Page 126 of Filthy Lies

I grab my phone and type a quick message.

Need help. No questions. Can you meet me in 2 hours?

Natalie’s response is immediate:Name the place.

I give her the address of a coffee shop in Queens. Far enough from our usual haunts to buy us time.

Vince’s voice drifts up from downstairs, still discussing tactics with Arkady. I have maybe fifteen minutes before he notices my absence.

I check on Sofiya, still sleeping soundly.Soon, my little angel. Soon we’ll be somewhere safe.

My hand rises to the tracking necklace at my throat. With shaking fingers, I unclasp it and lay it on the bedside table, where he’ll find it.

He’ll know exactly what it means.

I’m breaking the one promise I swore I’d never break: I’m taking his daughter away from him. Even if just temporarily, even if just to protect her, he’ll never forgive me.

But he’ll have only himself to blame.

“I trusted you,” I whisper to the empty room that still smells like him. “I gave you everything I had.”

Then I turn to leave.

46

VINCE

I don’t want to believe what I’m seeing.

But what the fuck else can it be?

The tracking necklace lies on our bedside table like a severed limb, a symbol of connection torn open, hemorrhaging trust all over the silk sheets where I fucked her just hours ago. And worse…

Rowan has taken my daughter.

Those five words are worse than any knife that’s ever found its way into my gut. They’re clean, fucking surgical, goddamn devastating, splitting my sanity into tidy before-and-after segments.

There was the man who believed he had everything under control.

And now, there’s this hollow-eyed executioner standing in his place, ready to watch the world burn.

Every cell in my body has crystallized into rage. Pure, undiluted,sacredrage.

A smarter man would wonder why she left. What she found. What she heard.

I am not that man.

Not when it comes to Rowan.

Not when it comes to Sofiya.

I tear through the compound. The security footage confirms what my gut already knows: Rowan disabled the cameras in the east wing. She’s no fool. All those months watching me, she learned our security protocols well enough to slip through cracks I didn’t even know existed.

“Find them,” I order into the phone, voice so deathly calm it makes the army of grown men on the other end audibly flinch. “Every camera in the city. Every traffic light. Every fucking convenience store. If you have to break into the goddamn NSA, do it. Just.Find. Them.”

“We’re trying, boss.” Dimitri sounds desperate. He’s smart enough to realize failure means death. “But she’s good. Really fucking good.”

Eighteen hours.She’s been gone eighteen hours now, and we have nothing.

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