Page 84 of Mission Shift

Bracing myself against the back of the couch, I locked my arms straight and hung my head low, trying to swallow the rage, trying not to completely lose my goddamn mind.

“Where is she now?” My voice came out hoarse, raw.

Nik didn’t answer right away.

I snapped my head up and asked again, my chest heaving, “Where?”

Nik exhaled heavily, dragging a hand down his face.

“We knew that they moved her, and now it makes sense why we never picked her up on any cameras. Why her trail has been completely dark.”

I froze.

“Go on,” I said, my voice dangerously low.

Nik’s jaw tightened. “She was cuffed, shackled, and bagged, then thrown in an empty shipping container at the industrial train yard not too far from the prison.”

I stared at him, barely registering the words.

“My guy doesn’t know the destination.”

The fury in my chest erupted. Before I could think, before I could stop it, my fist slammed into the nearest wall.

The impact cracked through the silence, rattling the shelves, sending a shockwave up my arm.

I didn’t care.

I barely felt it.

My knuckles were already starting to swell as I pulled my fist from the wall. Back at his station, Nik had resumed working, wasting no time. His fingers flew across the keyboard, his body tense, his mind locked in.

I stepped back, shaking out my hand, breathing through the white-hot frustration boiling inside me. I didn’t bother to ask what he was doing—I had already seen enough to know that he was on top of it.

A minute later, he let out a low sound of approval. Then his fingers tapped out a rapid sequence before he pulled up a familiar image.

Daria’s passport photo.

My heart stuttered as I gazed at those sharp cheekbones, those intense blue eyes—eyes I had stared into in the darkness of an abandoned house, glistening with river water, and shadowed with desire. Eyes I had last seen burning with fury.

Nik growled. “I have her entire digital footprint now, right down to her fucking DNA.”

With another keystroke, he uploaded her image into a software program—one I had never seen before.

“What’s that?” I asked, stepping closer.

“A new facial recognition algorithm using the latest AI that I wrote last night,” he said without looking up. “My own design. It taps into security cameras across Russia, skimming through public and private feeds, cross-referencing pretty much every database in the country. If she steps in front of a camera anywhere, we’ll know.”

He slid the laptop across the table.

“Monitoring it is your job now.”

Without hesitation, I grabbed it, my body still running hot with rage. The screen flickered, data streaming in real time as it began scanning thousands of security feeds, searching for even the slightest match to Daria’s face.

Nik leaned back in his chair, rubbing a hand over his jaw. “It’ll take time. But the moment there’s a hit, the program will save a file to the hard drive, notify you, and then keep running. Pay attention and stay on it.”

I nodded once, then sat on the sofa with the computer on my lap. I had one job—to find her.

I clicked through feed after feed, my mind blurring as I scanned the grainy footage of train stations, border crossings, and military checkpoints.

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