Page 18 of Bratva's Innocent Obsession
It’s a sappy endearment in Russian, but it feels true with her.
I run through scenarios in my mind. Different ways of rescue, methods of escape. I wish I had strawberries and cream sweetsto crunch for a sugar hit as I try to solve this impossible problem. The strawberries the guards provided just aren’t the same thing.
I’ve never needed another person’s opinion before, but this is such high stakes that I wish I could discuss it with my second-in-command, as well as Taylor. I’d get the whole London Mafia Syndicate to help if I could, pride be damned.
Nothing has ever mattered this much.
I mentally comb through all the details Taylor told me. The hotel rooms, the SUVs and the minibus, the trucks of equipment. The private plane. I think that’s the best chance, but it’s bad. Unpredictable.
Twice during the night I wake Taylor to ask more questions, covering her body with mine. We don’t have sex again, and it’s insane, but I feel as close to her in those sleepy, darkness-shrouded moments as I do to my own soul.
She whispers in my ear, and I clutch her hair. We have a give and take, a dance. And although I’m hard, I don’t allow myself to penetrate her. I doubt she’d invite it, but I can’t afford to lose focus. Getting her out safely is the only thing that matters.
A sweet girl half my age can’t be mine either way, not in London or Moscow.
I ask her to repeat it all again. Every name she can remember, all the vehicles they use. The timings and the luggage, and most importantly, the people.
The ballet is only in Moscow for one night, moving on immediately, so that’s in my favour.
What isn’t, is everything else. It’s been years since I was in Russia, I’m surrounded by people who could decide at any moment they want me dead, and I have no time to plan properly. I can’t return to London without Taylor, having found her, because I can’t leave her here any more than I could drop half my major organs.
If the only way she’ll come with me is with the other dancers, that’s what I’ll do, even if it kills me.
Which is a definite possibility.
I examine every step in the process Taylor described for transporting the ballerinas, and in the end, there’s only one logical place to snatch them away, and there are enough men who I know from years ago, and owe me their lives, or at least a favour. Or who I think I can find.
I hope.
Early in the morning, I wake Taylor again.
I tell her my plan as I pretend to thrust into her, my cock aching from the feel of her beneath me.
This time it really is a pretence. I’m more careful.
And I pray that I’m thinking with the correct head.
The first part of the plan goes well. I send Taylor back to her friends with a playful smack on her arse that gains me an authentically reproachful glare rather than the hope and fear that was obvious on her face as I opened the door. And I forced myself not to give Taylor a second glance.
Bile rises in my throat as I chat to Aleksandr, confirming the terms of our so-called deal. The one I never meant to confirm, since I assumed I’d be halfway back to London with my stolen goods by now.
Then I return to my private jet, and leave Moscow, heading west.
A chaotic mess of phone calls and commands follows. My men are in the wrong place and sleep deprived, having waited all night for me to turn up.
My second-in-command, Vadik, listens to my batshit crazy plan, makes two good suggestions that I accept, and gets to work. We leave my private jet in a nice spot in Eastern Europe, where we’re met by the rest of my team who have travelled up in the helicopter, which we use to travel back towards Moscow.
I check in with the team who stayed behind in Moscow to find one of Yevgeny’s pilots based on the name Taylor gave me, my memory of the man a decade ago, and a bit of luck. It worked. They have his wife and son, and his promise of compliance.
My man tasked with paying—or bribing, more accurately—to get permits so we aren’t shot out of the sky does a good job, because we land in a random field north of Moscow with no incident. The armoured SUVs are waiting for us, along with far more weapons than I planned on using for this. Russia’s black market, combined with the contacts I have from Volk, made it easy.
I have no inside intel. I’m trusting instinct and Taylor’s guesses here. But the problem with the Volk mafia is that they’re closed, secretive, and loyal. Problem. Strength. Same thing.
All we have is the element of surprise.
For this information, I pay London’s best hacker—in both senses of the word—an outrageous amount of money. Blackfen sends me intelligence straight from the airfield’s coms.
Then we wait.
