29. Ivan

29

IVAN

“ G et your fucking hands off me.” I shoved the cop back, searching for Becca.

She’d been right there. Next to me. Scared and nervous.

In the melee of all the club guests running, the staff workers arguing with the cops, the officers swarming and trying to arrest any Mafia person they saw—except that pair of Rossinis—it was chaos.

Even when the lights came on and the music was silenced, it was hard to follow the rushed frenzy of it all.

Once the cops noticed more of the people dropping like flies, all drugged, they shifted their focus to them and less on me. My soldiers and guards stood between me and the fuckers trying to arrest me.

They had no grounds. I didn’t have any drugs. I was no longer a supervisor of this establishment and my family no longer owned it.

“Becca!” I tried to shout for her again, spinning and enraged to find her.

“They took her,” a Bratva soldier reported, rushing in from the door leading to the exit. “They drove off.”

“Fuck!” I ran out with him, desperate to get in my car and drive.

As soon as I got in the driver’s seat, Maxim called.

“What?” I snapped. He was the one who operated the tracking software that synced with the tiny tab I’d put on Becca’s necklace. He was the brother I wanted to call, but I didn’t want to know why he was reaching out to me first.

“Get out of that club. I got intel that they’re staging a?—”

“Too fucking late,” I barked.

“The cops showed?”

“Yes. And someone took Becca.”

He swore, and the sound of typing came from his end. “I’ll find her. In the meantime, though, I’ve got news. Fucking finally. Nik had to make a few calls to the right people.”

“Fill me in.” I didn’t care who got the intel. I’d use it. And I would find Becca. I refused to consider the possibility that I wouldn’t. She belonged at my side. She should be with me forever. I didn’t find her just to lose her.

In the meantime, I was all ears for whatever would help me bring those fuckers down.

“Those drugs are experiments gone wrong. My sources say they originated in labs in Amsterdam, but someone else got their hands on it.”

“The Rossinis?” I guessed as I drove away from the club, waiting for Becca’s location.

“Yes. The Rossinis bought them for the use of a weapon, but others within their organization wanted to use them as ways to get customers to get hooked on elite drugs.”

Always about the money.

“Murphy was one of the first ones who found out about them, though. He learned about them on the black market,” Maxim explained, “but he couldn’t circulate them on his own and reap all the money and take all the cuts for it himself.”

I nodded. “Yeah, because he’s supposed to be a cop and would need to use criminal means to move them.”

“Hence, the Rossinis. He approached Dominic Rossini, who was skeptical of the product. The Rossinis were interested, and Dom wanted to look into it, but Murphy was too secretive about it all.”

I grunted. “That’s probably the phone call Becca overheard. About the long-term project Dom wanted to do with Murphy.”

“I think so too. Murphy, according to the skeptics from the Rossini side, wanted to get rich on the drugs and pin the circulation of it on us, on our Bratva. That was the incentive to the Rossinis, to use us as the scapegoat for the drugs appearing here.”

Which explains why they had them at the club we recently sold. Somewhere they must have thought we still operated.

“The Rossinis had too many things to worry about, though, for Dom to focus on this agreement. Their infighting, for starters. They were interested in a scheme to hurt the Bratva, but Murphy was too pushy.”

“I can’t wait to kill that fucker.”

“Agreed. Murphy started having people plant the drugs in sex clubs when you weren’t there. I think that’s why he wanted to know where you were when he called Becca. He must have realized that your taking Becca was a way to track you through her. Then he’d have his lackeys plant the drugs when we weren’t looking.”

It was a diversion, just like I’d thought, but I didn’t see how Murphy was keeping this up.

“The one detail I can’t understand is how the drugs got here, though. My sources seem to think Dom had the drugs with him, on Rossini property, and Murphy was bitter with him because Dom wouldn’t release them to him yet.”

“And that’s likely why he wanted to string Becca along, as insurance of some kind.”

Maxim sighed. “I think so too. But if Dom wasn’t interested in the plan yet, and sent Becca packing when he seemed to call off the plans with Murphy in that last phone call that she overheard, how are the drugs getting here? Murphy’s got to have a supply here somehow.”

“Maybe he bought some and had it on hand to distribute.”

“Okay, but he’s got to maintain the supply for his plan to work. A few people being drugged isn’t newsworthy. Dozens of them is. That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Where Murphy’s supply is.”

“And if I find that supply, I’d find him,” I added.

“Better yet, you could find him and kill him before he circulates any more of the drugs and causes trouble for the Bratva.”

As if I needed any more incentive to kill Steven Murphy. He was already a dead man. So were the fuckers who’d taken Becca tonight.

With every minute that she wasn’t with me, next to me in the passenger seat and proving that love could exist for me, that a bond could build and grow between opposites like us, I burned with a furious need to inflict pain and death. I became unhinged, driven to slaughter them all.

“Where is she?” I demanded.

“Sorry. It took a while to start up and search.”

Still, he didn’t continue.

“Please, Maxim. Please.” I didn’t care if the desperation was evident.

“She never takes the necklace off, right?”

She better not have. I tensed, wondering if someone could have swept her and checked for bugs or trackers. “Not since I’ve known her.”

“I’m looking. I swear, I’m looking. She might be somewhere that it’s hard to reach. In a basement or something.”

I’m coming for you, sweetheart. I swear I am.

“Call me as soon as you have a location.” After he said he would, I called the house and asked Margie to stay in Emily’s room. Just in case. Then I spoke with the guards at the villa, letting them know what happened.

They all jumped to action, promising to do as I asked.

Alek called too, telling me he was on his way to help me, to be backup.

And still, I waited for direction from Maxim, hopeful that he’d be able to steer me which way to go to get my girl.

I found her once. No matter the danger and complications from the fucking Italians and the crookedest cop, I’d find her again.

Then keep her forever.