Page 52 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride

No, no, no.

The stone texture, from a closer look, reveals different stripes than what I had recognized them to be. The wall I am standing beside has a large stain in mortar line near the base that is present in none of the images.

It is not the same place.

Standing at the wall of the wrong house on the wrong stretch of Naxos coastline with the photographs in my hand, my legstremble as all the pressure inside of my chest whooshes out. A bird lands on the wall three feet from me, head cocking as it looks at me.

Then it cocks it head away, pretending I don’t exist.

And maybe it’s right.

Maybe I don’t.

Who can really say that I am a woman standing outside a stranger’s house in Greece at half past seven in the morning holding photographs of her lost parents—work she spent sixteen hours on, work she has been building toward for three months that has brought her to the wrong wall?

No one is here to receive me, after all.

A sob builds in my chest, dry and painful.

I walked away from Mikhail for this.

I got on a plane, alone, for this.

My legs finally give up on me down the stone of the coastal path, my back sliding down the wrong wall. The photographs spread across my knees in the morning light of the Aegean, an ache spreading all over my body.

Breathing through it is all I can do. The water, reflects the sun back at me, cruelly shining light on everything that has fallen apart.

I don’t remember how I get to my feet and walk back, but by eight o’clock, I am back in the rental car with the photographs on the passenger seat. My phone’s screen shows me the schedule of all the flights back to New York.

There is nothing in Greece for me. I am done chasing after ghosts and buildings that don’t exist.

I close the search and stare at the dashboard.

Something at the peripheral edge of the coastal road, a movement of kind alerts me.

I go still.

A feeling curdles at the base of my spine, the same as the one that arrived on the streets of Dubai before those men materialized from doorways.

There are two of them.

The first is at the far end of the coastal road, standing at the juncture where the path meets a wider street. His back is partially turned but I know his eyes in his skull are focused on his peripheral vision doing the actual work. He does not move at all, standing in the same position for the full four minutes I have been sitting in this car.

The second is closer, on the coastal path itself, doing considerably better at assimilating. He’s walking, except his stride is too relaxed, and he has covered the same fifty-meter stretch twice in the time I’ve been watching him.

You can’t say they are together. The distance between them is too strategic for proximity and too coordinated for coincidence.

I’m under watch.

The package in the warehouse, the modulated voice, the coordinates pointing me here—maybe it was all a ploy to get me somewhere without letting me know the true cause.

My fingers hesitate around the ignition. I don’t start the car.

It’s the most obvious possible response and the coastal road offers me exactly one direction of escape. I won’t even be fifteenmeters from either of the men, which means that whoever positioned them already knew that.

The morning market is three hundred meters back toward the town center; I passed the cluster of canopied stalls stationed along a widened section of the harbor road when I drove past. It’s the kind of small, local market that exists in coastal towns for the residents instead of tourists, occupied by the women who come early for the produce.

I slip out of the car carefully and slowly, acting like I am searching for something I misplaced.