None too happy about the forced inactivity, Misha paced around the phone, waiting, strung out on irritation and what he refused to call hope, the knot in his belly getting worse with each passing minute. He didn’t remember when he’d last eaten, though he vaguely recalled Andrej sitting him down with a bowl of oatmeal earlier. Long enough ago so it didn’t add to the churning in his stomach. At this rate, Riley was going to give him an ulcer in addition to a headache. Misha didn’t do well with passivity. He was

a take-charge kind of guy, used to being out in the field, taking action, stirring up shit. That he couldn’t do this now, in this most personal, most important situation, was driving him stark raving mad. He knew he had to keep a low profile, avoid drawing attention, and in order to do that had to stay put and let others do the legwork, but it wasn’t easy for him.

He glanced at the phone again. It sat on the desk like a sleek silver bug, taunting him with malicious silence. Misha took two steps toward it; stopped. He wasn’t going to call Kolya. You don’t whistle for your dog when it’s hot on a trail; that’d be counterproductive. Misha knew better. He was a professional. Or had been, before Riley had come into his life and fucked him up beyond recognition. Best thing that had ever happened to him. Most painful, too. Misha spun around and marched back to the window to stare out into the garden, angry with himself and his weakness.

He knew he had to stop this obsession, stop thinking about Riley, about the look in Riley’s eyes when he’d come through that door and seen Misha for who he really was. They’d had a good time, all right, but they were over now. He had to get his shit together and—

The phone beeped.

Misha was back across the room, had snatched it up, and was answering before the machine had a chance to utter a second beep.

“Speak to me.”

Well aware of Misha’s current stress levels, Kolya betrayed no sign of surprise at either the promptness of his response or his tone. “I found him,”

he reported. “You were right; he’s in Texas.”

No surprise there. Texas was Riley’s home ground. The trouble so far had been that it was a lot of home ground and Riley was much more familiar with it than Misha and his men. It was a needle in a haystack sort of problem.

“Where exactly is he?” Misha demanded, already on his way to the bedroom to collect his traveling bag.

The silence on the other end of the line was brief, but worrisome. “He was in San Antonio, working at a bar,” Kolya said.

Misha picked up on the careful phrasing immediately and stopped in the middle of the hallway to glare at the device in his hand. “Was?”

“He spotted me.”