Page 55 of The Bratva's Innocent Pregnant Bride
“As dirty as they come,” Anatoli said. “I’ve linked him to the Collective. It’s tenuous, but it looks like he’s been helping sweep their crimes under the rug.”
Once again it felt like my heart was getting ripped out of my chest. For a split second I thought she was on the side of the law, working undercover on some kind of sting operation. Disappointing, but as many cops as the Collective had on their payroll, my cousins had twice that number. It was rare any of us would ever spend much time behind bars. But if she was working for the Collective, it was very likely that she had been involved with planting the bomb.
I was silent for too long, as all of these thoughts swirled in my head like muddy water breaking over a storm barrier after too many days of hard rain. None of it made any sense, because I still didn’t want it to.
“What happened after they left the airport?” I asked. “Do you have a direction?”
My head felt like a jackhammer was going at full speed against it. LA was huge, and they were hours ahead of me. The direction they took to leave the airport would hardly help at all.
Now it was Anatoli’s turn to pause, finally sighing. “Not just that.”
“If you have a location, send it to me,” I said, pacing back and forth in the parking lot, clicking the keyfob to unlock my rental.
“Better just to leave her,” Anatoli told me after another pause. “Aleks’s guys will pick her up eventually, and we might be able to sweep up some of her buddies at the same time if we hold off.”
“What if she’s innocent in all this?” I asked.
He made a strangled sound, like he was coughing back a humorless laugh. “Does that sound logical to you?”
“Listen man,” I said, trying to hide my desperation. “I was one of the loudest voices telling Masha to not trust you and to ditch your ass. What if she had listened?”
“You’re sure about this?”
No, I wasn’t. But no matter how hard I fought my gut feeling, it wouldn’t shut up and settle down. “Send me the damn location,” I said.
He ended the call without another word, but a moment later, he sent me a link to a map with the route highlighted. I got behind the wheel of the rental and squealed out of the parking lot. I didn’t know what I was going to find when I got there, or what I was going to do. But no one was going to hurt my woman, even if she wasn’t who I wanted to believe her to be.
Chapter 36 - Paisley
My wrist burned and my fingers were rapidly going numb as the handcuff bit into my flesh. With the folding chair tucked under my arm, I tiptoed to the door, pressing my ear against the grimy wood. There wasn’t a sound, and I slowly opened it. I was already going against Pierce’s orders, having stepped out of his lines drawn into the dust on the floor.
If I didn’t go ahead with this plan, he’d know instantly that I hadn’t sat and complied and he’d make me pay. At that point I knew I was going to die like the others on the list, so attempting an escape was the only shot I had at survival. I didn’t want to end up as a missing person, my body hidden for weeks or maybe longer before some unlucky jogger or hiker came across it, decayed and picked at by scavengers.
Outside of the room, the vast, mostly empty warehouse loomed ahead of me. It couldn’t have been more than fifty yards to the front door, but it looked like the expanse of a huge desert. Getting to the door could be my salvation, or I could find a guard waiting to bash me over the head.
Fear made me want to get back in the room and lean up against the door as if I could keep Agent Pierce out when he wanted to return to interrogate me more. It made me believe that the moment I took another step, alarms would sound, armed men would come running from the shadows, and all would be lost.
It had to be all those fantastical bedtime stories I’d been reading to the Fokin children that made my imagination kick into overdrive. If there were armed men in hiding, they would have tackled me by now. I closed my eyes briefly, wishing I was in the cozy confines of the library at the lodge, with the firecrackling, stockings hanging from the mantel, and those sweet little faces turned up to me with rapt attention as I read their favorite stories to them.
It was time to move. I had been dawdling fearfully for at least ten minutes, plenty of time for Pierce to leave the warehouse compound, and coming up on being too long. If he was just running out for coffee and giving me time to think, like he said, he could be on his way back by now.
What the hell was I supposed to think about? It still infuriated me that he kept accusing me of lying. It was probably that anger that got me to forge ahead toward the front door. I kept my eyes peeled on the dim outline as I rearranged the chair I was cuffed to, wondering if I could swing it as a weapon if necessary.
I had plenty of thoughts, but they weren’t the kind Agent Pierce wanted me to have. He wasn’t getting another word out of me because there was nothing else to tell. Instead, I was awash with regret. So much regret, going all the way back to before I got hired at Axon. The kicker was there wasn’t anything I could have done differently. How could I know that Pierce was on the payroll of my corrupt former employer? Even now there was no amount of money in the world that could get me to go to the police. If Axon could buy off the FBI, they could certainly be in bed with the LAPD.
Strangely enough, my biggest regret was not being nicer to Dan. He truly was nothing like the sexist losers who belittled me at work. He was just a rowdy guy who liked to have fun. I had grown to enjoy his teasing once I realized he wasn’t singling me out. He joked around with everyone, always just on the edge of being slightly inappropriate. I had lost my sense of humor after having to be so guarded all the time, but he had brought it back to me, little by little.
My cozy memory of being with the kids changed to a wistful imagining of being cuddled up near the fireplace with Dan. His arm around me, my head resting against his shoulder, music in the background as we both turned the pages of our own books. He’d turn to kiss my forehead. I’d look up with a smile. Then our lips would touch.
What the hell? I was losing it. There wasn’t going to be anything like that if I didn’t keep heading toward the door.
It might never happen for any number of reasons, most of all the fact I suddenly recalled Pierce had insinuated that Dan’s family was in danger. Not just insinuated but outright told me they wouldn’t be around much longer. That kind and loving family was being targeted all because I saw a little scrap of paper I wasn’t supposed to,
I moved faster, reaching for the door handle at last. There had been no tripwires, no alarms. This was nothing more than an abandoned warehouse used for convenience, not the lair of some criminal mastermind.
Remembering that the door creaked, I pulled it open slowly, inch by inch. Pale moonlight illuminated the concrete floor and as soon as the door was open enough to fit me and the chair through, I slipped out. The air was much warmer outside and a soft breeze ruffled my hair. The area in front of the warehouse was completely empty, and I looked around, trying to remember which direction we drove in. I was surrounded by other buildings, each one about as derelict as the one I just escaped. But maybe one of them was still in use and had a phone.
I hurried down the stairs and hunkered down against the wall, cursing myself for not paying attention and being hopelessly lost. I had been trying not to be sick, and nauseawelled up again as hopelessness flooded in. If I took the wrong direction, I could end up further from the road or worse, end up circling back.
