Page 54 of Angelo's Vengeance

"I don't know. She's always ten steps ahead. She was here, but she's gone.” His face was pinched with pain. “I could help you. I could be useful.”

I believed him. Too bad Veronica and Kostas had already broken into his network and accessed the trafficking data. They had enough to shut it down. Most of it had run through a computerized transactional site on the dark web. Kostas would be sifting through names and locations that we might be able to go after, but we didn’t need this joker. I shot him once more, right between the eyes—the silence after was deafening.

Conall exhaled. "One down."

"Not the one I want.” It made me grumpy.

“Man.” Conall kicked the body. “You’re so testy. You should be on Cloud Nine looking to have a smoke and a fuck after this, and you’re whining.” He shot me a wink. “Cheer up.”

We swept the rest of the property and found rooms full of maps, blueprints, and burner phones. A wall displayed photos of me, Maxim, Ilias, and Conall. On another board were high-value targets: Cora, Cora holding little Vasily, Francesca, Theodosia, Polina, andanother woman turned away from the camera, her hoodie pulled up to cover most of her face. It was chilling to see the detailed photos of the women in our lives, and the focal point that had been put on them.

I didn’t need to look at the others to know they were just as pissed as I was. As expected, it only took a moment before Maxim erupted, pointing at one of the pictures of his wife and son. “What the fuck is this?”

“Canvassing their targets most likely,” I said sourly. “Looking for weak spots.” I rubbed a finger over my lips, thinking, before tapping the woman with the hoodie and turning to the others. “Who’s this?”

“Galena. Even they couldn’t spot her. Good girl.” Ilias began to remove the photos from the board methodically. “Go see what else you fuckers can find.”

Maxim gave Ilias a dirty look, but followed me out of the room. “So, your half-sister seems a little wily.”

“Yeah, I checked on her years ago. Things seemed good. She was living with her mother and a new stepdad, an all-around good guy. There was no reason to get in contact with her at that point. She knew nothing of the bratvalife, and her mother seemed to be keeping it that way. She has been going to school and work. Fuck, she even walks to school. I didn’t want to disrupt it. Once we decided to go forward with the blood oath,” he hesitated, but I knew immediately what he meant. “I knew it’d have to change, but I thought she could be normal for a while.”

He’d hoped somewhere deep down that maybe Galena would get to skip out on being tied back into the criminal world we inhabited. Maybe she’d be able to breathe free, but that wasn’t meant to be. Her fate had been written twenty years ago.

“Look at this.” I poked at the walk-in closet. High-end women’s clothing. Italian designers. Expensive. Classic. My mother’s taste. A half-drunk glass of red wine on the nightstand. A cigarette still smoldering in a crystal ashtray.

She’d been here. Probably less than an hour ago.

Maxim stood beside me, arms crossed. “What now?"

I stared at the clothes. At the wine. “We’ll keep looking. We’ve taken one of her toys. We just need to keep kicking the cans.”

“Agreed.” He stared glumly at the ashtray. “She had pictures of Cora, and it looks like Galena is on the run, which means she knows something is up.” He ran a hand over the back of his neck. “I was stupid to think she could have just a few more years of normal life. I’d thought maybe she’d …”

“She’d what?” I snapped. “She’d get married? Then what? She was already promised. You knew that.”

“I know. She was just happy. She was a happy kid with regular parents living in a little house that seemed normal. Nothing like ours. It was nice. Quiet. Why shouldn’t she have that? I thought maybe Ilias would dig his heels in, maybe refuse.”

It wasn’t a ridiculous fantasy, but it was still a pipedream that made me irrationally angry. “Let’s go tell the others what we found. We need to regroup and call in the cleaners.” I ground my teeth together and forced myself not to say anything to him about Galena. It wasn’t my place anyway.

CHAPTER 32

THEODOSIA

I saton the sofa in the studio Angelo had set up for me, limbs stiff from falling asleep in a position not sanctioned by any chiropractor. Naps still seemed to be part of my repertoire these days, but I told myself they were a form of healing. That was my story, and I was sticking to it.

My sketchpad had slid to the floor beside a sprawl of pencils, fabric swatches, and the remnants of a bag of lemon drops that I'd been rationing like wartime supplies. Despite the chaos, something electric hummed in my veins. Design ideas had come flooding back last night like an old friend I'd ghosted and missed terribly.

"Alright, alright, let’s get to it," I muttered, tying my curls into a haphazard bun and stretching until my shoulder protested. It still twinged, a dull reminder of the bullet that had torn through it, but it had healed significantly. The wound was puckered and no longer raw. I was stronger now—healing, restless, and ready to claw my way back into the design world.

Mythos Designs, the New York version … I hummed and called Vivienne on video, hoping she wasn’t in the middle of something. Her face popped up immediately, all sleek black bangs and bright green glasses. “Theo! You’re alive! Oh, thank God. I was about to start designing mourning veils.”

I laughed. "Iwasdead for a minute there, I think." I hadn’t shared the details with her, but she had the basics and knew that I had been kidnapped.

She rolled her eyes dramatically. “Well, I assume you called because your fingers have started twitching to sketch again?”

“Girl, I am ready to take over the world. Just need a decent assistant on this side of the ocean. I can't keep texting you at three a.m.your time. You’ll start resenting me, and I can’t have that.”

Vivienne winked. “Already do, love. But it’s a sexy resentment.”