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I rang Benjamin. Straight to voicemail.

Panic had an icy claw sinking into the back of my neck.

I rang Aleksey.

“Boss? I was just about to ring you.”

That didn’t bode well. “Where are they?”

“They haven’t arrived.”

Holy shit.

Fuck.

Dread made my stomach sink like lead. “What? What do you mean they haven’t arrived?”

“I’ve waited here for over an hour. I thought they’d perhaps got caught in traffic, but they haven’t shown up.”

“Son of a bitch!” I seethed.

“I’m coming back,” Aleksey said suddenly.

“No. Stay there. They might turn up. I’ll go after them and call you if I find anything.” I really hoped I didn’t find anything. I hung up, my stomach churning and making me feel like I was going to be sick.

As soon as I hit the road, I realised it had been raining pretty hard. The roads were covered with water and thick mud, washing away any hope I might have had of tracking them.

What if they’d gone off the road? What if there’d been a collision?

What if it was Ronin?

Questions flew around my mind and I had to force myself to focus on the road in front of me. The rational part of my mind was trying to remind me to stay calm but the part that was wholly obsessed with Benjamin, was flying into a full blown panic.

When I’d been on the road for about thirty minutes I was considering turning around and finding another way of finding them when something caught my eye in a ditch by the side of the road. Something that reflected the glow of the headlights.

I pulled the car over and saw the telltale sign of a car wreck. The bumper of black SUV stared up at me from the mud. I followed the trail like breadcrumbs until I saw the vehicle, flipped on its side and wrapped around a tree.

I froze. My blood ran cold. I didn’t want to go any closer, afraid of what I might find. What if Benjamin was dead? What if Vlad was dead? I couldn’t bare it.

Fuck. What if they were lying there injured?

My legs started to move and I flew towards the wreckage, hoping against hope that I wasn’t going to find the corpses or my mate or my brother lying in the mud.

Something was playing through the radio, I could hear it on the wind but I hadn’t picked up on it until now. It was a voice speaking words that sounded familiar.

I threw the door open but the car was empty. Glass littered the ground and there was blood coating the interior. No bodies though. I couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or not.

Dread washed over me as I realised what the words coming through the radio were. Someone was reading aloud my letters. The letters I wrote to Edwin.

“…a smile as bright as the stars in the night sky. I would wish thee to sit with me, by my side as equals.”

I didn’t recognise the voice speaking those words I wrote over three centuries ago, but it didn’t matter. The ghost of those memories where enough to haunt me.

Where were they? I couldn’t see any footprints in the mud. I couldn’t see anything but blood and metal and glass.

He must have taken them. Ronin must have some reason for wanting them alive. To use them against me? If that were the case, he’d be keeping them alive.

I was still debating the problem when my phone rang. It was so loud in the quiet night that my entire body jolted. I looked at the screen but it just said, ‘No Called ID’.