Total pages in book: 67
Estimated words: 65054 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 325(@200wpm)___ 260(@250wpm)___ 217(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 65054 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 325(@200wpm)___ 260(@250wpm)___ 217(@300wpm)
26
DOMINIC
Chiara calls me while I’m still on the street outside the safe house. I almost don’t answer. Rafe is standing in front of me with blood on his shirt and three different phones going off between us. My men are trying to pull camera footage from buildings with dead feeds. Tomasso is pacing near his car.
Chiara wouldn’t call now unless something was seriously wrong.
“What?” I snap.
“Sofia’s gone,” she says in a panicked voice.
The whole world narrows to those two words. I go still. Rafe notices immediately.
“What do you mean she’s gone?” I shout.
There’s a breath on the other end of the line.
“I thought she was upstairs,” she says quickly. “She wanted to be alone, and I thought it was okay to give her space. But when I went up to check on her, she was gone.”
For a second, I can’t process it. She can’t be gone. There’s no way out of that place without setting off at least a dozen alarms to alert me.
“Sound the alarm,” I tell her. “The building needs to go into lockdown.”
“I already did.”
“Where did you see her last?”
“I told you, I saw her go to her room. She took the elevator up, there’s no way she slipped past me then. It must have happened later.”
“You were supposed to keep an eye on her.”
“I know that!” she snaps, and her voice breaks just enough to stop me from saying something worse. “I’m sorry, Dom. I’m trying. I didn’t know she would run.”
Sofia did not wander out. She did not get lost in a building she has lived in for weeks. She ran. Or someone made her run.
Fear almost swallows me whole. Sofia is gone. She’s probably done something incredibly stupid, too. Whoever took Marco could have lured her out easily, and she was just angry enough to go.
Then the fury takes over. How could she do this? How could she be so reckless?
“Stay where you are,” I tell Chiara. “Do not leave the penthouse. Do not let anyone else leave the penthouse.”
“Dominic.”
“I’m coming.”
I hang up before she can say anything else.
Rafe is already watching me. “What happened?”
“Sofia’s gone.”
“How?”
“I’m about to find out.”
Tomasso stops pacing a few feet away. “What do you mean Sofia’s gone?”
I look at him. For half a second, suspicion moves through me so sharply I nearly act on it. He called her earlier. He put her on edge. He overstepped in a way I still haven’t dealt with. But suspicion is not proof. Not yet.
“I mean she’s gone,” I say.
He looks genuinely stunned. That means nothing.
“We need to go back to the penthouse,” I tell Rafe. “Now.”
No one speaks on the ride. Rafe works the phones beside me, issuing orders too low for Tomasso to catch from the front passenger seat. Tomasso keeps turning around, asking if we’ve heard anything, if there’s been any movement, if Chiara has checked the roof or the other floors or any of the guest rooms.
He sounds concerned. I don’t trust it.
By the time we reach the penthouse, the building is locked down tight. There are guards in the lobby, guards by the elevators, guards near the service doors. Every man I pass has the good sense to look terrified of my rage.
Smart men.
The elevator ride up is silent. When the doors open, Chiara is waiting in the entryway, her face pale, her arms wrapped around herself. She looks smaller than usual. Younger. Like the little girl who used to pretend she wasn’t scared during storms because she thought I needed her to be brave. The sight of it nearly cracks me open.
“I’m so sorry, Dom,” she says.
“This isn’t on you,” I tell her.
Her mouth trembles once before she presses it flat. “She was so upset.”
“I know.”
I move past her toward the security room, Rafe and Tomasso behind me. It sits on the lower level of the penthouse, behind a locked door past the service hallway. The monitors show every angle of the building. Lobby. Elevators. Private drive. Garage levels. Service entrances. Hallway feeds.
I stand over the security tech’s shoulder. “Pull her floor.”
His fingers shake on the keyboard.
Rafe moves closer to him. “Breathe, Luca. Pull the feed.”
The hallway outside Sofia’s room appears on the main monitor.
Empty. The timestamp rolls forward. One minute. Two. Ten. Then the door opens. Sofia slips out wearing leggings and a sweatshirt, purse in one hand, hair pulled back messily. She looks both ways before closing the door softly behind her.
There is nothing frantic in the way she moves. She is scared, but she is not panicking. She has already decided.
“She’s going to the stairs,” Rafe says.
“No,” Chiara says from behind us.
I turn.
She is staring at the screen, horrified. “She’s going to the service elevator.”
I look back at the monitor.
Sofia moves down the hallway, takes the side stairs to the second floor, then slips behind the pantry.