please let someone find me before it’s too late for either of us.

I repeat it over and over in whatever’s left of my mind, a prayer with nowhere left to go, nobody left to hear it except the darkness closing in around every edge of what I can still perceive.

The last thing I register clearly is being lifted up, carried, the sound of the van door sliding shut with a heavy, final clunk, sealing out whatever daylight was left.

The world inside the van is darker, colder somehow, though I know that’s probably just the drug working through my system rather than anything real about the temperature or the actual air around me.

Voices talk over me in a language I don’t understand, low and urgent, and I try to hold onto consciousness through sheer will, failing more with every passing second.

I catch a name in the middle of the unfamiliar words, Viktor, spoken with a kind of deference that tells me even these men answer to someone waiting further down the chain.

My hand stays pressed against my stomach even as my fingers lose their grip, even as the darkness closing in from every edge finally swallows the last of my resistance whole.

I try to hold onto one clear thought before everything goes, something to carry with me into whatever comes next, and the only thing that surfaces is Artem’s face from this morning, easy and unguarded over coffee, no idea yet what’s about to happen to either of us.

I hope, distantly, that whatever’s coming for him is easier than whatever’s already found me.

33

ARTEM

My phone rings at 2:47p.m. Marek’s voice comes through before I’ve even said a word, ragged and out of breath.

“Talk to me.”

“They took her.” Marek’s voice, ragged, blood audible in how he’s breathing. “Outside the café. Multiple men, a van, moved fast. I took a hit; I couldn’t… I couldn’t stop them in time.” I can hear sirens somewhere behind him, distant but growing closer, and the sound of it makes the whole situation feel more real than his words alone manage to.

“Where’s the rest of the detail right now?”

“Two down. I’m the only one still standing.” A pause, pained, his breathing rough enough that I can hear him fighting to steady it. “There were too many of them.”

I don’t remember standing up from my desk. I’m already moving toward the door before the rest of what he’s saying fully registers, my hand gripping the phone hard enough that the plastic creaks under the pressure.

For one full second, something in my chest locks up entirely, my breath catching somewhere behind my ribs, my vision narrowing to a single point of white noise.

It passes as fast as it arrives. I’ve trained too long, lost too much already, to let a single second cost me the clarity I need for the next hour.

I press my free hand flat against the desk, grounding myself in the solid wood beneath my palm, and force the next breath in slow and even, counting it out the way I’d count out anything else that needed controlling.

“Get to the hospital. Now.” My voice comes out steady, clipped, the same controlled register that takes over when there’s no room left for anything but function. “Yuri’s people will meet you there.”

My phone rings again before I’ve even made it to the door. Yuri.

“I already know.” His voice is flat, all business. “Marek called it in the second it happened. I’m pulling every asset we have toward that location right now.”

“Trace on the phones.”

“Already running. If whoever took her makes contact, I’ll have a location before the call ends.” A pause. “Get to the house. That’s where they’ll call you.”

I don’t ask how he’s already three steps ahead of me. Fifteen years working alongside him, and I’ve learned not to waste time questioning instincts that have never once been wrong.