Blurred Lines

Chapter 33

Even before Nikolay stepped foot into the office of the Elmhurst warehouse, he knew from the uncomfortable silence and the muffled whispers of the men, that Ruslan was angry.

The uncharacteristic silence of the once buzzing warehouse made it feel like a tomb of late, like the glumness of Ruslan had bleed through its cracks and crevices and tainted the air they breathed.

He walked into the office to find Ruslan staring out of the warehouse window, his hands in his pockets, his eyes fixed blankly on something in the distance. Taking advantage of his distraction Niko turned to Sasha who'd been working at his desk.

He held his hands up silently, gesturing toward Ruslan.

Sasha raised an eyebrow, urging him to turn back before it was too late, making Niko smile.

He felt sorry for the kid. He was the only one that worked in such close proximity to Ruslan all day, everyday. Consumed by what he perceived as Abigail's betrayal, Ruslan had been hard to bear since her disappearance, but Niko knew that he was more wounded, than he was angry. He'd been broken by her rejection, and any man with eyes in his head could see that. In the early days he'd been optimistic, hopeful that he'd find her, but as the days gave way to months his optimism turned to bitterness. Annoyance at his inability to protect her, seemed to malign in him; annoyance he felt for himself and his vulnerability when her absence forced him to acknowledge his need for her.

When he'd come home from New York to find her gone, his anger had been measured and rational at first. He'd assumed that the trauma of what she'd witnessed had impaired her judgement and that panic was what had caused her to run. He was confident that Sasha would be able to find her quickly, and even if he couldn't, that she would resurface in a day or two.

When Sasha's discovered that her bank account had been closed and her social media accounts deleted, it became obvious that her disappearance was more planned than they'd originally assumed. But even so, this was a pregnant woman they were looking for. She was eventually going to open a bank account, register a cell phone,  go to a hospital, send an email to somebody at the very least. When two weeks passed and no leads turned up from the electronic surveillance, they'd been forced to accept something that they hadn't initially considered - the probability that she'd taken on an assumed identity. It complicated matters considerably, because unless they found out who'd helped her and what name she was using, finding her would be like searching for a needle in a haystack.

Knowing that she couldn't have planned such an elaborate scheme on her own, Ruslan turned the Den upside down a few weeks after her disappearance. Convinced that only Lev Zakharov or Maxim could get forged documents of a calibre that would allow Abigail to vanish without a trace, he turned the place inside out, threatening to do some serious damage to Lev if he didn't hand her over. Danil stepped in behind the scenes to smooth things over, picking up the tab for the damage Ruslan caused. He understood Ruslan's pain, his own wife had threatened to do the same thing on more than one occasion in their earlier years.

As Abigail's due date came and went, Ruslan became more volatile and harder to manage. He'd almost killed Maxim the first time, convinced that the key to finding her was through him. He wanted to pick Max up for a second round of interrogation, but was dissuaded by Niko.  Abigail would be found eventually, but what he'd done to those who were important to her, that would hang over his head forever.

Instead, Niko and a few of his most trusted men leaned on every document forger known in the murkier parts of the city. They left no stone unturned with promises of the kind of cash that should have flushed out the source of the documents, but they came up empty.

It wasn't everyday that a heavily pregnant woman paid for an assumed identity, so whoever it was had a reason strong enough that they'd risk the wrath of Lionman Mikhailov for it.