Just watching the back of her head over grainy surveillance camera, he’d swear he could feel her fear through the video. She kept looking down at something in her hand. Her phone, maybe?
When she finally pushed open the door, it felt like the release of tension in a movie. And the way she’d stepped out and then pulled her leg back in—Alexei didn’t think the phobia had been a fiction at all. It was real.
And she’d overcome it to escape his father and what he’d threatened to do to her.
Because finally, she didn’t just step into the alley.
She dashed headfirst and didn’t look back.
Meanwhile, the camera feed from the alley, pointed at the other side of the door didn’t change one bit. The door never opened. No one ever came out.
Bo frowned and reversed and fast-forwarded past the time-stamp on the other alley cam again and again. “I don’t underst—” he started but Dimitri cut him off, yanking him up out of his chair.
“Where the fuck did she go? What is my state of the art surveillance equipment buying me?”
Bo shook his head, smart enough to be genuinely afraid. “I don’t understand it, sir. No one’s tapped the feed to loop it. I would’ve known.”
“So what the fuck did they do?” Dimitri asked, shaking Bo.
Bo shook his head back and forth again, his eyes darting around. “It would have had to have been mechanical. At the camera itself. I get notifications if any of the cameras go down or go dark, but I guess…”
“What?” Dimitri shouted.
“I’d need to see the camera to be sure,” Bo said.
Dimitri shoved Bo away from himself. “Then go fucking look.”
Bo nodded and hurried out of the room.
Alexei’s phone rang and he picked it up. “Yeah?”
It was Pasha, his father’s lackey. “Papa wasn’t answering his phone.”
Alexei rolled his eyes, looking at his dad’s broken phone across the room. “What’s the message?” He put the phone on speaker and nodded with his head at his father. “It’s Pasha.”
“I think we found the problem with the GPS. Fucker ripped the damn thing out of the dash. Sending a pic.”
Alexei pulled the phone away from his ear and looked down at his screen, then showed it to his father. Pasha was holding a small black box about the size of a matchbox with a long string of several wires attached in his hand.
“Goddamned mother-fucking cock-sucker. I’ll fuck his mother’s skull!” Dimitri broke off and started swearing in Russian, banging out of the room and then coming back in, shaking his finger in Alexei’s face. “Find him. And the girl! I will not be made a fucking laughingstock!”
Alexei nodded fervently as his father stormed out of the room, yelling at Natasha and ordering her to get three girls and meet him up in his rooms.
“And get me a new fucking phone!” Dimitri roared at no one in particular as he continued his rampage through the club.
Alexei released a long breath and leaned back against a wall. After his father had slammed out of the club, he went out the back and met Bo in the alley over at the bakery where he was taking pictures of a clever set up. Nicholas had inserted a panoramic photo of the alleyway about two inches in front of the camera. If he’d stood in the correct place while putting it in place, the camera would never have seen him. And there’d have been only the briefest flicker while he put it up.
“Everything all good?” Bo asked, glancing Alexei’s way.
Alexei shrugged, pulling out a blunt he’d rolled earlier in the day. He lit it and then leaned against the back of the building, sucking in long and slow.
Alexei held the smoke in his chest for a moment then blew it out. “I think we pulled it off,” Alexei said, only now allowing himself a smile.
Bo nodded. “Nicholas is a good guy.”
“Still,” Alexei waved his hand, smoke idling into the air of the gray day. “He never would’ve thought of that.” He gestured towards the camera set up Bo had just taken pictures of.
Bo lifted an eyebrow. “He might have thought of it. He just wouldn’t have been able to pull it off without me.”
Alexei gazed at the door, as if he could look past and see the smart, daring woman beyond. “This one was definitely a team effort.”
Alexei hadn’t been sure what to do when Nicholas had first approached him at the beginning of the week telling him about his father’s ultimatum and asking for his help. Of course he knew what he ought to have done, at least according to his father’s logic of loyalty at all costs.
But maybe it was a lesson Alexei had simply learned too well.
Alexei was loyal. Brotherhood before blood, wasn’t that the mantra of the Bratva?
He was simply living out the ideals they’d all pledged as boys barely made men. Alexei had been given his first ink at seventeen and sworn himself to the Brotherhood.