Page 118 of The Bratva Stalker's Ruthless Claim
A blinking point appears.
Timofey whistles under his breath.
“Well,” he mutters. “Looks like your wife just told us exactly where she is.”
“Can I respond?” I ask immediately.
Timofey shakes his head, firm and unflinching. “No. The encryption she used is advanced. Any reply could give her away. She’s in hiding, Mike. Responding would be reckless.”
I don’t question it. Not even for a second. I know her. By now, I understand that if Ellie has reached out, she’s already built three contingencies beyond anything I—or Timofey—can see. She’s always three steps ahead, even when I think I’m leading.
Timofey leans closer, his fingers flying over the keyboard. “I traced the coordinates to the exact building. It’s not just secure—it’s fortified legally and politically. Shell corporations, government contracts…it’s insulated from a direct assault.”
I feel a cold knot form in my stomach.
“A direct hit,” Timofey continues, “would trigger international scrutiny. Legal, political…probably military. It’snot just about breaking in. It’s about surviving the fallout afterward.”
I sink back into the chair, tension tightening every muscle. Ellie is there. Alive, but untouchable. And Katerina…she’s built a fortress around her that I can’t simply storm.
Timofey watches the map for a long moment before leaning back in his chair.
“We have to think carefully,” he says. “One wrong move, and we lose everything.”
I stare at the blinking dot on the screen. Ellie is inside that building somewhere. Surrounded. Watched.
But not broken.
She wouldn’t have sent those coordinates if she didn’t want me to do something with them.
An idea begins to take shape in my mind. Slow. Dangerous.
I straighten. “We have to change our tactics.”
Timofey looks over at me immediately. “How?”
I lean forward, resting my elbows on my knees, eyes still fixed on the screen.
For the first time since Ellie disappeared, a small smile pulls at the corner of my mouth.
“We play her game.”
Timofey narrows his eyes. “Explain.”
“Katerina doesn’t want a war,” I say calmly. “Not yet. If she did, Ellie would already be dead. What she wants is legitimacy. Control. Influence. Before we go there in two days, I’ll take all of that away from her.”
The next forty-eight hours are a blur of precision and patience. I move like a shadow across the financial battlefield, using the last intact Rusnak capital reserves to quietly destabilize the syndicate’s public-facing subsidiaries. Stock manipulation here. Supply disruptions there. Strategicleaks to rival investors—careful, almost surgical. Every move is calculated to provoke disorder without tipping my hand.
Meanwhile, Timofey traces the digital footprint embedded in Ellie’s coordinate signal. At first, he assumes it’s just a location marker—nothing more than a clever way to tell us where she is.
But the longer he studies the code, the quieter he grows.
Then, suddenly, he leans forward, eyes widening. “This isn’t just coordinates.”
I look up sharply. “What do you mean?”
He zooms in on a section of the data stream, fingers flying across the keyboard.
“It’s a sequence,” he says slowly. “Timed…layered inside the encryption.”
