Page 11 of Capuleto

"This morning, Andrey took them all out; they were going to the airport. Our sister wanted to continue studying in St. Petersburg. Are you sure you rule out the Chinese? What if they are playing you?" He furrowed his brow.

"I'll call my contacts in Marbella, find out who it was."

I sat down and opened the bottle.

"You have a son," I commented, filling the glasses.

"It was the result of a bad lay."

"Did you know?" He raised his eyebrows as if to say, "Are you joking?" Of course, he knew. "He's as much of a bastard as you." My brother laughed.

"I'm glad he got something good out of it." I stayed silent, and he continued observing my reactions. "I'm sorry that bitch messed up your face, the doctor said there won't be any scars." His hand caressed my cheek.

"That's the least of my concerns."

"Don't hold a grudge against me, Kalinka, not against me. We're in the same boat." «Really?» I felt like asking him because I no longer knew who was steering the ship.

"What's the plan?" I asked coldly. If I was to make decisions, I needed information, and he was the only one who could give it to me.

"That's my little sister, let me tell you, we're going to raise the Korolev banner high."

6

Someone has told

Idrowned my discomfort in the sixth glass of whiskey

Dante's bar was crowded with people, voices and laughter intertwining with my most self-destructive thoughts.

I hadn't heard from my wife in a week, and that was a very bad sign, especially after discovering the identity of the woman who slipped the drugged bottle of Moët into the villa.

Demi Vasileiou, twenty-five years old, a former prostitute, addicted to easy money. Currently a "freelance sex worker." Tired of prostituting since the age of fourteen in brothels, she had specialized in being a bait for human trafficking. She wasn't affiliated with any organized gang, selling her services to the highest bidder. She had complaints in several countries and a suspended arrest warrant hanging over her head.

She was a slippery woman whom we had lost track of. I was pulling all my contacts to find her, as only she knew the identity of the man accompanying her and knew who took my wife. Despite all my efforts to locate her, she seemed to have vanished into thin air, just like Nikita.

Thanks to the video kindly provided by the hotel director, we tracked her face with a program available to Segarra's police unit. Through his contacts, we located her face at the port of Fira, an hour after she left the hotel. She never reappeared, leading us to deduce that she was taken by boat and that Demi, along with her accomplice, might have fled on it as well.

The man with the towel cart remained a mystery.

He could have entered the building after stealing a laundry van. The driver was hit from behind, tied up, and locked in the back of it when he left the company for the hotel.

They had perfectly studied the schedules, and my departure from the villa gave them the ideal opportunity to take Nikita without any issues.

The man was impersonated by the one pushing the cart, who left the van abandoned at the port of Fira.

The port facility staff alerted the police as soon as they received notice that one of the laundry vehicles had been stolen. When the police arrived, they found the driver in the back with a nasty bump on his head.

The man couldn't provide any details about the features of the individual who hit him.

No one had said anything about my wife's kidnapping—not the Chinese, not rival mafias from the 'Ndrangheta, not even the damn Holy Spirit who must have been too busy screwing the Virgin Mary again.

We had the Chinese in our sights, it was the most likely scenario after we unmasked Cheng, although we couldn't rule out that it was a random issue unrelated to everyone and everything.

There was a remote possibility that Demi noticed her during our little vacation and, given my wife's spectacular beauty, wanted her to sell at some auction or to some mafia.

The idea of Nikita being drugged, raped, and abused tortured me.

The Albanian-Kosovars and the Chinese were experts in turning the most beautiful women into addicts of opium and heroin. They reduced them to babbling bodies that had no strength to refuse anything. They diminished their faculties so that the only thing they could do was spread their legs.

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