Page 57 of The Bratva's Knocked-Up Bride

Damien, our baby, Gemma, and the others…

I had too many people I cared about, and who cared about me in return, and despite how much I wanted to stand my ground and fight Raf off, everything started to slip.

Piece by piece, that darkness bordered my vision, and I could feel myself shaking from a lack of air. That restriction made my head feel like it was prepared to explode.

The pressure and pain mounted and mounted until it suddenly eased at once. It all just…stopped.

Everything ebbed away into a state of clear, calm nothingness.

Chapter 25 - Damien

Tight with anger, I clenched my jaw and continued to drive after leaving the perfectly secure Levov warehouse behind, frustrated and still at a loss about what happened.

It was obvious that someone sent me a fake text from Ari, and in my urgency, I didn’t bother to check the contact.

Someone spoofed the message, claiming there was an emergency, but I couldn’t understand why. Why would anyone take the time to get my number and send me to a false location when nothing was going on? I didn’t know how this person got my number, for that matter.

It was confusing and frustrating, but I knew it had to be on purpose. It was too perfect to not be intentional.

But why?

Why did someone want to pull me away and mislead me?

There had to be a motive I was missing, but beyond that, I needed to make sure everything was fine with the Levovs.

If someone sent that text with the hopes of separating me from the family, then there was a chance they could be in trouble. There could be a bigger plan at that, and I was stupid enough to fall for the cop-out.

I was supposed to have the rat caught and stopped before anything else happened. Before anyone else’s life could be threatened by them and their goons.

Frustrated and determined to make things right, I was about to call Ari’s real number when Lukyan’s name popped up on the dash display. Brows furrowed, I accepted it.

“What the hell is going on around here?”

“Does that mean you already know?” Luk asked, sounding slightly hesitant to even ask the question.

“What, the spoofed text? Yeah, after I already got all the way there—”

“No…about Sky,” he interrupted, apparently aware of something I wasn’t.

Immediately, my brows pinched together as my expression hardened. “What are you talking about? What happened to her?”

There was a beat of silence from him, and I lost my patience at once.

“What happened to Sky?!”

Luk was quick to respond after letting go of a breath. “I was watching over the live feed of the office when I was notified of movement in the parking garage…and I ended up seeing Sky there. She was knocked out and taken.”

“…taken? You’re sure?”

“Yes. I watched it all happen.”

My heart stopped, and my grip on the steering wheel loosened long enough for me to swerve slightly into the other lane before correcting myself. All the while, those words echoed in my head, and I knew I couldn’t keep going.

Flipping my signal on, I pulled over and put the car in neutral.

The longer I processed what Luk told me and what that all meant, a wave of both alarm and anger crashed into me at once, and I grit my teeth as I uttered, “Who was it?”

“I did some cross-referencing as soon as I could, and the visual match came up as Raf Ajello…one of the newer hires, and I believe someone you had suspected,” Luk explained, tone sounding both urgent and remorseful.

---