Page 27 of Scorned Beauty (Scorned Fate #5)

Chapter

Seventeen

Dom

It had been a week since the Russians had taken Sloane.

From the surveillance footage, the fucker who’d captured her appeared to be Anton.

Trevor was busy dropping hints to the feds on where to search for her, but so far, they’d been hitting dead ends.

Kirill hadn’t been helpful in providing the name of the properties where Anton or Grigori could have taken her.

Phil Harding had been in a medically induced coma to ease the swelling in his brain caused by the fall.

He was lucky all he suffered besides brain trauma was a broken leg and collarbone considering the height he’d fallen from.

His spine remained intact, and he wasn’t paralyzed.

The second they removed his breathing tube, the detectives took his statement.

When he finally saw me, the disgust on his face spoke volumes and managed to make me feel an inch tall. He witnessed the cruelty I’d inflicted on Sloane.

“Find her…”

I wasn’t sure if it was a statement or a question.

“I was hoping you could help me find her,” I said.

He didn’t say anything but breathed heavily. “Don’t deserve her.”

“If there’s anything…”

“She didn’t betray you.” His heart monitor ticked up.

That was neither here nor there. Though Sloane and I avoided sharing personal stuff, we did spend five months together, and when I was able to think clearly, it left me with a certainty that she was coerced to work for the FBI.

That she was cornered and didn’t have a choice.

I lied to myself when I said she was dead to me, but I wasn’t prepared for Phil’s next words.

“I cloned her phone.”

The words didn’t register at first. My mind rejected them. It rejected them because that would mean Sloane was innocent. That there was no gray area to bargain with and make me feel better even when her shattered look haunted me.

The look as I spewed those venomous words and rejected her.

Ridiculed her.

Degraded her.

Called her a rat.

Trash.

No. No. No.

The unfairness of it all. My misplaced outrage and pride. I fucking destroyed her.

A faint smile curved Phil’s mouth. He was delighted to watch the slideshow of horror playing on my face.

“You framed her?” I choked.

And if the nurse hadn’t rushed in, I would have grabbed him, post-comatose or not, and strangled the life out of him.

Dazed, I didn’t even fight the nurse when she shoved me out of the room. I staggered a few steps into the hallway with no direction. I paced in circles.

I fought through the roaring in my ears, the pounding of my heart, and the inability to breathe without snagging on what suspiciously sounded like a sob.

Sloane never betrayed me. Sandro was right.

The FBI framed her. I scrambled through our text messages and cross-checked them to the messages from the bodyguards I assigned to her.

I battened down the nausea of self-disgust rising inside me when my brain came to the undeniable conclusion of Sloane’s innocence.

Since that night she disappeared, my days were spent on the streets talking to informants or riding Trevor’s ass on dark web chatter. Any clue that would lead us to Sloane or even Billy.

Kirill issued a warning that Grigori was his to deal with, but fuck that.

I also had Harriet watched. Trevor, at first, thought I’d lost my mind to consider stalking an octogenarian, but after we’d discovered the auto-monthly debit of her stay in Delphine had been cancelled only to be paid up for a year from an untraceable shell company, he agreed.

I didn’t know whether Harriet knew what happened to Sloane and I wasn’t about to give her a heart attack with bad news.

I would return to my penthouse in the early hours of the morning, but today, after finding out that I’d misjudged Sloane, I didn’t have the energy to haunt the streets or hound Trevor, so I returned to my penthouse early.

Six p.m. to be exact.

Here, Ginger was my constant companion. Surprisingly, she’d acclimated to being confined to an indoor space, noting said indoor space was ten times the size of Sloane’s apartment.

Apparently, she had a taste for fine living and expensive furniture.

I kept her fed in style and she’d been gaining weight, her coat getting healthier than it’d ever been.

I would sit in front of the television, and her acceptance was the only thing keeping me on the edge of sanity.

Because it was the nights when the regrets came and tonight the enormity of the injustice I’d inflicted on Sloane was magnified a thousand times worse.

Sloane and I had embarked on a physical affair, but we were in denial that emotions weren’t involved.

I was used to playing boss, concentrating on keeping the gears working smoothly in my organization, so I didn’t notice how she’d crept under my skin and burrowed into my heart.

I was such a fucking asshole. Phil was right.

I didn’t deserve her. I kept her boxed in a corner because I figured she would never survive the scrutiny of my position and leave me.

Even now, I didn’t want to present her to my mother, not because I was ashamed of her, but because Ma’s disdain at my choice of partner would drive Sloane away and make her end things between us.

But I didn’t have to worry. It was I who ruined us.

I was selfish.

She’d hinted, hadn’t she? That she was feeling more and seeing me go out with other women was wearing her down. I was a coward and hid behind my responsibilities, but in doing so, I’d forsaken who was turning out to be the most important person in my life.

Luca once said when I made a choice, I should protect that choice with my life.

I didn’t.

I didn’t fucking deserve her. And I might be too late. I didn’t know whether Sloane was dead or alive. My thoughts went to Luca. Were the Moretti men cursed to suffer the same consequences because of our quest for power?

The sound of the key turning made me sigh. It was the women. They’d been trying to corner me for a week, but I’d been one step ahead of them.

I typed a message to Trevor and Sandro.

Me

Fuck you, guys.

Trevor

Take it like a man, bro.

Sandro

Fix this.

Fix what? I didn’t owe them an apology. The only woman who was getting an apology from me was Sloane. I would grovel and crawl over broken glass if only I could find her.

Ginger jumped off my lap to greet the women. I had a suspicion they’d been coming into my residence to play with her.

“Ooh, he’s here,” Sera snipped. If there was a silver lining that came out of Sloane’s disappearance, it was that it seemed to have united my female cousins and my sister against me. Sera picked up the remote and turned off the television.

“Didn’t Matteo ever teach you not to touch a man’s remote?” I grumbled.

“Trust me, cousin, Matteo lets me touch everything.”

“Gag.” Lucy made the vomiting gesture. Of course, Bianca would be here. She was leading the charge to castrate me for what I’d done to Sloane. And that was without knowing what went down between us.

“I don’t know why you girls are here. I’m no closer to finding Sloane than a couple of days ago.”

“We went to visit Harriet,” Bianca said.

“Why?”

“The question is why haven’t you?” Sera asked.

“She doesn’t know me. Sloane never introduced me to her. But I know Harriet’s got a heart condition. I don’t want to shock her with the news that Sloane is missing.”

Bianca rolled her eyes and looked at the girls. “Know what? I have my answers. Sloane and Dom were nothing but hookups and obviously she didn’t share her personal life with him.”

“And how much did Sloane share with you?” I challenged.

“Did you know the reason she tries to be so independent and didn’t want to depend on any man was because that’s what her mother told her when her father left?”

I frowned. “That’s not bad advice. Talking about her family is off-limits. That was our deal. Any attempts of mine to pry were shut down. But we don’t need to look too far. Billy…”

“That’s what I don’t get,” Bianca said. “Harriet has a soft spot for Billy no matter how many times he’s fucked up.”

“How did she react when you were all looking for Sloane?”

“She knows,” Bianca said.

“What?”

“She doesn’t know where Sloane went, but apparently Sloane had been planning it for a while.”

“Sloane had planned to leave?”

“Yes. But the day after everything went down, the administrator of the facility told Harriet that her stay was paid up for a year.” Bianca exhaled a sigh. “She’s sad, Dom. Harriet thinks Sloane found out about Billy and was mad at her and left.”

Confused, I said, “I’m not following.”

“Duh, you think we do? Use your sneaky boss connections and dig.”

Lucy whipped out her phone. “I know a guy…”

“No,” I snapped. “You’ve done enough.”

My sister was on thin ice with the way she skated into shit without covering her tracks. She needed to stay far away from the political crap right now or risk another contract on her head she expected me to fix.

My phone rang, flashing Trevor .

“You have something?”

“Yeah.”

The old colonial house was on the outskirts of Manhattan, so it was to our advantage that agents from the New York field office and local cops were able to piece together the journey of a truck used by one of Grigori’s men.

The plates turned up as one of the pay-here-buy-here lots that required GPS tracking to be installed and it led to this house before it was eventually ditched in the Bronx and ended up in one of our chop shops.

The house was in poor condition and clearly hadn’t been maintained well. Fresh tire tracks indicated recent use, but hope deflated when the property appeared abandoned.

When the lead agent declared it clear, he approached me with a somber expression. “There’s something you need to see.”

“Is she dead?” The words scraped my throat like sandpaper.

“No, but there’s a basement,” he said. His eyes grew shifty before they fixed on the K-9 vehicle. “We’re going to let the scent hounds do their job. We can call you?—”