Total pages in book: 123
Estimated words: 119597 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 598(@200wpm)___ 478(@250wpm)___ 399(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 119597 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 598(@200wpm)___ 478(@250wpm)___ 399(@300wpm)
When our mission is complete, I want to return her to him and show him how she’s ours, how the three of us fit together in love and intimacy and every way possible.
Warmth spreads from my chest to my stomach and gathers between my legs. I fist my hands in the bedding to keep from touching her, from starting something I can’t finish in an ice-cold tent.
The road ahead will be the longest twenty-two miles of my life.
I pace the chilly, silent corridors of my childhood home, feeling the onus of this dead end bearing down upon me.
The estate, an oligarch’s sanctuary nestled in the remote wilderness of Kodiak Island, feels like a crypt.
Not much has changed in that respect.
It’s been two weeks since I set foot in this place, driven by desperation. But with each passing day, impatience gnaws at me. Failure drags at my bones.
I’m Monty Novak, for fuck’s sake. The wealthiest man in Alaska with a global empire at his fingertips. A man who bends the world to his will.
Yet here, in this mansion of long-buried secrets, I’m merely a man tormented by the absence of his other half.
Under my supervision, my investigative team launched an exhaustive search of the abandoned estate and pristine acreage, delving into hidden caves, tracing the rugged coastlines and inlets, and scouring every inch of dirt for a sign of Frankie.
We’ve turned up nothing.
She isn’t here.
Never was.
My team arrived at this conclusion days ago.
The mystery of her disappearance remains as impenetrable as the dense forests surrounding us. Yet I can’t bring myself to leave. I’m missing something. Overlooking some vital clue.
I pause at the last door in the corridor and step into my father’s office, a room stripped of its corruption long ago when I removed every financial document and confidential file after my parents’ deaths.
The emptiness of the cabinets and drawers reflects the void within me.
I stride through the vacuous space, running a finger along bare surfaces. My frustration morphs into exhaustion. Pacing turns into denial, denial to fury, until a solid paperweight flies from my grasp and crashes against the wall.
But instead of embedding itself in the sheetrock, it blows right through it and keeps going, bouncing into the recess beyond, revealing a deep, hollow chamber.
What. The. Fuck?
My pulse races as I approach the hole, my hands curling into fists.
There’s something there. Something deliberately hidden from me. Why?
Overwhelming betrayal consumes me, fueling the force of my punch. I unleash another and another. The drywall crumbles beneath my strikes, a physical manifestation of my relationship with Rurik Strakh.
What else did my father keep from me?
Punch.
Why didn’t he trust me?
Punch.
Why didn’t he love me?
Punch.
Dust clouds the air with each blow, driving me faster, harder. I pound away sections of gypsum and clay, breaking the skin on my knuckles and unveiling another layer of secrets that have lain dormant for twenty-five years.
At last, the wall gives way to the cavity within. My heart hammers as I reach inside, the dim light catching on objects unfamiliar yet deeply personal.
With shaking hands, I sift through the debris, touching photographs, a book, a wooden box, a velvet pouch. No doubt incriminating relics of my father’s past.
As I lift them from their tomb, there’s a menacing weight to them, a sense of evil I know too well.
These aren’t just trinkets but artifacts of a sadistic life left behind.
In the box rests a row of Soviet military medals. Stolen off dead bodies? Trophies of my father’s victims?
The velvet pouch holds a collection of rare, pre-revolutionary Russian coins, their edges worn by time and history. Blood money? Payment of blackmail to my father?
A stack of faded photographs captures moments of his reign in a homeland I don’t remember. My scowling father in suits and tuxedos. Shaking hands with powerful figures more corrupt than him. Standing with others I don’t recognize.
I don’t fucking care. I’m looking for my wife, not trying to exhume my family’s skeletons.
Tossing aside the photos, I examine the most perplexing item of all. A well-worn, leather-bound copy of Pushkin’s poems, its pages dog-eared from frequent visits.
I hold it in my palm, feeling the weight of my father’s madness. Why was this sealed in a wall? It looks ancient. Probably priceless. But Rurik Strakh wasn’t a romantic. He was a vicious monster with more blood on his hands than in his entire body.
Perhaps, within the pages, amid these mementos of his life, lies a clue, a key to unlocking something significant. The book could be a cipher, the photographs a missing link in history or an answer to unsolved mysteries.
None of this will bring Frankie home.
Still, I can’t ignore the discovery. These aren’t merely items. They’re fragments of my heritage, carried across continents and seas, too integral to be forsaken.
The thought urges me to search deeper, to look beyond the surface.