Chapter 60 Marlena
I came back to the cottage just before dark with groceries from the small market in town.
The door was open.
Not wide open. Just cracked, the way it would be if someone had left in a hurry and not pulled it closed all the way. My stomach dropped before my brain caught up with what I was seeing.
I dropped the bags on the front step and pushed through the door.
"Mom?"
Nothing.
I walked through the cottage fast, checking every room. The kitchen was empty. The living room was empty. Her bedroom upstairs was empty, the bed made, her book sitting on the nightstand where she always left it.
My heart was beating too hard now. I went back downstairs and looked for signs of a fight, broken things, anything that would tell me what happened. But everything was in its place. Clean. Quiet. Normal except for the fact that my mother was gone.
I pulled out my phone and dialed Elena's number. It rang four times and went to voicemail.
I called again. Same thing.
I was starting to panic, the kind that made it hard to think straight, when I saw the note on the kitchen table.
Just a small piece of paper with two words in handwriting I didn't recognize.
She's safe.
I stared at it. Safe. What did that mean? Safe where? Safe with who?
I tried calling Katya but the number didn't connect. I tried Damien but he didn't answer. I stood in the kitchen with the note in my shaking hand and felt completely helpless, the same way I had felt watching Luka slip away, unable to do anything but witness.
Three days passed.
Three days of calling everyone I could think of and getting nothing. Three days of not eating, not sleeping, just sitting by the phone waiting for something, anything, that would tell me where my mother was.
Katya called on the fourth day.
"She's alive," Katya said immediately, before I could speak. "Elena is alive and relatively safe."
I couldn't breathe properly. "Where is she?"
"Prague. Marcus has her. He's using her to draw you and Nikolai to a specific location." Katya's voice was steady and professional, the way it got when she was delivering bad news efficiently. "I'm tracking her exact position now. I'll have it within the hour."
"Marcus." The name didn't mean anything to me at first. Then I remembered. Nikolai's man. The one who had always been in the background, quiet and competent and trusted.
"He's been working against Nikolai for a while," Katya continued. "This is his endgame. He wants both of you in Prague. It's a trap."
"I don't care if it's a trap." My voice came out harder than I meant it. "She's my mother. I'm going."
"I know. That's why I'm calling. I'll meet you there. But Marlena, you need to understand what you're walking into."
"I understand," I said. "When do I leave?"
"Tonight. I'm sending you coordinates for a private airfield outside Zurich. There will be a plane waiting. Nikolai will be meeting you there."
The sound of his name did something to my chest that I ignored completely. "Fine."
"Marlena." Katya's voice shifted slightly, something almost like concern creeping in. "Be careful. Marcus is not stable right now. He's desperate and that makes him more dangerous than any of the people we dealt with in Monaco."
"I'll be careful," I said, and hung up.
I packed fast. One small bag with clothes and the basics. I put the gun Katya had given me months ago in the bottom, wrapped in a shirt. I took all the cash I had in the cottage and my passport and the burner phone I kept charged for emergencies.
Elena's book was still on her nightstand. I picked it up and put it in the bag too. Something to give her when I found her.
The drive to Zurich took two hours and I made it in ninety minutes, the roads dark and empty and winding through mountains that I didn't look at. I thought about Elena the whole way. About how fragile she still was, how the years of captivity had broken things in her that were only just starting to heal. About what it would do to her to be taken again, locked up again, drugged again.
The rage kept me focused. I let it build and didn't try to push it down.
The airfield was small and private, just a single runway and a building that looked more like a house than a terminal. The plane was already there, engine running, lights on in the dark.
And standing near the stairs was Nikolai.
I parked and got out and we looked at each other across the pavement.
He looked different than I remembered. Thinner maybe. Tired in a way that went deeper than just lack of sleep. His suit was perfect as always but something about him seemed less contained than before, like he was holding himself together by force rather than habit.
I walked toward him and he didn't move. Just watched me come with those grey eyes that had always seen too much.
"Marlena," he said when I was close enough to hear.
I didn't answer. I just walked past him up the stairs into the plane.
The interior was small and expensive. Leather seats, polished wood, the kind of quiet luxury that used to make me uncomfortable and now just made me tired. I chose a seat near the back, as far from the front as I could get.
Nikolai came up the stairs a minute later and sat near the cockpit without looking at me.
The pilot announced we were taking off and the plane started moving.
I stared out the window at the dark mountains disappearing below us and thought about everything.
About the contract I had signed in my tiny apartment that felt like a lifetime ago. About the wedding that wasn't real and the marriage that had somehow started to feel like it might be. About Monaco and the villa and the baby I had lost on that basement floor. About Luka dying while I was trapped in Nikolai's world. About my mother, stolen again, because Marcus wanted leverage and we were the easiest targets to find.
About all the ways we had destroyed each other without meaning to and with meaning to and sometim
es without being able to tell the difference.