Valerio was walking right into a trap, and I could do nothing to warn him.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Valerio
“Get up.” A deep voice penetrated my mind. “You idiot! Wake the fuck up!”
My eyes snapped open, and I lurched off the floor. My movements had been too fast, which caused me to experience a little vertigo. I tried to steady myself.
“What the hell happened here?”
I blinked and looked up to find Alex Kotov. He stood above me with raven black hair and eyes to match. He was dressed in a two-piece suit and his gun was pulled out, as if waiting for an intruder.
What the fuck had just happened?
It took my mind a second to gather my memory, and when everything was done downloading, I stood to my feet and looked around the living room.
Broken shards of glass and empty canisters of knockout gas littered the floor. I remembered the windows breaking and the white smoke that filled the room.
We had been ambushed.
“Fuck!” He had gotten the jump on us. “Where is Danill?”
“Right behind you.”
I turned and found Danill leaning against the archway with a towel to his eyes. They were bloodshot and there was a bruise on his cheek. But other than that, he looked to be okay.
Great. Now I was going to murder him with my bare hands.
I stormed over to him, ready to clobber him for being so reckless. But then Alex jumped in front of me, prohibiting me from getting to the man who had led Sergei right to us.
“You are a piece of shit, you know that?” I looked over Alex's shoulder at Danill. “You led him right to us!”
Danill looked down at his feet. Good, the guilt and the shame should weigh on him. She was gone because of him.
“I didn’t know.”
“Then you’re a fucking idiot!” The anger that poured into me was of lethal dosage. “She is gone!”
I tried to push past Alex, but he stopped me at every move.
“Enough!” Alex roared. “We don’t have time for this. You can’t blame him for what happened with Sergei. We are losing time right now. I came here ten minutes ago, but I have no idea how long you two have been out. We need to get moving if we want to find her before he takes her and stashes her away somewhere.”
The anger turned into a venom. “I’m going to kill him.”
Blood. I was hungry for blood, particularlyhisblood.
“No.” Alex pressed his hand on my chest and pushed me back. “The law is simple: he paid the bride’s price, and she belongs to him. You have no grounds to kill him, and neither does Danill. You can’t risk an all-out war. We have a plan, so we stick to it. Are we clear?”
I nodded my head, but I knew deep down that I didn’t give a shit. I had been loyal to the law until my father showed me just why I shouldn’t be.
“How do we even begin looking for her?”
“I have a tracker on her.” I reached for my phone in my back pocket. “As long as she has the bracelet I gave her, then we will be able to find her.”
“You tracked my sister?”
I sent a heated glare his way. I scrolled through my phone until I finally landed on the app I was looking for. “I was doing it for her safety, unlike whatyouhave been doing.”