Chapter 287

ALEXANDER

"You want the tracker. You want her back in one piece." His voice was wrecked but the smugness somehow survived it anyway.

"You're going to have to want it more than you want to watch me bleed. You need me conscious. And from where I'm sitting, that's not a bet I'm losing."

I let his little speech hang there for a second, watching him actually enjoy it.

"You're right about one thing." My voice stayed level, almost pleasant — the register that always did more damage than shouting ever managed.

"I do need you conscious. I do need you talking." I tilted my head slightly.

"But you've made a mistake, Arthur, thinking those are the only two things I need from you."

I nodded toward his hand.

"Two hands. Ten fingers between them, and you've only lost the use of one so far. You've still got a tongue — you've made that very clear tonight. But you've also still got eyes. Ears. A full set of teeth in that mouth you're so proud of running."

I leaned in."I don't need you to talk to get information out of you, Arthur. I need you able to talk. There's a difference." My voice dropped, almost gentle.

"And I think you're about to learn exactly what that difference feels like."

I reached out, movements slow, deliberate, and closed my hand around his index finger where it rested against the arm of the chair — giving him every second to understand what was coming, to feel the full weight of it arrive before it actually did.

"Last chance to save yourself this particular lesson."

His breath caught, the defiance finally slipping.

"Tell me how the tracker works. Now. Or you're about to find out how many fingers a man actually needs to type a password."

He shook his head, breath ragged, but somehow still finding one last thread of the arrogance he'd been running on all night.

"Negotiate with me— and I'll talk. That's how this works."

Ok then.I applied a slow, steady pressure backward. His body arched, a strangled cry catching in his throat as he fought against my grip, but the chair held him fast.

There was a wet pop, followed by the grating crunch of bone giving way.

I released the mangled digit, and his shriek filled the room, a high, thin sound of pure agony.

Before it could fade, I snatched two more fingers. This time, there was no slow build. I wrenched them back, hard and fast.

The sound was a sickening series of snaps, sharp and final. Bone shards tore through his skin, pale and jagged against the raw, bleeding flesh. They jutted out like obscene little flags.

“Talk,” I said, voice low and dangerous. “How do I track her?”

The bastard chuckled, blood, clearly believing he still held the upper hand.

“First the money… then the answers.”

A sharp, humorless laugh came from the corner of the room.

Leo leaned against the wall, arms crossed, watching Arthur with a look somewhere between disbelief and pure annoyance.

“Normally, I’d say you have terrible timing,” Leo said. “But honestly? This might be the worst possible moment in human history to test Alexander’s patience.

His wife is missing. His wife. Your daughter. And judging by the  way he's been terrifying everyone within a ten-mile radius since she disappeared… I’d say he’s not exactly in a forgiving mood. Yet somehow you still think this is the moment to play difficult?”

My patience was gone. “You think you still have time to negotiate,” I said quietly.

“You don’t. Every second you waste trying to negotiate is another second she’s in danger. And every second she’s with that bastard is a minute closer to me deciding you’re more useful dead than talking. Last chance, Arthur. How do I track her?”

Leo looked at me briefly, then back at Arthur. “I wouldn’t fucking test him right now. So unless your next sentence is ‘I'll track her now,’ I suggest you stop wasting everyone's time.”

Arthur actually smiled. Actually had the nerve to smile, blood still drying at the corner of his mouth, wrists bound to the chair, and somewhere in that delusional skull of his he'd decided he still held some kind of leverage.

"Untie me." He said it like an order, like I was staff and he was still the one giving directions.

"Get me a steak. Medium rare, and don't insult me with whatever cheap cut you people keep in this place. And transfer a billion into my account — untraceable, I'll give you the details — and then, Alexander, then we'll talk."

"A steak." I repeated it slowly. "You're tied to a chair in a basement, missing two teeth, one eye swollen shut, and you're ordering room service."

"You want her back fast, you'll treat me like a man doing you a favor, not a prisoner."

Every muscle in my body went still.

"I told you." He actually had the nerve to shrug, chains rattling against the chair.

"Business, Alexander. You want the location — that's going to cost—"

I didn't let him finish.I crossed the space between us in one step and drove my fist into his jaw hard enough to snap his head sideways, chair legs screeching against concrete. He gasped, spitting blood onto the floor.

Leo moved in, his hand fisting in the man's hair, yanking his head back until his neck was a taut cord against the chair.

A soaked rag was slapped over his face, and Leo pressed down, sealing it over his mouth and nose.

Arthur’s body bucked, his muffled struggles frantic as the water invaded his throat. Just as his movements began to weaken, Leo ripped the cloth away.

He sucked in a ragged, wet gasp, the sound choked off by his broken nose.

"I'm going to ask you one more time." My voice came out low. "How do I find her?"

He shook his head, some pathetic, trembling refusal, and even now — even now — I could see him doing the math, still convinced there was a version of this where he walked out richer than he walked in.

"Not until..." His voice broke apart, but he forced the rest of it out anyway. "The money. In my account."

Something in me went past anger into a kind of clean, cold fury that didn't have room left for patience.

I pulled out my gun, and aimed it at his left knee and pulled the trigger.

His shriek was something else entirely-a symphony of pure, unadulterated agony.

"You had one currency that mattered tonight, and it was time. You've been spending it like you had unlimited supply, and I am telling you right now, you don't."

I set the gun down. Then I reached into my coat and drew out the spiral blade, turning it once in the light so he'd have plenty of time to understand exactly what he was looking at.

His eyes, wide with a new kind of terror, darted from the knife to my face.

Leo mirrored my movement, his own knife appearing in his hand. With a flick of his wrist, Leo carved a deep, precise line across the man's cheek.

The cut was so deep it laid the bone bare, a river of blood pouring down his neck to soak his collar.

"Last chance." I said, pressing the point of my blade against his temple

"The next words out of your mouth are either the location, or they're nothing at all, because I am done listening to anything else, and I'll start peeling the skin from your body one inch at a time."

The arrogance was gone. The excuses were gone. The ridiculous belief that he could still walk away richer than he came in had disappeared somewhere in the last few minutes, burned out of him.

He sat there breathing heavy, staring at the floor like he'd finally understood something that should've been obvious ten minutes ago. He wasn't in control. He never had been.

"Okay— His eyes lifted to mine, red-rimmed, wrecked. "I'll tell you. I'll tell you everything, just— shit, fuck, just— just fucking stop."

Ten minutes of consequences, apparently, was all it took for a man like Arthur to remember how cooperation worked.

"Where is she?"

He swallowed hard, throat working. "I need a laptop— I need to download the app, the one that tracks her, it's not on my phone, I set it up on a separate device for security—"

"Laptop. Now!" I didn't turn my head, didn't lower my voice, just threw the order out into the room and trusted it would land.

It did. One of my men peeled off the wall so fast he nearly tripped over the chair leg, disappearing up the stairs two at a time.

I crossed to Arthur while we waited, crouching until we were eye level.

"If this is another delay tactic, I promise you, the next ten minutes make the last ten look like a courtesy."

"It's not." He shook his head fast, desperate to be believed. "It's not, I swear."

My man came back down at a dead run, laptop already open in his hands, and I nodded toward Leo.

"Untie him. Hand only — the good one." My eyes stayed locked on Arthur while I said it.

"You so much as think about doing anything other than exactly what I ask, and I promise the next thing you lose won't grow back."

Leo cut the restraint on his uninjured hand, and Arthur pulled it into his lap like he half-expected it to be taken from him too.

He flexed his fingers once, wincing, before dragging the laptop toward himself with visible effort —

He typed with two fingers, hand shaking hard enough that he had to stop twice and steady it against his knee. A login screen. A password, muttered under his breath as he typed it, not trusting himself to remember it silently.

A slow, agonizing progress bar crawling across the screen while I stood over him, arms crossed, watching every second of it with the kind of patience that had nothing left of it to spare.

"Come on," I said quietly, not really to him. To the bar. To the screen. To whatever god might be listening tonight.

The app finally loaded. A map bloomed onto the screen, and then — a single red dot, pulsing steady somewhere on the east side of the city.

Arthur turned the laptop toward me with both hands.

"There," he said, voice hoarse. "That's her. That's exactly where she is."

He leaned in closer, squinting at the map, and dragged two fingers across the trackpad to zoom in on the pulsing dot.

"There." He tapped the screen with a shaking finger.

"That's the location. It hasn't moved in the last hour, which means—" He swallowed. "Means she's stationary. Not being transported anymore."

"What is this place?" I asked, voice flat.

"Warehouse. Abandoned, far as I know — used to be a distribution center before the company folded.

It's about an hour out. Santos has used places like it before — off the books, no cameras, nobody around for miles to hear anything."

An hour. The word landed in my chest like a dropped weight. An hour was nothing and also somehow an eternity, every minute of it a minute she spent in a building with that man.

"Send me the coordinates." I was already straightening, already reaching for my phone, mind moving three steps ahead to men and vehicles and how fast I could get both moving. "Now."

Arthur's fingers found the keys again, faster this time, no more hesitation in them.

"Sending," he said. "It's done."

My phone buzzed a second later — a pin, a Warehouse an hour outside the city.

I stared at it for exactly one second.

Then I looked at Arthur.

"For once in your life," I said quietly, "you did something useful."

His face tightened.bI didn't care.

Because the only thing that mattered was no longer a question.

I knew where she was. And now Santos had a very serious problem.

Because I was coming.

As I stepped into the sunlight, I took a deep breath and closed my eyes.

I’m coming, Wife. Wait for me.