Viktor
It’s been weeks since Millie disappeared.
She’s completely gone with no warning or reason at all.
I’ve tried and tried to be pragmatic about it, to take the high road and choose to focus on my businesses rather than keep myself caught up in my feelings.
But it hasn’t worked.
Every morning that I wake up without her feels like a punishment from God. I’ve sent my men out dozens of times to find her, and I’ve watched them grow to resent me as their searching has inevitably put them behind in the work they take so much pride in.
None of this is sustainable, but I don’t know how to move on. How could Millie sever a connection like the one we had? It just doesn’t make sense.
Because of my mental absence, Stepan has taken control of the operations, primarily the counterattack we’ve planned on the rival gang who ambushed us. This was supposed to be my responsibility as the leader, but Stepan is right about one thing; I’m not in any position to be making life or death decisions right now.
When I finally decide to force myself to sit down and work, I’m immediately interrupted by what sounds like a fight breaking out near the headquarters. This isn’t uncommon, just more or less annoying, so I don’t pay any attention to it until I hear Nikolai’s voice shouting.
Nikolai has been gone for as long as Millie has been, down to the exact day and time as far as I know. He might know something about where she is, and I feel my heart skip a beat at the thought of finally getting some information or closure at the very least.
The fight is escalating, and I practically jump out of my chair to run downstairs to the second floor of the building where the sound is coming from.
What I find is Nikolai, holding his nose as it pours blood all over his shirt and the floor. I’m not sure whether or not I want to hug him or break his nose again.
“What the fuck? What happened?” I ask him, not certain of the proper course of events for interrogating somebody who recently went AWOL.
“Stepan, it’s Stepan. He’s gone insane,” he replies, snorting blood from his nose as he speaks.
“Where is he?” I ask, but before Nikolai can answer, I hear the unmistakable sound of Stepan’s tires squealing as he speeds down the road.
“Where did you go? Why did you come back?” I ask him, maintaining a distance just in case he’s come back to exact vengeance on me for whatever reason.
“What the fuck are you talking about? I left after Stepan accused me of getting Millie pregnant. That baby is not mine, man. I swear to god,” he replies, pleading.
My blood runs cold.
What baby?!
“What?!” I shout, my question unanswerable and ambiguous in the face of such a statement.
“Millie’s baby, Vik, that is not my kid! I had nothing to do with that. We were just friends,” he continues, clearly just as confused as I am while still clearly showing fear of retaliation from me.
“Millie is pregnant?!” I shout, running my hands through my hair in frustration as my thoughts begin to race.
I should have known when she quit drinking, when she started making excuses about her weight, when she started getting sick every morning.
How could I have missed something like that?
“Yeah, dude, I thought you knew. Stepan told me that you thought it was mine, like you were going to come after me and cut all my limbs off if I didn’t leave,” he replies, feeling emboldened by the realization that he’d been lied to.
I feel like I could pass out. First, my girlfriend is pregnant and doesn’t tell me, then she and one of my men run away. Was Millie lied to like this too? Did Stepan push her away from me?
The facts line up too well. Of course, Stepan would lie about this; he hates Millie. The fact that she’s pregnant with my baby is just the final nail in the coffin to any wishful thinking he had about me marrying Katya. No wonder he jumped right back on that bullshit the night she disappeared.
I’m suddenly overcome with a white-hot anger that overtakes my sensibilities.
“I think I might know where Millie is,” Nikolai says, breaking the nonstop avalanche of worst-case scenarios and fears in my head.
“How would you know that?” I ask, questioning his credibility after he’d just retracted any accusation of involvement with Millie.
“She and I were talking one time when I went to the bakery. She has an aunt in upstate New York that she’s really close to. I have a feeling she might be there,” he says.
“How are we supposed to figure out where that is?” I ask, feeling a volatile combination of hopelessness and anxiety at the idea of not finding her.
“I mean, we could probably use her last name to find the place. It’s pretty uncommon,” Nikolai replies.
I hadn’t thought about that. Millie’s last name isn’t one I had ever heard before, and sure enough, once we looked up her aunt, it was easy enough to find the name of her bakery.
“Well, it looks like this is where we’re going to look for her,” I say to him, and he nods in agreement as we both head out the door to my car.