“Uh uh. I don’t buy it,” Chad said and Logan’s heart kicked into gear.
He didn’t know what would be better. If the note was right, it meant Sam had left him because she wasn’t sure of them. Wasn’t sure she wanted the life she’d said she wanted with him. It might kill him, but at least it would mean she was safe.
On the other hand, if someone forced her to write it, she was in danger. Possibly hurt.
“She loves you, Logan,” Chad said with a hell of a lot of conviction.
Logan raised his gaze and met Chad’s eyes.
“If she loves me, but she left, that means—”
“Yeah, that means.” Chad nodded. “We’ll find her.”
“Where do we even begin? Sam is the one we always call in a situation like this,” Kelly asked.
Logan picked up his phone. “We call in a ton of favors.”
“Zach is already on his way to meet with a few of the guys we know at the FBI. They’ve all worked with Sam. They owe her and they care about her. They’ll do what they can,” Jack said.
Chad nodded and started dialing his phone. “I’ll see if I can pull any more strings.”
The group was quiet and grim as Logan and Chad called as many people as they could. They weren’t able to get a B.O.L.O. out for her car, but unofficially every officer and agent in the area was watching for her vehicle. A few of the guys at the FBI were trying to track her online and others were checking hotel and motel records.
Logan swore bitterly into the phone, causing everyone to stop what they were doing to watch him. Because one of his contacts had just informed him that Diya Molov was likely behind Sam’s disappearance.
“What the hell? How did Diya get this close with no red flags being raised?”
He was quiet, listening for a minute, but the anger coursed through his veins like blood itself.
“Find out!” he barked and threw his phone onto the couch. He fisted his hands into his hair and tugged, wanting the pain as a distraction. This couldn’t be happening.
“Want to fill us in?” Chad asked quietly.
“Yeah,” Logan said, looking up. He needed to get his head back in the game … get out there and find Diya Bogolomov and her cousin.
“That was one of the SEALs I was working with on my last assignment. I can’t give you all the details,” he said, looking at Chad and the rest of the group, who nodded their understanding—they knew he had worked a lot of classified ops, “but he’s tracked someone linked to my past here. Diya Bogolomov has a lot of reasons to want to see me hurting and it turns out she’s been in Connecticut for the past two weeks. It’s no coincidence. We suspected she might have the identities of me and a few of my team members, but we hadn’t heard anything more. She was spotted in one of the airports and flagged, but somehow the people who should have alerted us never made the connection with my location and her movements.”
“How angry is this woman? How unstable?” Chad asked as Jennie put her arms around his waist and Kelly did the same with Jack. Seeing them all leaning on one another killed him. He wanted Sam safe in his arms.
“Very angry and very unstable. And, she’s likely well-funded.”
“What does she want?” Jennie’s voice reflected her fear.
Logan hadn’t ever really understood the meaning of the word despair until now. He felt utterly gutted at what he was about to say.
“She wants me to pay. She wants me to lose everything.”
No one spoke. They didn’t need to ask why. It went unsaid. They all seemed to understand Logan had somehow taken everything from this woman and she wanted the same for him. She wanted him to suffer as she had. Now, she was going to use Samantha to do it. She was going to take Sam away.
“All right,” he said. He wasn’t going to sit here. He couldn’t just sit back and let Sam go without a fight. “There’s no sign of a struggle here. Amanda said she came in and asked her to watch Billy and give him to me after a meeting I wasn’t in.”
The dog poked his head up at the mention of his name, but continued to watch the group, as if waiting for some instruction on how he might help.
“So, whatever made her leave, she wasn’t physically forced because no one was with her.”
Kelly nodded. “But something made her leave. And, if they didn’t simply take Sam or keep someone with her, they must be awfully confident that whatever they have on her is enough to make her come back. Or enough to make her do whatever they instructed her to do. Could this woman have reached out to Sam? Somehow convinced her that she needed to leave to protect you? That’s what would convince Sam. If she thought she was somehow protecting you.”
They were all quiet for a moment, as if each of them were trying to digest what Kelly had said.