Page 38 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride

He receives it unflinchingly, which is exactly what I expected. I am not looking for what breaks, though. I am looking for what holds too carefully. In the half second, I almost find it.

The distinction is invisible to most.

I stand at the window after they are gone, operational gear having replaced the jacket.

Two fronts: the Irish syndicate has resources and coordination and what appears to be an active source inside my operation, and the response to that is something I have done myself more times than I can accurately number.

The second is—

Zara is in the penthouse’s eastern room right now. She is probably awake, with her notebook, probably thinking about the truth concerning her parents.

And I am carrying around the answer to that in my chest like shrapnel from an old wound that has never been fully removed, doing its quiet damage in the dark.

A reason you have been carrying around for a while, waiting for it to still be true.

Chapter 13 - Zara

The investigation is bleeding out in front of me and I cannot find the wound.

That is the only way to describe what has been happening over the past seventy-two hours. It’s that nauseating experience of watching something that was alive and moving go motionless.

Yusuf, the one who gave me SABLE-7, sitting across from me while his anxiety radiated off him in visible waves, has not responded to three separate contact attempts across two different communication channels.

There’s not even the carefully worded non-answer of someone who is nervous but still present. Just the total silence of a person who has ceased to be reachable, which could mean two things and both of them are bad.

The second contact, a woman I had cultivated over eight months through a financial network analyst she trusted and who I had spent considerable effort befriending, sent a single message four days ago that contained three words and a full stop.

Don’t contact me.

The third is simply gone—number disconnected, email returned undelivered, the professional presence she had maintained across three separate platforms for the two years I had been quietly following her work all erased, as cleanly and completely as if she had never existed.

I sit at the desk in the study Mikhail has made available to me, staring at the screen of my laptop where three separate dead ends in three separate browser tabs mock me.

Someone is dismantling my investigation systematically. They are not blocking the information itself, just cutting my access from the people who held it.

Smart, because information can be re-found but trust, once severed by fear, does not come by again.

My notebook is open beside the laptop, and the page I have been writing on for the past two hours looks like the scribbles of a mad and frustrated scientist.

I have drawn three separate connection maps and crossed out two of them. The third sits at the bottom of the page and it has one clear conclusion written in the center of it, underlined.

Dubai. The original records. Physical access only.

Whatever my contacts held, whatever they were directing me toward before someone reached them first, the source material still exists somewhere. Digital records can be wiped, communications can be severed, people can be frightened into silence—but the physical network that operated for years does not simply disappear.

Somewhere in Dubai there is a location that holds what I am looking for. It cannot be erased by a phone call and a threat.

“You’ve been in here for four hours.”

His voice arrives from the doorway, startling me slightly before I relax.

Mikhail.

“I’m aware of the time,” I tell him, not looking up from the screen.

He enters the room instead of staying in the doorway, moving to the edge of the desk. He peers at the laptop screen, at thenotebook, the map I drew at the bottom of the page with its underlined conclusion.

The silence stretches for a moment before he breaks it.