Page 51 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride

I told her I would help her find them while keeping the truth from her. It’s a betrayal that leaves me no solid ground to stand on and make demands.

She is building her own ground to stand on, in Greece, with forty-three photographs and fifteen years of work, fueled by therelentless purpose that this time no one else gets to decide what she is allowed to reach.

My fists clench on the table.

I am letting her go. Forcing control now would confirm every version of me she thinks I am, would erase the distance between who I have been and who I have been trying to become because of her.

Chapter 19 - Zara

Greece is beautiful like nothing else I’ve ever seen before.

The Aegean is a gorgeous blue, the coastline composed of white stone and olive and sunbaked terracotta.

Even with how extraordinary it is, I am not looking at it, my attention stolen by the photographs in my hand.

The twelve prints in front of me have the clearest background detail, the strongest environmental indicators, the most reliable information of wherever my parents have been detained.

I have laid them across the small table in the room I booked in a coastal town on Naxos because the light angle in the photographs, along with the stone in the background, pointed here before anywhere else.

Since four in the morning, my notebook and these pictures are all I’ve stared at. The cup of coffee at my elbow has gone cold.

Gathering all this information alone took me six hours on the plane.

The stone is volcanic in nature—the texture in the high-resolution prints, the darker inclusions running through the lighter matrix horizontally says so. The window placement in the images my mother appears near is south-facing, thelight belonging to that of a Mediterranean winter sun even in the warmer-month photographs—meaning the hideout is somewhere near the coast.

What little vegetation is visible at the edges of the frames is a particular flowering shrub somewhere over the Atlantic whose identification took me forty minutes. This means the location must be the Cyclades.

Naxos. South-facing coast. Volcanic stone. Isolated.

The sun isn’t even up before my first step out of the hideout.

The coastal road south of the town is quiet in the early morning, the road running along the cliff edge with the sea appearing and disappearing in the gaps. I drive the rental car with the photographs on the passenger seat, my eyes darting between the road and the landscape like my life depends on it.

Which it kind of does.

It’s half past seven when I finally see a house that sits back from the coastal path behind a low stone wall and an overgrowth of the same flowering shrub from the photographs.

My car jolts to a stop with how hard I press down on the brakes. The roofline, the color of the stone, the way it stands relative to the water. A current zaps through my chest nauseatingly, like something that’s been falling for a very long time and has just encountered solid ground.

My body is frozen for two minutes before I push it to move, which is the longest two minutes I have spent recently. My fingers curl around the photographs before I slam the door shut behind me, making my way toward the building through the coastal path rather than the road. The road would make mevisible from the front of the property, which is not something I can risk, not until I’m sure.

Slithering along the perimeter of the wall, the photographs complain mutely as my fists tighten around them.

The stone is right. The roofline is the right height. I rub the leaf of the shrub between my finger and thumb—also right.

This is it. Just one thing left.

I am so close to letting myself believe it that I have already written the next sentence of my own story in my head—pushing through the gate in this wall, walking up to the door of this house and finally—

A stone appears in my throat.

No. It can’t be.

The window in the photograph is set twelve, perhaps fifteen inches higher on the wall than the window in front of me. When I bring the photograph up against the south-facing wall and align the window position with the image, the angles do not match.

I lower the photograph.

Raise it again.