Page 49 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride

My parents are in a location that can be found.

There is a wall in those photographs with a specific stone texture. There is a window that faces a specific direction. There is a quality of light that belongs to a certain place.

There is also a woman who investigates things for a living sitting on a warehouse floor in Red Hook with forty-three photographs in her hands and fifteen years of hope blooming violently in her chest.

I am not running after nothing anymore.

This has a beginning and a middle and an end that I can reach, and the end is them, the end is real, and it is closer than it has ever fucking been.

Pressing the photographs carefully back into the protective envelope of the oilcloth, I stand up. The warehouse light is going amber now as my feet lead me toward the door, the photographs tucked tightly against my chest.

I know how to find a location from a photograph. I have done it twice before in my career.

For the first time in three months, the search has a direction and it leads me out of the warehouse and into the Brooklyn evening without looking back.

Chapter 18 - Mikhail

There is an absence that stains the air even before I open my eyes.

My eyes shoot open, hands creeping into the cold and empty space beside me that has not been warm for several hours.

My whole body freezes for four seconds before I shoot upright.

Zara is gone.

On the kitchen counter lies a note. The paper is from her notebook, handwriting scribbled and direct, the way it is in the margins of her notebook when she is writing for herself.

I know where they are. I’ve narrowed the location from the photographs—the details in the background and the light angle puts it in Greece, likely the islands. I’m going to follow it. This lead is real and I am not waiting for another one.

Do not come after me.

You have already done enough.

I set the paper down on the counter mechanically.

Then I lean over the counter and read it again.

You have already done enough.

This has to be the most precise and least forgiving sentence she has ever said to me since the alley in Dubai.

I switch on the coffee maker.

She is going to Greece.

These photographs that she found in the warehouse—the warehouse that Greger’s secondary detail followed her to and reported back. That report was scrunched between my fingers inthe study last night, while I debated whether her self-perceived autonomy was worth her safety.

Those photographs have given her a location. She knows enough to figure out a location that I don’t doubt will be an accurate guess.

She is walking toward something real.

In the context of everything we have uncovered about her parents’ network, the enemies they accumulated, she’s walking into a minefield unknowingly.

The Irish syndicate is still moving; Timur’s allegiances are still unconfirmed and that alone creates an unpleasant vacuum in my chest. The location in Greece, wherever it is, was held secret for years by people with the means and motivation to hold it.

That package was sent by someone I have not identified.

Someonewantsher to go to Greece.