Forced Mafia Bride (Yezhov Bratva #2)

Chapter 16 – Nikolai

Two Months Later

Anatoly dragged the unconscious man on the floor, leaving a thick red trail across the room to a chair placed by the wall. He dropped the hefty man on the seat like a sack of weighty potatoes and crouched to his knees to tie him up. The man’s bloodied head lolled forward. Anatoly shoved it back with a grunt, impatiently working the knot on the twine.

Leaning back in my desk chair, my eyes caught and narrowed on the fancy desk calendar. One of Timur’s weird gifts before his quick trip back to Mexico. The date, in small black serif fonts, glared at me.

Two months.

She’d been gone for two months, and there was no word. Nothing but silence. I secretly commended her for being able to maintain a low profile for that long. Honestly, I didn’t think she had that stealth ability in her. Even some of the men had grown weary of keeping an eye out for her. The routes had been closely monitored since her escape, but there were no traces that she had made any attempt to leave the city, and it made me wonder why.

Anatoly successfully finished the last knot. He rose to his feet and flicked the man’s limp head before turning over to my desk. Fishing out a cloth from the inner pocket of his suit jacket, he relaxed on the chair opposite mine, and my mind was too preoccupied to care when he started wiping the blood off his tattooed fingers, one after the other.

I wondered why she was still here, in L.A., lurking in the shadows. Or maybe she had a plan. Or maybe she’d been smart about it. It was possible that she’d found a quiet exit with the help of someone even smarter. My mind wasted no seconds pulling up Aiden’s picture. The idea that he’d helped her wasn’t improbable. The only problem was that it was unlikely that he had because if Aiden knew Rosalyn was missing, then Ronan knew. And so far, he didn’t. We’d managed to keep that information under wraps.

“So, am I going to leave him here or send him to your brother?”

Anatoly’s voice reminded me that he was in the room. His thumb jerked to the man at the back of the room unenthusiastically. I smoothened a crease on my shirt, supported my elbow on the armrest, and raised an eyebrow.

“And who’s he?”

Anatoly frowned. He dropped his hand and plucked a cigarette from…. I wasn’t sure where the stick came from. One minute, he was seated with a bloodied cloth, and the next, dancing yellow-orange flames from his Zippo lighter hovered under the butt of the cigar between his lips.

“That’s Greg Fisher.”

My eyebrows relaxed and then furrowed. I glanced at the man’s head slowly falling forward and the timely dripping of blood on the carpet. Any other day, I might have threatened to put a fist on his jaw for messing up my office, but I was distracted by thoughts of a red-haired princess on the run.

“Greg Fisher. The broker?”

“Mm-hm.” His head bobbed, and white smoky rings floated from his lips, forming a thick fog covering his face. He dispersed it with a wave of his hand and exhaled more rings.

“What’s the broker doing here?”

The corners of his lips crooked downwards, and he couldn’t have looked more unimpressed. The stick went into his mouth, and he waited for a heartbeat, inhaling, before responding.

“You don’t remember? He’s owing you money. Just last night, you practically raved about it and asked me to find him and deal with him.” Smaller, smoky clouds escaped his nostrils in a long trail. “What was not decided was whether or not to have your brother involved because we heard he’s been looking for the son of a bitch too.”

I didn’t forget. I almost never missed the slightest detail. But right now, the matter at hand didn’t seem dire enough to earn my attention. There were more pressing matters to attend to.

I gave him a once-over before leaning back on my chair. “Transfer it. Let him handle it, then. I have other things to attend to.”

He barely gave me a chance to turn away before pressing. He leaned in, eyes hard, fingers gripping the edge of the desk. “Other things like the girl, yes? The men have noticed. You’ve been distracted a lot lately.”

“Their fucking business or mine?”

“Yours.” He leaned back, a smile in his eyes. He shrugged. “Just saying. It’s been two months, and not even a speck of dust has shown up for a trail. If you ask me, she’s probably lying in a ditch somewhere.”

Red flashed through my vision, and I forced my fingernails into the armrest. Again, that idea was not impossible, but just the thought of it had my lungs snatched in a death grip and the blood flowing to my brain.

I glared at him, hard enough to leave a hole in the middle of his head. He must have noticed my intent to murder and backed off with his raised hands.

“Just saying.”

“Then, don’t fucking say. Rosalyn is not dead. If she was, we both know there’d be more than a speck of dust for a trail.”

This insane rush, like adrenaline but something even fiercer, burned through my veins and struck every bone in my body. The urge to break something was more palpable than the fucking oxygen in the room. It was her. She was driving me almost fucking mad with this push to protect her.

My phone vibrated on the gleaming hardwood, breaking into my thoughts. I snatched it up before I allowed my instincts to swipe it off the desk.

The caller identity had Aiden’s name flashing boldly on the screen, and a sinking gut feeling told me I wasn’t going to like what he had to fucking say.

I put the phone on speaker and knotted my fingers over my groin to avoid causing the device any damage, and the incredulity in his voice came through the speakers in the harshest whisper I’d ever heard.

“She’s missing ?”

His tone was the fucking expression of the feeling coursing through my being, the subtle but evident anger, the disappointment. But most of all, the fucking care.

This spiky, hot-blooded version of Aiden was the one I didn’t get to see very often. His guardian angel wings only came out where Rosalyn was involved. Involuntarily, I suppressed a bitter chuckle.

Like a fucking sister, my foot.

But there were bigger fish to fry. Something a lot bigger and more vicious than the glaring truth of Aiden’s feelings. His abrupt call meant….

I closed my eyes and rubbed my temple.

Shit.

“Ronan knows, doesn’t he?”

Silence.

Then, more heavy breathing on the speaker and quick-paced movement of shoes. He was moving with an urgency that could only mean one thing.

“Ronan knows. Everyone knows. One of the men walked in this morning with the verification of the news that his sister had escaped from your custody two months ago and hadn’t been found till date. I’m not fucking sure how he even got the verification in the first place, but Ronan is mad as hell and has set his men loose like dogs on a search.”

Fuck.

With a sudden burst of energy, I stood, sending my chair scraping backward, and grabbed my phone. Anatoly was right behind, snagging the car keys before we both headed out the door. Aiden was still speaking, trying to provide coordinates of her last sightings, most visited locations while she lived with Ronan, and possible places where she could be. Then, he paused.

“Are you going to do something about finding her, or should I?”

We approached the Tesla, but my feet stopped moving. Aiden remained oblivious, but I’d already sprang into action, mindlessly surrendering to the overwhelming urge to track her down. He was asking me now if I was going to do something about it. If I still wanted her.

I knew the answer. Fuck , even Anatoly knew the answer. He stood by the door, waiting for me, knowing the meaning of the tension hanging in the air.

My eyes narrowed as I gazed past Anatoly’s face, my mind consumed by a singular mental focus: Rosalyn. The mere thought of her name ignited a fire within me, fueling a determination that possibly bordered on a thin line of obsession.

She was mine. My possession.

No one took what belonged to me and lived to tell the tale.

My jaw clenched as I recalled the events leading up to her disappearance.

Ronan’s brazen attempt to take her from me still simmered in my veins like poison.

We were going hunting to take back what was mine. And I was going to stop at nothing to reclaim her, to make her understand that she belonged to me, body and soul.

I tightened my grip on the phone.

“If Ronan has an army of a hundred men, I have a thousand already at my command.”

I hung up and marched to the car, nodding toward Anatoly. “I want every resource allocated to finding her. Leave no stone unturned. No lead unexplored. I want her back, and I want her back today, unharmed and untouched. Not a fucking scratch on her body, got it?”

He nodded, knowing better at this time than to question my resolve.

And when I finally found her….

No one would ever take her from me again.