Page 83 of Sacrifice (Corrupt Empire 2)

I’d kill for Avery.

I’d snuff out their lives one by one, relishing in the sick, twisted justice of it all.

My girl needed me. Fucking needed me and I wasn’t there for her. I needed her back. Desperately. This whole fucking thing was eating me alive. It’d only been a couple of hours and that was too fucking long. They say the first seventy-two hours after someone goes missing are the most crucial. I had no fucking time to waste.

I got out of the shower after cleaning up properly and got dressed before going into the office. John was sitting at the desk. His gaze flicked up to me.

“We’ve had a couple of hits, but then it just stops. I think we need to find CCTV footage of the area around the last hit,” he said.

He got up off my desk chair and let me sit down. I got to work immediately. Hacking into the national CCTV network, I found the last ANPR hit and the cameras around it. They were still in London. Thank fuck.

“There,” John said, pointing at a car on the screen.

I paused the footage, zooming in on the vehicle. The number plate was a little blurred but clear enough for me to know it was the right fucking Range Rover.

“Let’s see where these fucks go.”

We followed the footage as far as we could until we found the car turning into a carpark. More cars went in and out as we scanned through the footage, but the Range Rover didn’t leave. And we couldn’t see Avery or any of the fuckers who took her on the footage surrounding the carpark. Why the fuck would they have taken her in there? And where the fuck did she go after that?

“Do you want me to check it out?” John asked.

“No. Something is off about this.”

I couldn’t put my finger on it, but the whole fucking situation felt wrong to me. I checked around the carpark. It was close to Mayfair. That struck me as a little odd. Rich pricks owned property around there.

“Do any of Chuck’s clients live around here?”

I looked up at John. His brow furrowed for a moment.

“A few, but none who’d pull shit like this.”

“Names and addresses. We leave no stone unturned.”

John wrote them down for me. He was right. None of them stuck out to me. Mostly older clients from Nicholas Daniels’ generation. I had no fucking clue what to do with this bit of information. For fuck’s sake, this was turning into a fucking nightmare.

“This doesn’t make any sense. How much does she know?” John asked.

“Avery? She knew nothing until we met and even now, she doesn’t know the full story. No one knows she’s aware of it except me and her friend. Nothing about this adds up.”

I stared hard at the list of names.

Fuck. No fucking way.

“John… Is he here?”

I pointed down at the name of the man who was connected to the one person who I could never get close to.

“You think he’s back in the UK?”

“He can’t be. All my fucking backdoor alerts would’ve gone off if he went through border control here. It can’t fucking well be him, can it?”

“Why would it be? You said yourself, no one knows she knows. He has no reason to be here. He’s left you alone this long.”

What John said made logical sense. Except something fucking nagged at me. Telling me I shouldn’t rule him out completely. What if it was him? What if he’d discovered my relationship with Avery and had taken her because of it?

Fuck.

The question remained. How the fuck would he have got into the country without crossing through passport control? He wasn’t a fucking British citizen.

---