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I was barely five blocks away and jammed up in the never-ending LA traffic when I got a call from the doorman at the apartment.

“I’m sorry to bother you, sir,” he said sheepishly. “But the woman from the penthouse has left.”

“Did I not instruct you and your staff to keep that from happening?” Anger welled in me to mask the disappointment that felt like a knife to the gut. She’d really left at the first opportunity.

“I’m very sorry, Mr. Fokin.”

“Never mind. When did my employees arrive?” Hopefully, they were already out looking for her, but as I tried to find an opening to turn around, I wondered why the guards hadn’t called me yet.

“No one else has arrived,” he informed me.

That wasn’t right. In fact, it was very wrong. It was a miracle I didn’t cause an accident maneuvering my way out of the traffic jam so I could race back to the apartment, confusing my phone with repeated demands to call the men who were supposedly three minutes away when I left. A lot more than three minutes had passed since then. Neither of them were answering, so I gave up, calling someone else to get some more guards on the way.

“How fast can you get a team to me?” I gave my head of security the address and waited as he coordinated things on his end. I could hear him tapping on his keyboard, safely tucked away in the gatehouse on the compound. He was the best in the business, so I didn’t take my increasingly foul mood out on him as I waited the interminable seconds.

“Thirty minutes, boss.”

“Not good enough,” I snapped.

He explained that most of my people were out tracking Arkadi. Most of them were routed south since he’d been spotted trying to head for Mexico, and the rest were scattered around the city. And there was the traffic.

“You don’t have to tell me about the damn traffic,” I said. “Just get them there.”

“Already on their way,” he answered, not the least flustered by my anger.

His competence calmed me down a fraction, but not enough to keep me from feeling like I was about to crawl out of my skin. The only thing keeping me from losing it was the knowledge that Arkadi was miles away. It wasn’t much comfort, because I still had no idea where my wife was.

Or why she had left. And I didn’t want to speculate. I’d get her back, but at the moment, she was out there somewhere, a sitting duck for my enemy.

At the apartment, the doorman immediately directed me to the security office, where I could check the building’s many cameras. I didn’t need to see her leave the apartment or race down the stairs like her life depended on it, but I watched it all the same as the young woman in charge of the night shift played it all back for me.

“Just get to the street views,” I growled.

Why did this hurt so fucking much? Emerson had been pissed off, but did she want to be away from me so badly that she’d risk her life? We finally found footage of her leaving the building from the garage, making her way up to the street, and looking nervously in both directions before taking off running again.

God damn it, she looked scared. Whatever anger was simmering at her faded away, as I only wanted to keep her safe. At least I had a direction now, and she wouldn’t get far on foot. Arkadi was still being tracked and probably not even in the county at that point. Nobody knew I had brought her here, so she was in no immediate danger from him or his men, so the fear that had me in a chokehold released its grip a little bit.

“Maybe she went to get a cup of coffee?” the young woman asked tentatively.

I kept staring at the screen, repeating the view of Emerson taking off down the street until she was out of range.

Sure, she wanted coffee enough to take off at a dead run. Nice thought, though. But maybe she had come to her senses and was still nearby, too anxious to return and face the guards’ wrath. Checking my watch against the time stamp on the video, only twenty minutes had passed. With a sigh, I headed out to drive around and see if she’d sought refuge in one of the nearby shops or diners.

When I couldn’t find her, and nobody had seen someone fitting her description, tension and worry crept back in. I kept crawling my car up and down the nearby streets, but there was no trace.

I asked my security head to see if he could hack into the city’s surveillance cameras in the area, and he assured me it would be no problem; it would just take a little bit of time. I refrained from swearing at him again and went back to searching for my wayward wife and praying for a glimpse of her wild red hair whenever I turned a new corner.

Nothing. Not a trace of her. My frustration grew as I refused to admit there was nothing I could do but wait. Heading back to the apartment to meet the new guards, who should have been rolling up at any minute, I breathed a sigh of relief when Dima called.

“Tell me you caught Arkadi,” I said, jerking to a stop in the parking lot.

“Yeah, but there’s one problem,” Dima answered. “It’s not him.”

“What the fuck do you mean? It’s not him?”

“We got played. This guy was just a decoy. A damn good one, too.”

My heart did a flip. They didn’t have him. They were going in the wrong direction that entire time and now had no earthly idea where to resume the search. Which meant the man who was after my wife could be anywhere.