Page 61 of Fixation

“How many dates did you go with her on?” Mihir asked him.

“I don’t know, three maybe.”

Mihir raked a hand through his hair. “Since you never date the same woman more than once, I suppose Ivan assumed she was important to you and instructed him to kill her. To send you a message… To sendusa message...”

A stone fell into Vedant’s stomach. “Fuck, are you trying to say that she was killed because ofme?”

“Vedant, this isn’t on you,” Mihir tried to reassure him.

“Of course, it’s on me,” Vedant shot back. He pushed his glasses up his nose. “She’d been calling me frantically for days. I assumed it must have been something to do with work. Finally, when I did return her call, she didn’t answer. And I left it at that. I didn’t even fucking remember to check on her again.”

“You cannot take the blame for this,” Mihir said. “Just like Armaan cannot take the blame for Navya being kidnapped by Vasily.”

Vedant jolted back. Ice spread in his veins.

Noting Vedant’s stricken expression, Armaan shook his head. “Navya’s safe. She’s sleeping upstairs in my room. I’ve moved her here, at home, with me. But those moments when Vasily had her... Fuck, I wouldn’t have survived if something had happened to her.”

“Wait,” Vedant said. “Start from the beginning. When did this happen? And Vasily was involved in kidnapping Navya? Why? It doesn’t make sense.”

“It happened yesterday,” Mihir explained. “We were going to call you last night, but we both were too damn exhausted by the end of the whole ordeal.”

“Does that mean Vasily was working for Ivan?” Vedant started to join the dots.

“He wasloyalto Ivan,” Mihir explained. “And we missed it. We fucking didn’t realise that Vasily had placed bugs in our house and our cars. Ivan had planted him in our team long back. He activated him only once he became our Head of Security last year.”

“Fuck,” Vedant cursed.

“He was listening in on our conversations,” Mihir continued. “The only reason he decided to attack Navya was because Armaan and I had started doing things differently. We started swapping cars with the bodyguard’s vehicles, stopped discussing things at home, and he figured that we were getting suspicious.”

“That also means he knows about Karina,” Vedant surmised.

“Yes,” Mihir replied.

Fear twisted in his heart further. “Armaan, tell me about Navya. Is she hurt?”

“She’s shaken up, but fine,” Armaan said. “She was so damn clever, you know. The second Vasily kidnapped her and took her phone, she made a call to me via her Apple watch.”

“And we had already put security behind her, which no one in our team knew of,” Mihir added. “Also, her brother, Rajiv, did a Goddamned brilliant thing. He had her location sharing on, on his phone. At the end of this call, we all are implementing this immediately.”

That was indeed brilliant. It was the best way to keep track of each other’s whereabouts always.

Armaan continued, “While Vasily forced Navya to drive them to a deserted location on the Dubai-Abu Dhabi highway, she made him reveal everything he had done. His people had been watching and waiting to attack us. We caught him right on time and rescued Navya. He was the one who had planned those attacks on both you and me on Ivan’s orders.”

“Bloody hell,” Vedant felt his temper rise, “Fucking bastards. What happened with Vasily? You guys detained him? Did he say anything? What are we doing with him?”

“He told us Ivan is in Poland,” Mihir said. “We are setting up a search for him there. The guy who shot you and planned your attack is Paul Samson. Vasily said he was in Poland with Ivan. We took Vasily’s phone, and it had the messages exchanged between Vasily and Ivan, confirming the same about Paul. But Vasily also told us that this Karl Leipzig, the man who attacked Armaan, is in Poland, but that turned out to be false. Anyway, our men are searching for Ivan in Poland now.”

Armaan continued, “We decided to hand Vasily over to the mob. They have a few contacts here who were more than happy to take him off our hands once they learned he turned against us.”

“Good riddance,” Vedant said. “He deserves the pain they will put him through before they kill him. I can’t believe we trusted that fucker.”

The mob took loyalty very seriously. Alexander Oshnov had saved Vasily from the mob, and they’d let him go because of their respect for Alexander. By plotting against Alexander’s sons, he had betrayed Alexander, and betrayal never went unpunished in the mob. It was a valuable lesson they all had learned from their father.

“One more thing,” Armaan said, “Two days back, our guys in India reported that Dorab was found dead in his apartment. Histhroat was slit, and he’d been tortured as well. Vasily confirmed that it was his men who had gotten this done.”

Oh fuck. Dorab was their link to find Karina. Why would Ivan get him killed unless…

Vedant spoke up, “He killed him because Dorab didn’t know where Karina was, but his boss JD may know, and the only way to get JD to return to India was to eliminate Dorab, correct?”

---