Page 130 of Tarnished Tyrant (Zhukova Bratva 1)

My heart lurches into my throat. I sprint across the suite and throw open the door to Elise’s room to find Belle standing next to the empty bed. Her eyes are wide, all signs of anger replaced with pure terror.

“She’s gone.”

“Did you check everywhere?”

“Shower, closet, her bed, the balcony.” Belle bites back a sob. “She’s gone. She took her room key, her phone. And her shoes are gone…”

“I’ll call the front desk to see if anyone saw her. It will be fine.”

Belle stays in Elise’s room while I step out and call down to the front desk. Within five minutes, I have all of the security footage from the hallway in front of our suite and of the parking garage sitting in my email inbox.

When I pull up the footage on my laptop, Belle is standing over my shoulder. “This is going to take hours,” she moans. “We don’t have time.”

“There’s motion detection,” I tell her. “All I have to do is click through every instance of movement and—”

Onscreen, the door to the suite opens and Elise steps into the hallway. The timestamp shows it’s barely even six AM.

Belle inhales sharply. “She left hours ago. And what’s she holding?”

I grimace. “Fuck.”

“What? What is it?” Belle asks, leaning over my shoulder to get a better look. She smells like vanilla and roses.

“Those are my car keys.”

I switch over to the parking garage footage. I scroll to around the same time on that footage, and sure enough, we see her walk quickly across the parking garage, unlock my car, and hop inside. A minute later, she reverses jerkily out of the space and speeds out of the garage.

“Oh God, oh God. Oh my God!” Belle says, getting angrier each time. Then her face crumples and tears gather in her eyes. “Oh my God. She could be anywhere. She could be on the side of the road in a ditch. She could be—”

“Perfectly fine,” I finish for her. “She could be safe. She could be just a dumb kid who went out for a joyride.”

Belle looks at me, and I can tell she wants to believe me, but it’s hard.

I understand. Elise isn’t even my blood, and I feel… something. Belle loves her so much that it’s hard not to feel protective of her myself.

I close the laptop and reach for Belle’s hand. “Come on. Let’s go.”

“I’m scared…” she whispers.

But she’s already sliding her hand into mine.

29

BELLE

“Your car has a tracking device?” I ask, staring down at the phone in my hands and the tiny red dot flickering on the screen.

He nods in the driver’s seat of the car we’re “borrowing” from the hotel’s general manager, who just about fell over himself in his rush to fork over his keys to Nikolai. “It activates if I say the car has been stolen. Now, we just have to follow it.”

“Easy enough, since it isn’t moving.” As soon as the words are out of my mouth, my stomach drops. “Shit—the dot isn’t moving. What if she—”

He peeks over at me out of the corner of his eye. “Do you always assume the worst is going to happen?”

“It’s habit. I mean, look at my life this last week.”

“Explain.”

He says it with zero expectation that I might refuse him. Nikolai asks, Nikolai receives.

---