Page 127 of Filthy Lies

Not so much as a single security cam freeze frame or a stray credit card transaction. She’s become a ghost.

Someone had to help her. This level of disappearance requires resources.

“Pull up everything we have on Natalie,” I tell Arkady, who hasn’t left my side since we discovered them missing. “She’s involved. I can smell her fucking perfume all over this.”

“Already searching her financials and communications,” Arkady confirms, his fingers flying across his tablet. “Nothing suspicious yet, but?—”

“Dig deeper,” I snarl. “She didn’t vanish into thin air.”

But as hours stretch into the second day, it begins to feel exactly like that. Like Rowan took all her light with her, leaving me in a darkness so profound I’m drowning in it.

I stand in Sofiya’s empty nursery, surrounded by stuffed animals and tiny clothes that still carry her scent. I lift one of her blankets to my face. It smells like her baby shampoo, like innocence, like everything good I never deserved to touch.

My knees crack against the hardwood as I sink to the floor, clutching the blanket to my chest.

“Why?” I whisper to the emptiness. “Why would you take her from me?”

The room offers no answers. Just mockery in the form of abandoned toys and the mobile still spinning lazily above the empty crib.

The knock on the doorframe barely registers.

“Vin…” Arkady’s voice is uncharacteristically gentle. “We need to talk.”

“Unless you’ve found them, I don’t want to hear it.”

“Come on, man. You haven’t slept. You haven’t eaten. This isn’t helping anyone, least of all Rowan and Sofiya.”

My head snaps up, fury replacing the momentary weakness. “Say their names again. I fucking dare you.”

Arkady crosses his arms, refusing to be intimidated. After fifteen years as my right hand, he’s earned that right. “Rowan and Sofiya Akopov. Your wife. Your daughter.”

I’m on my feet in an instant, hands fisted in his shirt, slamming him against the wall hard enough to knock the air from his lungs. “You think this is funny? You think it’s a joke that someone took what’s mine?”

“No,” he says, not struggling against my grip. “I think it’s fucking impressive.”

This unexpected response loosens my hold, just slightly.

“Think about it, Vin,” he continues. “Rowan didn’t do this on impulse. She planned. She executed. She protected herself and your daughter from what she perceived as a threat. Sound familiar?”

I release him, stepping back as if his words burned me.

“She learned from the best,” Arkady presses, straightening his shirt. “She became exactly what you wanted her to be—someone strong enough to survive in our world.”

“She took my daughter.”

“Sheprotectedyour daughter. There’s a difference.”

“Fromwhat?” I roar, the sound tearing from someplace within me that’s never spoken before. “From me? I would die for them!”

“Maybe that’s the problem.” Arkady’s voice has gone quiet, contemplative. “Maybe Rowan doesn’t want anyone dying—for them or because of them.”

The rage inside me starts to curdle, mixing with something colder, more painful. The possibility that I might be wrong. What if Arkady is right? What if Rowan’s decision to leave wasn’t an act of betrayal, but of love?

“She wanted another baby,” I whisper, staring down at my hands—hands that have killed, that have tortured, that have stroked her hair as she slept. “Just last night, she begged me to put another child inside her. And now, she’s gone. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Unless something changed between last night and this morning.” Arkady watches me carefully. “Did you say something? Did she find something?”

The question stirs a memory, foggy through exhaustion. I’d come out of yesterday’s morning meeting with Arkady, and I could swear that Rowan’s scent was lingering right outside the door. Could she have…?

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