Page 45 of The One Night Match (Mafia Matchmaker #1)

FORTY-FIVE

CRUZ

S ix hours of sitting in that room, waiting for someone to crack.

Six hours of silence.

Six hours away from the camera feed.

When Riley moves out, I’m going to have to have someone install cameras so I can get my fill of her, because there’s no way I can spend the rest of my life without her.

I haven’t allowed myself to consider what will happen when she inevitably finds a man who can give her the world. It will be torture seeing someone else make her happy, but it will just be another part of my punishment.

Just another way I’ll suffer because I allowed my kitten to be hurt on my watch.

I groan as I stretch my neck from side to side. I need to go to bed, but I can’t face Riley, which means I’ll be sleeping on the couch in my office.

The second I step over the threshold, Mr. Whiskers lets out an almighty meow from my desk.

“You mad at me too, bud?” I scratch him between the ears as I drop down into my chair.

He howls again, now scratching at the file that’s sitting open beneath him.

It takes me a second to realize what it is, given his orange butt is covering most of it, but then a wave of dread hits me.

The contract and the note I wrote before we left.

I wasn’t ready to give them to Riley yet, wasn’t ready to admit that she can do better than me and give her the out she wanted from the start, but it seems fate has fucked me once again.

For the first time in weeks, the orange demon swipes at me, getting me right in the cheek with his razor blades masquerading as claws.

“What the fuck?” I snap, dabbing the blood pooling on my skin. “I thought we’d come to an arrangement.”

He glares at me for a moment before turning his ass around and moving to the corner of the desk, where he starts knocking shit off.

I sigh and shove myself to my feet. “I know I fucked everything up. You should probably go with her when she leaves. You like her a whole lot more than you like me anyway,” I mutter to myself as I collect the files he’s thrown on the floor like the little dick that he is.

Mr. Whiskers scratches at the desk again, and I run my hand down my face.

This desk cost an arm and a leg, and letting the little monster destroy it feels like a waste of such a beautiful piece of furniture, but I don’t have it in me to yell at him when he’s mad at me for ruining things with the best thing that ever happened to the both of us.

I glance up at the cat, intent to try to salvage what’s left of our relationship, when I notice the red smeared on his paw.

“Did you hurt yourself?” I ask him, reaching for the paw in question, but he quickly swipes my hand and starts scratching at the desk again.

I push to my feet, moving closer to look at the damage he’s done, when I realize it’s not Mr. Whiskers’s blood at all.

Right there beneath the files is a knife I use to open mail. Yes, I realize letter openers exist for a reason, but I don’t have one. Beside the knife is the letter ‘M’ written in blood, right where the orange demon has been scratching.

“Cruz?” Lexi shouts from somewhere in the house, and I take off toward her voice, my chest tightening with panic.

I skid to a stop at the end of the hallway when I find her at the bottom of the stairs, her eyes wide. “Where’s Riley?”

“I don’t know. She wasn’t in the bedroom when I woke up. I’m sorry! I know you said to stay upstairs, and we did. But I fell asleep, and I didn’t hear her get up.” Tears fill my sister’s eyes, and I breathe through the worry that’s setting up shop in my chest. “Do you think she would have left?”

I shake my head. “I think she found the ninety-day clause to end our marriage signed on my desk,” I admit. “But there was something else. Let me call Colten to check the cameras.”

I can do it myself, but I’m not as efficient as he is, and I don’t have the eye he does to move through the tapes quickly.

He answers on the first ring, but he doesn’t give me a chance to answer. “There’s a dead guard at the back door. Get the girls into the panic room right now,” he barks.

“Lexi, panic room, now,” I relay the message, and she looks like she’s about to argue before she turns on her heel and heads up the stairs.

This is the first time anyone will actually use it, but I’m glad I had everyone learn its location and how to get inside when it was first installed.

“Can you check the camera feeds for the last couple of hours and see if Riley left the house?”

“Left the house?”

I nod to myself, forcing a deep breath into my lungs. “She found the contract and the note.”

“For fuck’s sake,” he mutters. “I told you that shit was going to end badly.”

“There’s more.” I hesitate for a beat, knowing that the second I tell him the next piece of information, it makes everything real.

“There was blood in my office. It looks like Riley may have been trying to tell me something. Like maybe she was taken under duress. But she might have done that to throw us off the scent. To give herself time to get away?” It’s foolish to hope that’s the case, but I can’t help it.

The alternative is allowing myself to consider that my wife has been taken, and that’s a reality I refuse to believe.

Colten is quiet for long seconds that feel more like hours, and every moment that ticks by is more excruciating than the last.

There’s a reason men in the Mafia don’t fall in love, because love makes you vulnerable, something you can’t be when you’re running a criminal empire. But I’ve never felt the reason more than I do right now.

“Fuck,” he mutters.

“What is it?”

“Monica. She and some guy I don’t recognize came to the house, took out Gavin and Craig by surprise.”

“And Riley? Did she leave before they came?” I ask with far too much hope.

“No,” he hesitates for a moment before he audibly swallows.

“Colten, tell me what the fuck is going on!” I snap.

“They got her down the side of the house, and the cameras cut out right as they came into view. They’ve hacked the system.”

I try to breathe through the crushing panic that slams into me, but instead, my body folds in half, desperately dragging in ragged breaths.

“I’m a few minutes away, but I need you to keep your shit together, brother. Check the side of the house, see if you can see anything down there that will help us work out where they took her.”

It takes longer than I would like to get ahold of myself, but when I finally do, I stride out the back door and into the cool evening air. It’s only September, but the weather in Seattle is already starting to gear toward winter.

I don’t react when I see Gavin’s dead body by the back door. I’ll make sure his family is taken care of, but right now I need to focus on finding my wife.

My gun turns the corner before I do, but when I find no one lying in wait, I walk forward quickly, looking for even the tiniest hint that Riley was here.

By the time I reach the front of the house, I’m beginning to lose hope, until I see the puddle of blood pooled within the stones.

I look around, my eyes dragging over the trees that surround the house, scanning for any sign of my girl or the people who came to take her from me.

“Colt?”

“Yeah, man. I’m a minute out.”

“You still got cameras in the forest around the house?”

“I do. Why?”

I swallow through the bile that climbs up the back of my throat. “I think Riley made a run from Monica. I think she’s in the forest.”