arm, but his grip is too tight. His fingernails bite into my nape, and moving my head sends a sharp ache down my spine.
“Don’t worry, dorogoy,” he says, his voice all hard steel. “You’ll be reunited with your husband soon … on the other side of life.”
I’m catapulted forward with the flex of his hand, and my head slams against the dashboard hard enough to make me see stars. Viktor releases me and I slump, swiftly losing my grip on consciousness. My face is throbbing and my visions swims in a frightening haze.
My final thought before losing my hold on wakefulness is that Diego is likely dead. There’s no need to fight the blackness blotting out my vision and pushing me under.
30
Diego
Four hours. That’s how long it took Elena to make her escape while my back was turned. After combing the city for any sign of Viktor and turning up nothing, I returned home hoping to regroup and come up with a new plan. Viktor’s on the run and finding him before he can do more damage is my number one priority—after assuring Elena that I’m all right.
Only, I’m greeted at the door by Nicolas, who can’t look me in the eye while relating the story of how Elena came into the control room and ordered him to have security back off. Not long after, she walked right through the front door, leaving her cell phone behind—likely so she couldn’t be tracked. I’m on the verge of ripping Nicolas’s eyes out of his skull, when Jovan yanks me off him and reminds me that my men were ordered to cater to Elena’s every demand. After the wedding she stopped being a prisoner and became my queen. The entire thing is my fault, and everyone knows it. I was too free with my affection, too loose with security, and too stupid to see that she was playing me all along.
I leave Nicolas with nothing worse than a busted lip and a black eye—his reward for letting Elena talk him out of calling me to verify that her orders were legit. Then, I storm into the control room and have Jaime pull up the security footage from every camera leading the way from my bedroom to the front door. Gripping the back of the chair as I stare at the squares lined up on the screen, I watch as she walks the hallways with the phone to her ear. She stops on the stairs for a few seconds to chat with Marcella, still giving the impression that everything is as it should be—and she’s not about to tear my heart out of my chest and feed it to me. The cameras follow her to the control room, then to the foyer—where she takes a moment to check her appearance in the mirror, set her phone on the decorative table, and walk out.
The front cameras capture the car and the driver from enough angles that leave no question or doubt. She left with Viktor … purposely, willingly.
My fist crashes into the nearest monitor and I tear from the room, feeling as if I could pull the entire house down brick-by-brick. Jaime and Jovan follow but I ignore them, making my way straight to the bedroom. While they stand in the doorway, watching me with pity all over their faces, I strip off my leather jacket, rolling my injured shoulder and cracking my stiff neck.
“Boss,” Jovan ventures. “What do you want us to do?”
The obvious answer is to keep trying to find Viktor. His cell phone isn’t trackable, and none of his contacts seem to know where he is—either that, or they’re covering for him. Even knowing that Viktor’s life is forfeit, the bratva will be loyal to him out of love for Oleg. He won’t be shunned until the manner of his punishment has been made public … if he even survives it.
There’s another question beneath the one Jovan poses out loud, and it’s whether I want Elena back. Part of me hasn’t changed—raging that she belongs to me and always will. It wants to finish Viktor off and drag Elena back here by her hair, throw her on the bed, and remind her that she will never be without me.
But the part of me that fell in love with her rebels against the idea. If knowing I love the shit out of her isn’t enough to convince Elena to stay, then no amount of force or security is going to keep her