Page 25 of The Hunted Wife

Ricard turned the gun toward her. “Come with me now and I won’t kill your husband.”

She lifted her chin. “He’ll find me. You’ll never be able to hide me from him. You’ll see and when you do, it will be the last thing you see.” She stood and came toward him.

As she passed, Ricard grabbed her by the hair. “You’ll regret running, my sweet Milena. You’ll never do it again, or I’ll kill you. Understand?” He placed his gun in his waistband and grabbed her chin and squeezed. “Do you understand?”

“Ow! Yes! Yes, I understand.”

He released her and they walked out of the kitchen into the dark night.

Chapter 9

Adam heard her scream from halfway across the yard. Every instinct inside him went savage. He broke into a dead run toward the house while security men shouted behind him. The moment he hit the backdoor and saw it swinging slowly off its hinges, he knew. Her guard lay crumpled beside the table in a pool of blood.

“Millie!” Adam roared as he tore through the house room by room, searching even though he knew she was gone. Panic clawed at his chest so violently he could barely breathe. He had promised to protect her. Promised she would be safe with him. And he had failed.

Outside, floodlights cut through the darkness while men spread across the ranch yard with rifles and flashlights. His brothers were out there along with all the remaining security detail. Adam dropped to his knee beside the dead guard long enough to close the man’s eyes before fury unlike anything he’d ever known before took hold of him. “Find her,” he ordered in a deadly calm voice that silenced everyone who had run in behind him. “I don’t care what it takes. Lock down the roads, call the sheriff, call every Sullivan employee we have. Ricard Sokolov just declared war.”

Millie complied with his instructions to keep Ricard from shooting her as they ran through the forest toward the road.

He held her arm with his left hand and in his right, he kept his Makarov ready to fire.

Once they hit the road, they ran to a waiting SUV.

Viktor slid behind the wheel.

Ricard shoved Millie into the backseat and climbed in after her. “Go. Viktor. Go.”

“Which way do you want me to head?” Viktor looked into the rearview mirror.

“To the hunting lodge.”

“We are closer to it here than we were in downtown Steamboat Springs.”

“We still have to hurry.”

“I will get us there, Boss.”

Millie sat rigidly in the backseat of the SUV, as close to her door as she could get, while Viktor drove over the curving mountain roads at dangerous speeds.

Ricard grabbed her by her arm and pulled her back toward him. “Get over here. I don’t want you doing something stupid like jumping out of a moving car.”

That was exactly what she was planning to do. She kept her eyes forward, her hand on her belly. Her pulse raced and she couldn’t stop shaking.

When Ricard finally noticed her hand resting protectively over her stomach, his eyes narrowed. “Are you ill?” he asked suspiciously.

Millie forced herself to shrug. “Carsick.”

His gaze lingered for several seconds before he finally returned to look out the windshield at the road in front of them.

She silently thanked God he hadn’t figured out the truth.

Adam had followed the tire tracks away from the ranch long enough to know that the breach was from the unsecured north ridge. The place he’d been sure was too rugged for someone of Sokolov’s city boy constitution to make it up and down again. Then they disappeared in the gravel road at the bottom of the hill. He wasn’t sure which way they went. Too much traffic had passed. Defeated, he turned around and walked back to the ranch.

As the hours dragged before dawn he didn’t sleepw. Search teams continued to comb the surrounding mountains. The sheriff’s department set up roadblocks. Benjamin coordinated with private security contacts across Colorado, while Gabriel worked nonstop tracing phone records and traffic cameras.

Adam stood in the barn, staring at Venus, when Daniel approached quietly by his side and set a hand on his shoulder. “We’ll get her back.”

Swallowing hard, Adam rested a trembling hand on the stall door. “I know,” he said roughly. “Because if we don’t, there is no place on earth that Solokov can hide from me.”