Page 64 of Bratva Stalker Kidnaps His Bride

“Yeah.”

“And Dubai.”

He nods.

“And tonight,” I finish, eyes boring into him.

He only blinks in affirmation.

Fifteen years.

Fifteen years of conducting operations beside this man, years taken to form the trust that only comes when you work at close range through high-stakes situations repeatedly, who you have stood in rooms like this one on the same side of every table.

Timur Sokolov, who was present at the Moretti operation, who has sat in the Bratva’s most sensitive planning sessions, my right hand through which I have extended my authority across this organization for a decade and a half.

I don’t feel any fury. That is the thing about the deepest betrayals—they do not burn. The weight is cold, dead weight, like realizing the ground you have been building on was hollow the entire time.

“The messages sent to Zara. The warnings. You sent those.”

His brows twitch before he smooths his face down.

“Some of them,” he says.

“Which ones?”

“The early ones. The notes telling her to stop looking.” He pauses. “I needed her investigation to slow down. She was getting close to things that would have changed the timeline.”

“What about the package in the warehouse? The photographs in that, and the Ionian lead.”

He shakes his head, and the gesture is small and certain. “That was not me.”

I study his face, looking for his specific tells I have gathered since the betrayal and even before it.

There is nothing. The denial carries the same flat quality as everything else he has said tonight—a man who has decided that there is nothing else left.

“Then who…?”

“Someone wanted her to find them,” Timur offers. “Someone who has been running a parallel operation to mine, with the opposite objective. They wanted her looking. They wanted her moving. They probably have different reasons than the syndicate does. I don’t know who though. I have been trying to identify them for six months and I haven’t managed to find shit.”

A slimy feeling crawls down my spine.

Someone is pushing Zara toward her parents from one direction while Timur and the syndicate are trying to stop her from the other. She has been bravely running her investigation in between those two opposing forces, and tonight, both organizations probably got what they wanted: the Khans in someone’s hands and a note on the back seat of my destroyed car telling their daughter she is next.

“Where are the Khans?”

Timur blinks.

“I passed the route and the timing only. I don't have the location they were taken to. The syndicate operates on acompartmentalized system—I gave them access points, not destinations. The people who executed tonight's attack are not the people I have been in contact with.”

A ball appears in my throat.

He does not know where they are.

His face tells me that he is not protecting anyone. He genuinely must not have it, because the Irish understood that the most valuable component of his access was his position inside the Korovin organization. They were not going to compromise their security by giving him more than he needed.

“You have given me everything you have,” I announce. “This is all you knew.”

“You know it all now,” he replies, and there is something that might be, in a different life, relief.