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We stay like that and seconds turn to minutes. To an hour.

Above us, seagulls caw in the sky, a reminder of where we are. I look up at him and his eyes are closed, but his breathing is rough, harsh. He’s caught in a blizzard of savage memory, and I put him there.

I cup his frozen jaw. “Mason, I’m sorry.”

He gives a broken groan. My arms slide around his neck, and I hold him tighter. Another shudder rips through him. He groans again, and tears squeeze through his shut eyes and tremble on his lashes.

“He was five when he was taken. Just five fucking years old,” he whispers.

27

KEELY

I freeze. “Taken?”

He remains silent, his eyes still squeezed shut.

My mind tries to grapple with the many interpretations of what he’s saying. In the end, I blurt out, “How was he taken? Who took him, Mason?”

A hard swallow moves his throat. “I did some work for the government when I was in college. It was all top-secret shit… Writing code for satellites that helped win some obscure war I had zero interest in. A few years later, they came back, asking for my help again.”

His jaw is so tight, I’m surprised it hasn’t cracked, and for a moment, I’m afraid that’s as much as he can say. But then his lips part with a savage twist and he continues.

“They offered me a fuck load of money to alter one of my security algorithms, but I refused.” Again, he pauses, but this time whatever dam has held him back seems to have cracked open and the words spill from him in a flood of heat and pain I feel ripping through his rigid body.

“They waited a few years, then offered more money. Cassie and I were married by then. And Toby… God, my son would never want for anything. What the hell did I need more money for? But now I was interested in the world he would grow up in. If altering a simple code could help catch a few bad guys, then I was in.”

He sighs and it sounds like his soul is squeezing from his lungs in a tormented rasp. “They wanted me to work in a lab somewhere in the bowels of some faceless building in the middle of nowhere. I said,Hell no. I’m Mason Sinclair the Third. If they wantmyprogram, they have to do things my way, which includes not taking me away from my son for weeks on end.”

I want to move, to stroke his agonized face. To kiss his tormented lips. But I’m frozen, afraid if I move it will tip the balance and he’ll stop his soul-bleeding confession. So instead, I feel the heavy beat of his heart and try to ignore the racing of my own.

“We tussled over that a bit and reached an agreeable arrangement. They would send a junior analyst to live with me and learn the code in case I became compromised.” He stops and shakes his head. “I said yes.”

He shudders and his grip shifts, releasing my frozen state. “And this analyst… he just… took your son?”

“He was great with Toby.” His voice rumbles on, an arid recounting. “They got on like a house on fire. I never suspected a thing. Peterson was living with us for a couple of months. The day I… That day, he offered to take Toby for ice cream. He’d done it a bunch of times before. I was in the middle of writing code. I barely looked up to say goodbye to my son. I didn’t even realize what the time was until Cassie came home and asked me where Toby was.”

Mason finally opens his eyes and I see the black, irredeemable despair that fills them. “It was one in the morning. My son had been missing for over eleven hours, and I had my head buried up the ass of some goddamn coding.”

Just like he asked me to stop talking when the crush of words became too much, I want the words falling from his lips to shrivel up and die. I don’t want the image of that beautiful boy on the cinema screen in Monte Carlo to alter in any way. But then I remember the sound Mason made when he watched his son’s image. The sound of a defeated soul preparing itself for the seventh circle of hell. It’s that sound, and my impossibly arrogant need to free him from it, that makes me speak now. “What did you do?”

“The usual—calls to the police, followed by calls to heads of every law enforcement department, threatening to kill each and every one of them if they didn’t dedicate every single resource to finding my son. The less brave ones promised me jail time once Toby was found. I threatened some more, even managed to get a few incompetent assholes fired.” He exhales and I swear I see the flames of hell leap in his eyes when he looks at me. “Seven days, Keely. He had Toby for seven days.”

The vice around my chest strangles my lungs. “You found him?”

His mouth compresses into a blade. “I was building Seven as a side project at the time. I altered her parameters and programmed her for the sole purpose of finding Toby. She pinpointed a mile radius of his location on the seventh day, to some farm in Virginia. But… we were too late.”

Oh God. I pull him tighter into my warmth, but he’s statue-still and chilled despite the sunshine surrounding us. “Mason.” I say his name, not to prompt him into any sort of action or response, but to let him know I’m there. “Mason. Mason.”

I give in to the urge to kiss his cheek and feel the blood flow beneath his skin. I’m encouraged that there’s life beneath the petrified sorrow and rage. I trail my mouth to the corner of his mouth and kiss his frozen lips. I don’t get a response, but I’m not dissuaded.

“Mason.”

He jerks his head back when I try to deepen the kiss. I recognize his need to purge, and I place my head on his chest again, my thoughts calmed a little by the rhythmic beat of his heart.

“He took him, Keely. Right from underneath my nose. So you see, you’re not the only one who was fooled into ignoring the warning signs. I’ve had a long time to think about those signs.”

My fingers glide into the hair at his nape in a gesture of inadequate comfort. “What signs?”