Page 163 of Cruel Demands

Nikita shakes her head. “Taylor,” she warns, her voice low. “Run.”

The man says, “Come back, Taylor. I have orders not to kill you. I have no such orders for Nikita.”

She gave me the pregnancy test. She offered to help me leave her son. She gave me Mikhail’s baby blanket. She became my family before I realized I was missing one here. She called me her child and told me to save myself and my baby.

The man’s elbow digs into Nikita’s throat, and she stops talking. My shoulders drop.

Nikita’s voice breaks, her face collapsing. “No.”

I turn away from the stairwell.

43

MIKHAIL

I do not know how long Taylor has been missing. It feels like an eternity. Whatever it is, it is long enough.

My men tear through the private treatment wing while Arkady divides the search below us. Half move toward the ambulance bay. The rest sweep the service garage, opening every ambulance and dragging drivers from behind their wheels.

The cameras give us nothing. Every feed covering the private corridor, service elevators, and ambulance level went dark at the same moment. Seven ambulances entered the grounds for the event. Two belong to the hospital. The remaining five carry the names of private contractors that may not exist by tomorrow.

“First vehicle clear,” a man reports through my radio.

“Second?”

“Empty.”

“Then open the third.”

A second voice cuts through the channel. “No sign of them in the treatment rooms.”

I move faster.

“They cannot have left the grounds,” Arkady says through the radio.

“They can if they are already inside an ambulance.”

“The ramp is being sealed.”

“Being sealed is not sealed.”

Static cracks across the radio. “Third vehicle clear.”

No Taylor. No Mother.

My mind supplies images faster than I can stop them. Taylor forced onto the floor of an ambulance. My mother bleeding beside her. A vehicle passing through the service gate seconds before my men close it. I crush each image beneath the next step.

Panic is useless unless given orders.

“Search beneath the vehicles,” I say into the radio. “Open every compartment. Verify every driver against the original staffing list.”

“We are doing it.”

“Do it faster.”

The unfinished wing stretches ahead of me, dark except for temporary work lights hanging from exposed wiring.

Orlov came here himself. He stood in the public hall after hiding from me for months. He watched the emergency begin and moved deeper into the hospital instead of toward an exit. He would not risk appearing here merely to trust someone else to tell him whether the extraction worked.