Page 11

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RAFFAELE

“ Y ou want me to take you home?”

“Why the fuck would I want to go home?” I snap, glaring briefly at my driver. “Is she at home? Do you have information I don’t have? Are you fucking psychic and can tell me that she’s just hiding at home after all this time, huh?”

My driver pales slightly and immediately ducks back into his seat as Vito shoves my tablet into my hands.

“Look,” he says, tapping the screen quickly. “She made a call ten minutes before the smoke alarm went off and then she left out the side gate. She runs past there quite a lot, so something must have given her the confidence to leave that way.”

“Who did she call?” I grind out, gripping the tablet so hard that the plastic squeaks.

“Working on it.”

“Then work faster.”

Gone. Adelina is gone.

Is this my fault? Should I have prodded her silence more this week? Should I have done something with her tonight? If the disaster at the brothel hadn’t taken up my time, I would have been home hours before she snuck out and then maybe this wouldn’t have happened.

Is she gone? Was she so truly unhappy that her only option was to flood the bathroom, set the place ablaze, and sneak out like some unruly teenager?

My heart tightens and pain lances through my chest, like my veins are turning into barbed wire. A hundred horrible things could have happened to her in the hours she’s been gone, and I can barely stomach to think of them all. I know the darkness in this city. I know how cruel people get under the cover of darkness. Hell, it’s usually me who makes the shadows jump, but I would never hurt Adelina unless she gave me cause to.

And it would need to be a legitimate cause.

“Anything from Pascal?”

“I called him,” Vito says. “Kept it casual. He hasn’t heard from her.”

“Don’t tell him anything,” I say, my words snapping out around the tension in my jaw. “I don’t need this getting out.”

“Understood. Here it is.” He sends me a file through the airdrop. “She called her friend Marie.”

“Driver!” I bark, causing the man to turn around with a snap. I hold up the tablet. “Take me here.”

“Understood, sir.”

The drive to Marie’s place is torture. I can scarcely sit still and spend more of my time calling Adelina’s phone in the hopes that seeing my name so much will eventually make her pick up. Each time it rings out, my heart beats faster and faster until it’s just a blur of sensation in my chest.

I’m not typically a nervous man, but something about this is different.

Something about Adelina is different.

Most days, I can’t get her out of my head. I see her every time I close my eyes. I can’t stop watching her when we’re together. And I have no idea why. I’ve entertained women before, but something about her is so different. Maybe it’s because she gave me a taste and then went right back to hating me. Does that make her more attractive to me, the fact that she wants nothing to do with me beyond the business deal?

And then she pulls shit like this. There had better be one hell of a fucking good explanation or I’m tying her to the bed for the rest of our marriage.

Arriving at Marie’s apartment, we pour from the car and hurry up the steps. I pound on the door so hard that the latch bounces with each impact from my fist until an alarmed voice yells from inside.

“Hold on! Jesus Christ, I was asleep!” The door cracks open and a bleary eye peers out over a gold chain keeping the door from opening too far. “Who the hell are you?”

“Marie,” I bark. “We need to find Marie immediately.”

“What? Why?”

“Because I fucking asked you, that’s why!” I yell, raising my fist to the door once more. Vito swiftly steps in, dragging me back down the steps and taking my place.

“I’m sorry, but we think someone is in trouble and they were last in contact with Marie. We’re really worried, so if you could please direct us to where Marie is?”

“She, uhm…” The person groans softly. “She went out drinking with a friend, I think.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. It was three hours ago, maybe?” The person sighs. “You could try Revenge. She likes drinking there a lot.”

I’m already springing down the steps toward the car. Revenge is one of my clubs. I own every nightclub in the city, at least in the wider radius, so if Marie and Adelina went to a nightclub, it shouldn’t be too hard to track her down.

“Raffaele, you gotta watch it,” Vito warns as he hurries back into the car with me. “You can’t lose control.”

“I’m not going to lose control,” I snap, logging into the club mainframe that connects all of the club networks.

“Really? Scaring a civilian at six in the morning is you in control?”

My attention snaps up and I glare. “You know as well as I do how this looks. Losing my wife a month after we got married? This act of rebellion makes me look fucking weak and I don’t need that shit if the Irish are getting bolder.”

“That’s not why you’re angry,” Vito says, his voice frustratingly gentle.

“Oh, really?”

“You’re worried something’s happened to her.”

“Stop fucking psychoanalyzing me and get every available man scouring all the footage from every club we have a hand in,” I snap angrily. “Someone had better find something or it won’t just be the Irish floating up from the fucking river.”

Vito falls silent and complies while my driver takes us toward Revenge. I try to focus on the tablet in front of me as I check my credit cards and Adelina’s. There are no charges so Marie must have been paying for everything. That will take more time to get that kind of info, but I put the request in with a contact regardless.

Vito’s words cut too close to home. Worrying about Adelina suggests I care beyond my attraction to her, and that’s not true. We barely know each other, and she made it clear that she hates me because of my reputation. I can live with that.

So why do I feel like someone’s hands are around my throat, restricting everything from air to blood flow?

I like seeing her at breakfast. I like the soft scents she leaves after her shower. I like seeing her run around the garden, and I like her warmth next to me in bed at night. She might rarely speak to me, but there’s a companionship there that’s been quietly soothing a part of me that I didn’t even know was damaged.

When I get my hands on her, she’s in so much fucking trouble.

“Got her!” Vito lurches forward in his seat, causing his seatbelt to lock and snap him backward. “The footage is delayed for sure, but she was at the Crystal Maze with Marie… thirty minutes ago.”

“It’s the closest we have. Driver!”

“On it, Boss.”

“Good work, Vito.”

He flashes me a smile but doesn’t speak. Probably a wise decision.

Despite the speed with which the driver weaves through the city, we still take too long to reach the Crystal Maze. The car has barely come to a stop before I’m flying out the door and sprinting up to the door. The bouncer raises a hand but upon seeing Vito immediately steps aside and lets me through. We head through a sea of drunk, sweaty people to the security office behind the bar where a security guard leaps up from his seat while choking on whatever greasy pastry he’s just shoved into his mouth.

“Boss!”

“Move,” I bark, shoving him out of the way and taking over the camera controls. The delay from the real-time cameras to the mainframe has never been an issue due to how rare it is to require immediate footage like this, but now it feels like the worst thing in the world. I line up the cameras with the timestamp from Vito’s video and play the footage on fast forward while Vito has our men search the club in case she’s still here.

Adelina comes onto the screen and seems to be having the time of her life with her friend. She’s dancing and laughing, which would be amusing at such a rapid pace, but the sight just makes my chest tighten like a weight is pressing down.

Why didn’t she just ask me? I could have organized it if she had told me she wanted to go out with a friend. These are the perks of owning the clubs.

Sure, I told her no, but that was because it’s harder to secure the hospital she frequents so much.

By the time Vito appears, I’ve got Adelina at a bar with Marie and two strange men. I glance at Vito and he briefly shakes his head.

Adelina isn’t here.

Which means we have to keep searching.

Vito continues while I play the video until something on the screen makes my blood run cold.

While Adelina and Marie are giggling with one another, the strange men’s hands flash briefly over their drinks. It’s so fast, but I know a drugging when I see one.

“Raffaele…” Vito leans over my shoulder, and his grip turns to iron as we watch Marie fall over and Adelina try to help her. It’s not long until Adelina appears out of it and they’re both carried away by the strange men. I follow them on the cameras until they disappear outside. The angle isn’t great, but I glimpse Marie being loaded into the back and something delays them at the trunk of the car.

Then they race off and vanish into the night.

“Find that car,” I grind out to Vito, and my voice sounds thin to my own ears. “Find it NOW!”

Vito is gone in a flash to do just that.

“And you.” I rise slowly and turn to the guard who still has pastry flakes clinging to his lower lip. “How the fuck did you miss that?”

The guard’s eyes widen. “But it happens all the time. It’s just one of those?—”

His last words fall empty as I whip my gun out of my belt and shoot him right between the eyes. He drops like a rock. “I don’t pay you to watch shit like that happen!” I snarl, delivering a swift kick to his lifeless body. “You fucking fat fuck! You stupid fucking—” Another swift kick, and I pour all my rage and terror into the next kick.

We deal in drugs, it’s true. But we don’t drug people. We sell recreational drugs to drunk teenagers, not sedatives to fucking creeps. I kick him again as hard as I can just as Vito sprints back inside.

“Car was already flagged for running two red lights on the next street over. Belongs to a guy called Geoff Roulston. They’re sending us the last known address now.”

“Right.” I step over the body, but just as I move past Vito, he catches my arm.

“There’s one more thing.”

“What?” I snap. “What more could there possibly be?”

“I’ve seen that name before.”

“Where?”

“On Pascal’s bank transactions.”