Page 5 of Broken Embers

“Was that before or after she dumped your bleeding body at a hospital and ran?” Syd sneers, her tone filled with malice, which shocks me as I’ve never seen such spite in her before. But it’s fleeting, and the hurt and anger that flashed in her eyes during her outburst are gone as quickly as they came.

Clyde turns to her. His eyes are icy as he drawls, “Actually, I didn’t want Tara to take me to the hospital at all. I told her to run and go to a safe house. But she’s as stubborn as a fucking ox and took me anyway. Then I had to all but get security to escort her from the hospital to leave me. Tara, unlike some people, knows what loyalty is all about.”

Before they can get into a full-blown argument, I intervene. “So Sam hasn’t been able to locate Tara yet either?”

“No.” Clyde’s answer is curt and clipped. “When I asked, all he said was that he may have a lead.” He looks at me curiously. “Did Sam tell you that Carla went missing in Moscow?”

“No,” I reply. “Sabrina tried to call her mother, but a Russian woman, a housekeeper at a hotel in Moscow, answered and told Sabrina that she’d found the phone in a room.”

He looks at me in surprise. “Shit.” He spits. “I take it you investigated that?” Before I can answer, he fires off another question. “Which hotel?”

“Hotel Volkovya, in the Patriarch’s Ponds District, Central Moscow,” I tell him.

“Oh no!” Clyde’s face drops. “I’m assuming you went there?”

I nod.

“The suite number the housekeeper gave Sabrina, where she found Carla’s phone, was one that is permanently booked for some influential Russian family,” Lev adds, glancing at Ivan. “Ivan and Syd found out that the day Carla was supposedly in the suite, no one had been booked in there for the night or was reportedly in there.”

“Of course not,” Clyde says in exasperation. “There’s a reason they call that hotel the Wolf Den. Because of its discretion, each private client that has a suite there has a personal card key, and they pay per month or year, so they don’t have to book.”

“That makes sense,” Ivan says with a nod. “Although I’ve never heard of the hotel being called the Wolf Den.”

Ivan looks at me for clarification, and I shrug. “Me either. However, my family has never had much need for hotels in Russia. We have property all over the country.” My attention turns back to Clyde. “What do you know about the hotel, and why would Carla have been in a suite booked out to the Morozov family?”

“Oh fuck no!” Clyde hisses, running his hand impatiently through his hair. “It’s starting to make sense now.”

“What is?” All four of us ask him, as nothing is making sense to me yet.

“The first red flag you and Sabrina raised was poking around in Lidiya Zorin’s business, the second was looking into the Morozov family,” Clyde informs us. “While the Volkovya is discreet, trust me, the Russians still keep a close covert eye on it, especially on some of its more important families.”

My brows shoot up now as it registers. “Oh, fuck, do you think the Morozov that has that suite is General Timofey Morozov?”

“Woah!” Ivan gives a low whistle. “The man who basically changed warfare strategy and authored the Morozov Doctrine? The doctrine that is still taught in elite Russian military academies?”

A muscle ticks in Clyde’s jaw as he says, “I believe so.”

His confirmation makes my blood run cold. “So are you telling me that now the Russian Special Forces have Sabrina and Carla?” I swallow. “And possibly my aunt, Nikolas, and Mark as well?”

“No!” Clyde shakes his head. “I doubt General Ergorov has Carla or your aunt and their partners.”

“You seem very sure of that,” I note.

“If Carla’s last known whereabouts were in the Morozov Hotel suite, she’s not with the same people who took Sabrina,” Clyde clarifies, his voice as sharp as the edge of a blade. “And for the record, Sabrina was taken by the Russian Military Special Authority Division, known as the RMSAD. Led by General Ergorov.”

“RMSAD?” I’ve never heard of them.

“Yes,” Clyde’s jaw clamps as he takes a breath and continues. I can see the same worry he had in his eyes earlier when he mentioned having to get to Sabrina as quickly as we could. “Ergorov doesn’t answer to the regular command structure. He runs black operations under executive privilege. The kind most Russians pretend doesn’t exist.”

“What kind of black operations?” Ivan asks before any of us can.

“The kind that makes your skin crawl and you’d find in some horror movie,” Clyde states. “They carry out biological, psychological, and... other experimentation. A lot of covert shit goes on there. There are whispered rumors of many different types of human experiments, such as genetic enhancement programs.”

My blood turns to ice now as my worst fears start to jump in front of me. “Is that why they took Sabrina?” My voice rattles with emotion. “Because she’s a high-potential individual?”

“No fucking way!” Syd’s voice breaks through the sudden tension in the room like a bullet. “What crap is that? They can’t just pick American citizens off the streets of Russia for having a superior intellect and then experiment on them. I don’t care who the fuck they are, that would have serious implications for the Russians, kidnapping an American.” She fixes Clyde with a look that could kill. “How would they even know about Sabrina?”

Clyde doesn’t flinch, and the following words out of his mouth hit me like a punch to the heart. “They’ve known about Sabrina for a long, long time.”

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