The hotel by the freeway had only gotten more depressing since she’d last checked in. She couldn’t get a flight out until the morning, but the thought of staying in the house was too painful, so she ended up back here.
In all her lonely years, this was the loneliest she’d ever felt. She was in a hotel by herself, headed back to a place that was no longer home. But the only home she did have left was suddenly cold and empty. Vlad had taken its light and warmth and walked out the door with it, leaving behind nothing but ugly accusations.
You’re trying to justify in your mind why his job was always more important than you.
It wasn’t true. It wasn’t.
You’re chasing a ghost.
No.
Is that how you justify the fact that you hid in a hotel room for three days with almost nothing to eat? Why my mother had to buy you your first tampons? Why he never, ever remembered your birthday?
Elena didn’t realize she was crying until she felt the dampness on her pillow when she rolled onto her side.
What happens after you get that report?
A bone-deep fatigue settled into her limbs, because the answer to that question was a dark horizon. A cliff she couldn’t see over. Clue after clue after clue. None of them led anywhere definitive. How long was she going to do this? How long was she going to ignore the beauty of her present for the ugliness of her past?
Vlad was right. She was chasing a ghost. She was the ghost. The little girl she once was before she realized how different her life was from others. Before she figured out that no matter what she did, her father was never going to come home on time. Never going to help with her homework, make sure she had a good lunch or clean clothes. He was never going to take her ice skating or to the movies. He was never going to remember her birthday. She’d spent years trying to figure out why she mattered so little to the one person who was supposed to love her above all else.
Tears soaked her pillow now as sobs racked her body. What was she doing? Why was she leaving the man who did love her above all else? Who always had, even when she’d rejected him, even when it was clear that she didn’t deserve him.
She didn’t want this. She didn’t want to spend her life blindly chasing something in her past until she was unable to see what was right in front of her.
Elena shot out of bed, wiping madly at her face. What was she doing here? There was only one place she wanted to be, one place she belonged. Home. And home was with Vlad. She shoved her feet into her shoes, grabbed her backpack and her suitcase. She hadn’t unpacked anything yet. All she had to do was go home.
The woman at the counter who checked her in watched with confused curiosity as Elena dropped her key cards into the return box. As soon as she walked through the automatic doors to the outside and into the humid night, Elena started to run. The wheels of her suitcase bounced along the seams in the sidewalk. Her car was around the corner of the hotel entrance and beneath a skyscraper-high streetlamp.
She unlocked the car with her key fob, opened the back, and threw in her suitcase and backpack.
And that’s when the world went black.
Elena woke up disoriented. Groggy. A throbbing pain the only proof that she was alive.
She pried her eyes open against the pain, but all she saw was more darkness. Her body rocked back and forth in time with a rhythmic sound.
She was in a car.
Wait. Vlad’s car.
How did she get here? What was going on?
The pain. Someone had hit her. Someone had snuck up behind her in the parking lot and hit her. She tried again to raise her hands to the spot on her scalp that hurt, but she couldn’t move. Her wrists were taped in front of her body with something. Duct tape maybe?
She couldn’t see who was driving. The outline of his eyes in the rearview mirror was all she could see from this angle in the back seat. Nothing about them were familiar. Elena strained to turn her head to see out the window where they were, but all she could see was the glare of lights as they passed by.
Think. She had to think. She could easily reach the door locks, but they were driving too fast for her to attempt an escape. Maybe she could distract him, force him off the road somehow. But she was as likely to die in that scenario as if she opened her door and rolled out.
Her eyes darted around the back seat. Why did Vlad keep such a clean car? There wasn’t even a stray pen lying on the ground that she could use to stab someone if necessary.
“I know you’re awake back there.” Elena gasped and froze. The accent was Russian, but he spoke in English. “How is your head?”
“Who are you?” Elena rasped.
“I am sorry about hitting you. You surprised me. I didn’t expect you to come out until the morning. Our plan was to take you on the way to the airport, so we had to improvise.”
Dread turned her stomach to rot. Calm, Elena. Stay calm. Keep him talking. Her father’s voice came out of nowhere in her imagination. “How long have I been out?”
“About five minutes. I was starting to worry.”
Her stomach revolted at his fake concern.
“I found your phone in your backpack,” he said, almost bored. “I tossed it in the parking lot before we left, so don’t bother looking for it.”
She swallowed her panic.
He laughed. “They were right about you. I did not think you would fall for it, but you are a lot like your father was. The promise of a big break was all it took to get him out of the house too.”
Agony tore a hole in her chest. It was all a ruse, and she’d fallen for it. Is that how they got her father too? “You knew my father?”
“That’s enough talking. You should save your strength. You’ll need it later.”
“Just tell me,” she begged, ashamed of the way her voice gave away her fear. “I just need to know. What did you do to him? Where is his body?”
“Gone. That’s all you need to know.”
“No. Please tell me. Why can’t you just tell me? You’re going to kill me anyway. Did you kill him the night he disappeared?”
“Yes.”
Grief, new and raw, ripped open all the old scars. A sob brought her bound hands to her mouth. All those days she waited for him in the hotel . . . he was already dead.
“He begged us to leave you alone,” the man said. “It was actually kind of touching. He told us you knew nothing, that he never told you anything. But then you couldn’t leave it alone, could you? You had to start digging just like him. I actually think he’d be proud of you in a weird way. He loved you. I don’t know if that’s any consolation, but he did.”
Grief became an unbearable pain. Tears burned her eyes, clogged her throat, hacked her breathing. She opened her mouth to scream, but nothing came out but agonized air, a silent sob that ended with a violent cough.
Her father had begged for her protection. Before he died, he’d been thinking of her.
“Would you like some water?” the man asked.
“I don’t want anything from you.”
“I can understand that. Try to relax. We are almost there.”
Be calm, Elena. Be calm. He father’s voice came to her again. She tried to slow her breathing and rein in her thoughts. She had to think. She had to get out of here. He said they were almost there. So, they were still in Nashville. They had to be. If she’d only been unconscious for a few minutes, then they couldn’t have gotten far. Maybe she could make a run for it as soon as he opened the door. It was her best option, but she would have to surprise him, maybe even overpower him, first. She had to be ready to pounce, but she had no idea which side he would open to get her out.
In the front seat, the man’s phone rang. He laughed and hit the speaker button. “I assume this is for you.”
A familiar voice filled the car and turned her blood to ice. “Hello, Elena. I hear you’re not cooperating.”
No. It couldn’t be true.
“You really are too much like your father. He didn’t know when to quit, and neither do you.”
Not him. Not Yevgeny. He couldn’t be part of this.
He chuckled. “I thought that by hiring you, I could keep an eye on you, but you were even further along than I ever dreamed you’d get. That’s the sad irony of this. You’re a hell of a good journalist, Elena. You could have had a wonderful career, but your fatal flaw was the same as his. You trusted the wrong people.”
She wanted to scream, claw, spit, and fight, but she couldn’t. Grief had stolen everything she had left . . .
“You were my father’s friend.”
“And that made it harder than you can ever know to have to stop him the way we did. But he got too close, just like you.”
“Too close to what?”
“To unmasking me.”
“You’re Strazh.” She was dizzy with the rush of rage.
“I am. Nice to meet you.”
“You won’t get away with this.”
“I already have, Elena. More times than you know.”
“You have daughters. How can you do the things you do and not see their faces every single time?”
“By not bothering myself with the details. I make money. That’s all it is.”
“Please,” she choked. “I don’t care what you do to me. Just, please, leave Vlad alone. He knew nothing about this. Okay? You have to believe me. I never told him anything. Please don’t hurt him. Please.”
Yevgeny laughed. Loud and openly, as if she’d just told the funniest joke in the world. “Do you want to know the last thing your father said?”
Snot and tears mixed together on her face.
“He said, Don’t hurt my little girl. She doesn’t know anything. You two are so alike.”
She didn’t try to fight or argue anymore. The pain this time was overwhelming.
“I promised him I would look after you. And I tried. I really tried. I’ve known all along where you were, Elena. Every step you’ve taken since that moment, I’ve known where you were. But you just couldn’t leave things alone. You couldn’t have just married that rich hockey player of yours and moved to America and lived a life as a bored hockey wife, could you? You just had to be as much of a pain in the ass as your father.”
“What did you do to him?” she whispered.
“Does it matter?” Yevgeny paused. “I’m sorry, Elena. I really am.”
He hung up.
Her father was dead. He had died trying to right the wrongs of the world, a noble cause, but he’d left her alone because of it. He’d left her alone with no details on what happened to him. What if she disappeared just like her father and Vlad never knew what happened to her? She had to get back to him. She wasn’t going to leave Vlad with the same unanswered questions, the same guilt and grief, that she’d lived with for so many years. She wasn’t going to let a fruitless quest steal what really mattered from her. Him. It had always been him. She’d just been too blind to see it.
She wasn’t going to do that to Vlad. The cycle ended here. She had to find a way to escape.
Elena turned onto her side on the small seat to look around the car again for a weapon, anything.
“What’re you doing back there?”
She adopted a pained voice. “Trying to get comfortable. My head hurts.”
“It won’t be much longer.”
A chill stole over her body at the double meaning in his words.
She shifted again.
And that’s when she felt it.
In her front pocket.
The burner phone. He hadn’t found the burner phone. Maybe he hadn’t even thought to check. He would have been in a hurry to get her body into the car before anyone saw them.
Heart racing, her eyes darted to the rearview mirror. He was still staring at the road ahead, but if he so much as glanced back, he would see what she was doing.
Elena rolled onto her other side to hide her front from his view.
Facing away from him, she angled her hands toward her pocket and worked her two pointer fingers inside. It took several slippery tries with her sweat-soaked skin to ease the phone out inch by inch. It fell onto the seat with a quiet thud, but it might as well have been as loud as a gunshot. She held her breath for his reaction, but . . . nothing. She picked up the phone between her bound hands and pondered another problem. How was she going to hide the light from the screen when she turned it on? Faking a moan, she curled into a tight ball to surround the phone as she hit the home screen button.
It lit up, and she shoved it facedown on the seat.
“I really am sorry about your head,” the man said. “I do not like to hit women.”
Right. He just kidnapped them and trafficked them.
Elena eased the phone onto its side, cupping it close to her body. Fumbling, she found the button to turn down the brightness. Then she flipped the tiny button on the side to silence it.
Acting as fast as she could, she hit the icon for messages and thumbed in Vlad’s number by memory. Another lesson from her father. Never rely on technology to remember phone numbers.
With fat, clumsy fingers, she typed a single word.
Sparrow.
Vlad clenched the phone in his hand. The word swam in his vision. Turned and twisted and floated as his brain tried to push it away. He sank against the island in his kitchen, and his crutches fell with a crash.
“What’s wrong, man?” Colton looked down at the text message. “What is sparrow?”
Vlad’s knees gave out. Colton wrapped his arms around Vlad’s chest just in time. “Jesus. What the fuck. Vlad, what is going on?”
Vlad choked on his own voice. “Call the police.”
“What?”
“Call the fucking police!”
“Why? What the fuck is going on?”
Vlad grabbed the front of Colton’s shirt. “She’s been taken. Elena has been kidnapped.”