Page 47 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride

The penthouse has stopped feeling like a prison.

I am not comfortable here anymore but I am not uncomfortable either.

I simply have to be here.

Mikhail has been absent since we arrived back from the airport. This is not something I asked for, but it is something careful. This is the withdrawal of a man who understood I could not manage his presence right now.

I flip open my notebook instead.

That number is still in my phone, sitting inside the message thread. A door I have been standing outside of and have finally decided to open because something shifted in me on the plane over the Atlantic, in the dark air cabin where I refused to look at my husband for five hours.

I press call before I talk myself out of it.

The phone rings four times, then it connects.

“Ms. Khan,” comes the subtle, electronic signature of a voice modulator; genderless, age-less, built for staying anonymous. “I expected you to call sooner.”

“Where are my parents?” I demand impatiently.

“Alive,” the voice says, knocking the air out of me. “But not accessible by the means you have been attempting.”

Alive. They’re alive.

“Then tell me the means that work.”

“There are things you need to see before you can understand where they are and why they are there. Materials that were gathered years ago and have been kept in a location I am willing to give you.”

“Why?" I risk asking. This question is the most important one, and I have never in my life accepted a source offering materials without understanding the motivation behind the offering.

“Because the people who put your parents where they are would prefer you stop looking,” the modulated voice states flatly. “I prefer the opposite.”

Huh.

“So you’re suggesting a meeting,” I say, raising a brow.

“Yes,” the voice confirms. “Alone. No Korovin personnel, no security detail, no communication to anyone in that household before you arrive. Those are the conditions. I understand they are significant ones given your current situation. They are not negotiable.”

I should hesitate. Every instinct I have developed across five years of investigative journalism, and the past several weeks of learning to move in this crime world is telling me that this is a trap. Coming alone to an unknown location is the kind of decision that ends stories rather than advances them.

My parents are alive.

“Give me the address.”

The location is in Brooklyn, which is not where I expected it to be. I thought it would be somewhere further removed, somewhere that required distance to reach. Instead the address belongs to a forgotten section of the waterfront in Red Hook.

I go in the late afternoon, alone, in a car I arranged separately from anything connected to Mikhail. Some part of me is relieved to have a reason to move through the investigation without him.

The building I arrive at is a former warehouse, stripped of function and withering. The exterior is corrugated metal with a gray-brown shine of rust working its way across the panels in slow, branching patterns. The door at the front is unlocked.

Inside, the space is enormous and entirely empty.

My footsteps echo, the light coming through four high windows on the eastern wall in long, declining columns that illuminate the dust suspended in the air, turning it to something almost beautiful, the particles catching and releasing light.

There is no one here.

I stand in the center of the space and turn through a full three-sixty to confirm it.

My phone is in my hand, the security detail’s number two taps away. I stand in the center of a large empty building in a part of Brooklyn that will take them twelve minutes to reach, and the modulated voice that directed me here has not answered the two follow-up messages I sent on my way over.