Page 20 of Ivory Oath

“Please,” the night manager whimpers from where he’s cowering behind his desk. “I just hand out the keys. I don’t know anything about who the guests are. I don’t monitor who they invite or who comes and goes. I don’t have any clue what is going on with?—”

I cock the gun already pointed at his face. “Shut up. I can’t hear what they’re saying.”

The figures moving around on the screen in front of me are fuzzy around the edges. The security system has to be a decade old, at least. There’s no audio, but I lean forward anyway. I want to crawl through the screen and be in that moment.

Like I should have been the first time.

“There is no sound,” the manager points out. But the words cut off in another desperate whine when I jab the gun in his direction.

The footage is an eerie mirror image of the video my father showed me. Instead of Viviana standing on Trofim’s doorstep, I’m watching my older brother knock on Viviana’s hotel room door.

It was easy enough to trace her movements from the mansion to the pharmacy. Then from the pharmacy to the cheapest motel in a five-mile radius. The night manager feigned “guest privacy” for all of three seconds before I pulled out my gun and he logged into the security footage like his life depended on it. Which it did.

“When was this taken?” I growl.

“The timestamp in the corner is wrong,” the manager says.

“No fucking kidding. It’s not December 31, 1999?” Raoul slaps him in the back of the head. “Tell us something we don’t already know.”

The manager is innocent of everything except being an idiot. The only way to get clear answers out of him is through threat of violence. So I kneel down in front of him, the muzzle tucked under his second chin.

“How long did the woman stay here?” I ask clearly. “And when did this man knock on her door?”

He closes his eyes and blows out a shuddering breath. “An hour, maybe?”

“An hour? She was only here for an hour?”

He shrugs. “I think. It could have been less.”

“So this footage—” I jab my finger at the screen on the desk. “—is from the first night she arrived? Four days ago?”

“I think it was four days. I’m not—She checked in a few nights ago. She was quiet and kept her head down. I didn’t pay much attention to her. I was more focused on the room next to her. Men were coming and going from that room all night and the police have been on us about cracking down on prostitution.”

“The point,” I bark. “Get to the fucking point.”

“I was distracted and I didn’t see this guy show up,” he scrambles to explain. “When she walked out of this room with her key, it was the last time I saw her. The maid went in the next morning and her stuff was still there, but she was gone.”

I turn back to the screen, watching as Trofim carries Viviana’s limp body through the door and down the cracked sidewalk to his car.

“He knew where she was,” Raoul whispers, saying exactly what I’m thinking.

If Trofim was here within the hour, then someone must have told him where Viviana was staying.

Now, I need to know who.

As soon as the thought crosses my mind, my phone rings. I pick up and Anatoly is already mid-sentence. “—there now. Get there right fucking now!”

“Get where? What are you?—”

“Trofim was spotted thirty minutes ago at a bar the Giordanos own. Agostino was with him. He and Agostino were sitting at the same booth. They’re working together.” He’s talking fast, squeezing as much information as he can into every second. “You need to get there now. If you find them, I guarantee you’ll find Viv.”

Viviana’s father is here in the city and there’s no way it’s a coincidence.

Viviana’s father is working with my brother. He helped Trofim kidnap his own daughter.

Before I can stop myself, I send my fist through the poor night manager’s monitor. The screen cracks. The edges flicker with life, but the center is a large, black hole of jagged glass.

“Ah, man,” he mutters miserably.

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