Page 112 of Koroleva

I was bout to go to sleep when I heard Romeo shouting from the floor above.

I thought he was having a nightmare, so I got up ipso facto. The sound of drawers opening and closing as I went up the stairs gave me a bad feeling. He wasn't sleeping, unless he was sleepwalking, which I doubted.

I had been suspended in limbo for an hour, in that place that kept me in between, admiring each memory, pausing in front of them, with a bare gaze and a mind full of contradictions. All of this was neither staged nor faked. He and my brother were friends. Friends! And each image added more weight to Romeo's words that it wasn't him. I reached the door of his room and knocked before opening.

"I heard you scream, is something wrong?" He was half-dressed and looked disheveled.

"Aleksa and Andrey have disappeared." I raised my eyebrows at his excessive concern. Just because his man and mine weren't at home didn't mean anything. Well, something maybe. A smile curved my lips.

"Relax, they must have gone out for a walk and to bond," I suggested sarcastically. He looked at me, lost in an equation that I had long understood. My guy and his had gone in search of privacy. They wanted to have sex again; that was what this smoke bomb was about.

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"Well, they are grown up enough for you not to go out at ungodly hours looking for them. They know how to get home and don’t need daddy daycare to rescue them." I crossed my arms in the doorway while he slid the black shirt over his abdomen.

"You don't understand. They haven't gone partying! It's not about that!"

"Then what?" Now I was the one who didn't understand.

"Camilo and Mijaíl were patrolling around the housing development and they came across the car Aleksa was driving, crashed into a tree with no trace of your man or mine."

"Did they have an accident? Maybe someone picked them up and took them to the hospital."

That did worry me.

"Their phones are off, and there was a bullet casing on the road. It wasn't a casual accident, they were targeted."

"Chyórt![2]" I cursed. "I'm going to kill those bastards; it must have been the same ones who shot at me this morning."

"I'm afraid so, and we need to find them. The problem is we have no idea where to start. And if they went after your man and mine, I can only think of one name."

"I can find them." Romeo furrowed his brow.

"You?"

"Yes, Andrey has a tracker and I guarantee they haven’t found it." I had come up with the phone in my hand. I entered the unlock pattern and went straight to the app that would give me his real-time location.

"What are you talking about, Nikita? A telemetry bracelet like the ones prisoners wear?" he asked incredulously.

"Something a bit more sophisticated and discreet. All my men wear it. It’s for safety. It’s a microchip, under the skin, it not only tells us where he is but also measures his vital signs. I don’t know if I told you that I had an uncle who was really into cutting-edge technology... He used them for other things, of course."

"Have you chipped them like dogs?"

"It's not about being an animal or a person, it's about their safety. We had an incident in St. Petersburg that could have been avoided if we had had such technology. Believe it or not, I don't use it to see if they're going to have sex or take a piss. Only when it’s absolutely necessary. Come, take a look." Romeo stood behind me. "This app on the phone gives us their location with millimetric precision." I entered the alphanumeric code for Andrey and the place where he should be appeared. Romeo let out an expletive.

"Shit!"

"What?"

"I recognize that location. That land was supposed to be ours, but Cheng beat us to it. There's a hotel under construction there that belongs to him. I know where it is. It's forty-five minutes away via the AP-7."

"Twelve if we take the Ferrari and I drive," I stated without waiting for his response.

I went straight to my room; I also needed to change out of the party dress I was still wearing.

Romeo went to Ana María's room to wake her up and ask her to look after Adriano while we were out. I had enough time to arm myself and head down to the parking garage, eager to put those spring rolls in their place.

My husband had already made the necessary calls for our men to get moving and head to the hotel site. We didn’t know what we were facing, nor would we know, until we saw it with our own eyes. Both of us reached for the driver's seat.

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