Katya was missing.
No, not missing, taken. Like a bad joke, I’d gotten the report only a few hours ago, and it had been hysterical.
I’d laughed for half an hour straight, tears leaking from my eye. Somehow the men that had brought the report hadn’t seen the humor, they’d passed silent glanced among themselves.
Of all the things in the world to do, Maxim Triev decided to take Katya.
He was already a dead man when he’d made a move on Yuri, now, what I wanted to do to him would have made him unfit even for hell.
God would look at his fucking body and let him into heaven just to make up for it.
But even that, I paused, I couldn’t do.
I’d promised him to Katya.
I drew a deep breath and continued, before pulling on my jacket and wristwatch.
Maybe Maxim wouldn’t face my hands, but I was pissed as shit, and somebody was going to pay for it.
Frankie and Dom were in on the hunt too, nothing much, just looking for a little bit of information to help us with Maxim’s whereabouts. They would let me know as soon as they had a lead, meanwhile, I was going out on my own tonight.
Nowhere fancy, just the shitty hotel the Trievs had bought and remodeled.
I leaned against the passenger door of the van, whistling to myself—I’d been playing the tune of the rhyme, but I couldn’t remember the words—while the men I’d brought with me wreaked havoc inside. The screams reached me, and occasionally somebody would run out to try and escape.
Since the place was remodeled, it wasn’t officially operating. Instead of a hotel, it was more of a joint for Triev operations. A place for his people to drop off reports, victims, or whatever the hell they did,
If they ran up the street, in front of the van, I reached inside the passenger seat for a shotgun, aimed and fired. And if they went the other way, I had a man at the back to shoot them.
There was chaos inside and, on the street, but that was only the beginning.
I was going to turn up the heat until somebody gave me something I could use to find my fucking wife.
With all the noise, nobody dared move on the street, but some of them must have had the good sense to phone the cops.
The cops wouldn’t be coming though, not when I’d already made a very direct call to the attorney general. A man on the Trievs’ payroll.
The little shitty stunt that they had been pulling for the past weeks, breathing down our necks and disrupting our businesses, had only been taken with humor because of the merger between the Petrenkos and us, but since my wife was now fucking missing, and her father was being guarded in the hospital, there was no Petrenko left to whisper in my ear about being reasonable.
If they so much as made a sound I didn’t like, I’d made it clear to him that there would be instant, significant, and very severe consequences.
All he had to do was receive his fat bribery check and stay put until I had my wife back.
By the end of the raid at the Triev hotel, I had five business managers captured for me. I intended to question them until I found out where she was being kept.
Preferably before I lost my mind.
I didn’t even know how they’d taken her, but she was missing, and all fingers pointed to the Trievs.
And since they had a history of human trafficking and were not above using medieval methods, as they had with the stripper from the Petrenko strip club they’d raided, I needed to get her back quickly.
I hadn’t slept since I had gotten the news, and this was the second establishment of the Trievs I had visited.
Katya.
If anything, anything at all, happened to her, I was going to go insane and that was going to mean crap for everybody.
All I’d done so far was think, and it was true. We might have started fast and hot, tossed on a fucking rollercoaster that didn’t know how to slow down, but somewhere along the way I must have fallen for her without realizing.