Page 59 of Wicked Union

We sat silently for a moment, and I let it all sink into my brain. Drake blamed himself for everything that had happened to Alex. But was it his fault? He was only trying to protect her. If he made a few mistakes, it was because he was human.

“You were out hacked.” I put my hand on his shoulder and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “It’s not your fault Alex was kidnapped. You did everything you could to stop it.”

“Cole, you’re not listening.” Drake shifted his weight on the cushion and let out a deep breath. “Maverick got information from my server. Only The Knights know Alex is living with the Salvatore brothers. So how did her estranged mom, of all people, know where to find her? They haven’t spoken in six years.”

He had a point. While our enemies were intelligent, they weren’tthatsmart.

“Think about it, Cole. How did the Russians know Alex was living with them? And how did they know her exact location? The Salvatore Estate has over twenty bedrooms and a team of guards who monitor by land, air, and sea twenty-four-seven.”

I shot up from the couch. “Maybe I could use a drink after all.”

“Pour me one.” I narrowed my eyes at him, and he said, “Please. I promise I’ll stop tomorrow.”

I could tell the guilt over this had been killing him. Maybe now that he confessed to me, Drake could return to normal. Well,normalwas a relative term with my cousin. He lived an unusual life, often without sleep or food for days. He needed a girlfriend, a therapist, or someone to keep his ass in check.

“Why are you shutting everyone out?” I added scotch to two glasses and strode to the couch, passing one to him. “You could talk to Tate or Olivia. They live in your house. Hell, you could have called me.”

“This stuff upsets Liv. And Tate… Well, you know Tate.”

I sipped from the glass, feeling the burn slide down my throat. “You can’t keep secrets without them eating you alive.”

“I told you,” he said, relief washing over his face. “I already feel lighter.”

“Maybe you’ll get some sleep.”

He bobbed his head. “But there’s one more thing, Cole. It involves Grace.”

My heart skipped a few beats at the mention of her. “What?”

He pounded the scotch in one gulp and set the glass on the table, nearly falling into it. “Maverick got more than Alex’s location.”

Don’t say it.

Please, don’t say it.

“He knows Katarina Adams Romanov is Grace Hale.”

I gasped, a shiver of fear rushing through me. “No.”

“Yes.” His expression darkened. “That’s why Viktor is getting closer to finding his daughter. Maverick must work for The Lucaya Group. Or, at the very least, he made a trade for the information. People like Maverick do this for profit.”

Viktor Romanov put out feelers on Grace on the Dark Web. He had been looking for her for so long that anyone who came across the request could have contacted him.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about why Fitzy has kept Grace around for so long,” Drake said, his deep voice wavering. “He hates her. Treats her like shit. There’s no love lost between them. I think Viktor has something on Fitzy.”

I drank a few more sips and added the half-full snifter to the collection of empty glasses on the coffee table. “What does he have on Fitzy?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know, but it’s something big. Viktor was KGB, a trained intelligence officer. He came to the United States to get information on The Founders. Maybe he got more than he bargained for, and that’s why Fitzy locked him up on Skull Island.”

All Knights train on Skull Island before becoming members of the organization. I did horrible things there that still haunt my nightmares. We kept prisoners on the island who were too dangerous to allow a fair trial through the judicial system.

Plus, we couldn’t kill them until we got what we wanted. Men like Viktor were not that easy to break. He was on the island for several years, made friends with a guard, and escaped.

The island was in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. But he must have had help from others because we never found him—only the handcuffs he’d left behind. Like a ghost, he vanished. We thought he had returned to Russia until he appeared on our radar looking for Grace.

“We’re missing something, Cole. Bastian should be the heir to the Adams fortune, not Grace. It has something to do with Viktor. Maybe even her mom.”

I patted his thigh. “We’ll keep digging. Eventually, we’ll find something useful.”

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