Chapter 127: Where is my wife?

Marcus understood, with a cold certainty settling low in his stomach, exactly what tonight was about to become. Sienna needed to be found. Alive. Unharmed. Because if she wasn’t if even a single hair on her head had been touched by whoever had taken her, Viktor Kessler was going to burn the entire city down with everyone still standing inside it.

This was going to be a bloodbath.

Marcus’s fingers finally found the right contact, and he pressed the phone to his ear, bracing himself for the storm he had just helped set into motion.

"Tell me you have something," Viktor said, voice low, deep, stripped of everything except the promise of violence sitting just beneath it.

"Yes, boss." The voice on the other end was clipped, fast. "We have a private jet planning to leave tonight. There’s no one here just a few businessmen, carrying a big box."

"Should we engage?"

"Yes. Do it. I’m on my way."

Viktor was already moving before the call ended, phone dropping from his ear as he stormed out through the compound, Marcus hurrying to keep pace behind him.

He barked the address at Marcus without slowing, and Marcus relayed it instantly to the Gallon boys, already mobilizing across the city like a single, coordinated blade.

Less than fifteen minutes later, Viktor stood at the edge of a private airstrip, the Gallon boys fanning out around him in the dark, the outline of a jet idling on the tarmac just beginning to taxi. He didn’t wait for it to stop. He didn’t wait for anything.

The first gunshots cracked out before he’d even reached the wing of the plane merciless, immediate, dropping anyone who so much as reached for a weapon. There was no negotiation in this.

No warning shots. Only the cold, practiced efficiency of men who had done this more times than they could count, clearing a path through screaming chaos as Viktor walked through the middle of it untouched, his long dark coat snapping wide behind him, a gun steady in each hand, his expression carved from something far past fury and settling into something colder, more absolute.

Inside the jet, he found only confusion a handful of men frozen mid-motion, hands raised, eyes wide with the particular terror of men who had just watched their entire operation collapse in under a minute.

"Where is my wife?"

His voice didn’t rise. It didn’t need to.

They only stared at him, blank, useless, and something in Viktor’s chest snapped clean through. He raised one gun and fired without hesitation into the nearest man’s leg, the scream that followed swallowed almost entirely by the roar already building inside him.

"Check the box," he ordered, voice flat now, terrifyingly calm.

Two of the Gallon boys moved fast, tearing into the large crate secured near the rear of the cabin.

Viktor watched, chest heaving, every muscle in his body coiled tight enough to shatter, as they pulled back the lid to reveal a black body bag inside.

He crossed the distance in three strides and ripped the zipper down himself.

Not Sienna.

A crude, stuffed dummy stared back up at him instead, wrapped loosely in the bag like a cruel joke, a single folded note tucked against its chest.

For my son.

The world went white at the edges.

Viktor emptied the rest of his clip into the dummy without a single conscious thought behind it, bullet after bullet tearing through stuffing and fabric until the gun clicked empty in his hand, and still he didn’t stop, didn’t lower his arm, didn’t breathe, until the sound of his own ragged, furious breathing was the only thing left echoing through the cabin.

Then the scream tore out of him. Raw, guttural, something that didn’t sound entirely human anymore, the full weight of it crashing down all at once, Fabio had played him.

Every calm word, every hollow apology, every quiet I hope we never cross paths again had been theater, a distraction stitched together just long enough to buy the time needed to take the one thing Viktor had never once imagined he could lose control of.

He had Sienna.

The realization detonated through Viktor’s chest, grief and rage fusing into something far more dangerous than either alone because a man like Viktor Kessler did not simply mourn what was taken from him.

He hunted it down.

He turned slowly, gun clattering from his hand to the floor of the jet, his eyes finding Marcus across the wreckage of gunfire and screaming men, and when he spoke again, his voice had dropped into something bone-deep and absolute, a vow rather than a threat.

"Burn every property Fabio Fernandez has ever touched," Viktor said. "Every warehouse. Every safehouse. Every man loyal to his name." His jaw tightened, something lethal settling permanently into his eyes.

"I want him to feel exactly what it means to lose everything before I let him die. And I will not stop not for one single second until my wife is standing in front of me again."

Marcus didn’t argue. He simply nodded, already reaching for his phone, because there was nothing left to say to a man who had just declared war with his bare hands still shaking around the memory of an empty body bag.

—--

Fabio sat in the front seat, unbothered, watching the dark stretch of highway roll past as the car sped steadily toward the borders of Philadelphia.

He had planned this carefully, every detail accounted for, every contingency weighed and re-weighed over the past several months.

He wasn’t a man afraid of war. He’d been built for it, forged in it, and he had no illusions about what taking Sienna would ignite once Viktor Kessler discovered she was gone.

But after years of failure, after chasing shadows and losing good men to a girl who always seemed to slip through his fingers at the last possible second, having her now alive, contained, finally within reach mattered more to him than any revenge he might have wanted to carve out of Viktor’s flesh. Revenge could wait. This could not have.

In the trunk, Sienna’s eyes fluttered open slowly.