Page 46 of Deception

“Good.” Finally, he answers tersely, lighting the cigarette pursed in the corner of his mouth.

Looking over at Anton, I gesture for him to hand me his phone.

“Are you sure about that?” Anton asks while I put it down on the desk in front of him. I take a long drag of my cigarette while the video call connects, and his wife’s cries fill the silence.

Standing, I meander to the window of his office. It overlooks the cordoned-off market strip with the view of the ocean beyond it.

“Do you remember what happened to your brother and his family? How you got this office?”

When I look back at him, Hasim nods in acknowledgement of what will come next if he doesn’t cooperate. He knows that I won’t hold back. It won’t just be his wife that gets hurt. With a string of loved ones, he has a lot to lose.

So do you.The echoes of the pang in my chest whisper back at me, stoking the flames of my anger.

“My father spared your niece, but I will not spare your daughter.”

With every second of silence that ticks by, it feels as though I’m going slowly insane. That alone is torture, however with all the shit that’s going on—the Sarapovs and their fucking games, the English assholes, and to top it all off, the conversation with Mama that keeps replaying in the back of my mind—it’s nearing impossible to contain the madness and bloodthirst screaming inside me, constantly leering at my clawing need to find Red. To bring her back.

“Once we’ve seen the footage, you can go back to your family, and they will be safe again.” Anton nudges the computer keyboard closer to our friend, ready for him to hand us the key to his town.

There’s an edge to the caution Hasim moves with that has me pulling back to see the bigger picture. As the police chief, he naturally possesses a surety about him. He’s not one to dither, yet he takes far too many probes and nudges from Anton to log into the town’s surveillance network.

“Other angle,” Anton bites out at him with a slap of his hand to the hardwood table that makes him jump.

When Hasim shows him all the other angles of the scene, Anton’s demeanour changes completely. Long gone is the stoic man—the former Soviet spy that remains unfazed in any storm. It’s all I need to know that whatever went down tonight wasn’t a coincidence.

“What are you hiding, Hasim?” I ask, my control rapidly unravelling as I circle the table, keeping a wide berth so I don’t follow through on the gut instinct to beat the intel right out of him.

The gun at my side heavies, making its presence felt as I come to a stop behind him and glance down at Anton’s phone. The wife’s cries are still shrill, his son’s curses barely cutting through them. It makes my mind wander to the night we took Red. She didn’t cry or curse. She showed no fear at all. Red is unlike any other woman I’ve ever come across.

The growing cries from the video call pull my focus back to it. It takes a beat for me to realise what’s bothering me about the picture in front of me.

“Your daughter.” I blow out a breath, glancing up at Anton to ensure we’re on the same page before I focus back on Hasim. “Where is she?”

It doesn’t take too long for his duplicity to well to the surface. Panic brims over the lines of his eyes as his breaths sputter from him wetly.

“Son of a bitch!” Anton bites out as I sit on the edge of the table and watch the footage from the cameras on loop.

The dark screen pops with two shots of light, fuzzing the view of the crossroads. Each of the four cameras should focus on a different angle. However, they all point to the empty traffic box in the middle with the lights completely out of sight.

“You get one shot, Hasim.” I warn, pulling my gun from the holster and looking it over in my hands.

“Sergi will kill my daughter.”

“You should’ve come to me,” Anton barks at him.

“Sergi—”

Sergi. Sergi, Sergi, Sergi.I laugh. “Sergi Sarapov is a fool.”And a dead man.

I push to my feet, grabbing Anton’s phone and throwing it at him with one hand while the other tightens around my weapon. For a moment, I stand, looking down at him.

“Your niece…”

“Elif,” he part mutters and part sobs the maid’s name.

Red liked her.It was obvious from the looks they exchanged that she trusted her. If she’s betrayed her…God help her.

“Did she help you?” Looking between me and Anton frantically, he doesn’t answer my question. “My father spared her after your brother betrayed us…and here we are again.”

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