“Scan all around the area again, search every building, shed, and fucking overturn every leaf again until you find her!” My shout echoed around the study, and the men standing before me flinched — well, all but Elio.
He waited until my voice had faded from the air. “You heard the boss. Search again. Do it now.”
The men filed out. Between them, they made up the next level of management in the family. They would make sure it was done. I’d never had a reason to doubt them before. They were good men. Yet, as soon as they filed out, I doubted my orders. I needed to be the one to search everywhere.
I didn’t realize I’d voiced that particular doubt aloud until Elio spoke again. “They’re your loyal men. You can trust them.”
“Don’t tell me what I already know,” I snapped.
Elio merely nodded. Fuck. I was losing control. This wasn’t me. This mess of violence and impulse. But since the moment Giada had zeroed in on the rosary beads, and I’d ripped open an abandoned car’s door and found them sitting on the seat, I couldn’t think straight.
Red colored my vision. Fury that was so hot it boiled in my veins tormented me. Yet despite all of that, it wasn’t the anger that was making me abrasive.
It was fear.
I’d never been so afraid.
Elio left the room, and the door had barely closed before my arm lashed out and struck the laptop on my desk, sending it clattering to the floor. It wasn’t enough. My anger surged through me, turning into violence.
The books on the bookcase were next, and then the entire case. It crashed to the floor with a thunderous bang. Next the desk itself became a punching bag. The lamp sitting on the end became a good weight to bludgeon the art on the walls, and the plant where Charlotte had hidden the bug became confetti, crushed under my feet on the carpet.
Time skipped forward again. I couldn’t keep it in place. My hands ached, the knuckles torn and busted. My breath rasped in and out, and the barren hole in my chest where a heart had beat for a few, precious weeks ached.
When time came back to me, I was spent. My arms throbbed, my shirt was dotted with blood, and the room was a wreck.
Nothing remained but the portrait of my mother, serenely smiling down at me, and the wooden cross on the wall above. Wrecking the room had brought me to my knees right below the portrait and the cross. The polished wood of the cross gleamed, and the strict lines of the shape judged me.
I was a man who had feared nothing. A man who’d had nothing to lose for a long time.
That had all changed. I was pushed to a point; a brittle, broken, jagged shard. My infamous control was hanging in tatters, and a stranger stared back at me from the pieces of glass littering the floor.
“Forgive me,” my voice rasped in the sudden silence. “Forgive me, damn me, drag me to hell…just bring her back.”
For the first time since I was a boy, following his mother’s coffin to the burial site, I began to pray.
Before another hour had passed, I was back out, searching the areas around where the abandoned car with the rosary had been found. Night had fallen, and with it, snow swirled in the air. It was bitterly cold and all I could think of was that my little nurse was out there somewhere right now, cold and alone.
Lost.
A vivid memory of the first night we’d met filled my mind. When she’d pleaded for mercy, and that St. Anthony’s medal she wore had caught the light, staying my hand.
“Are you lost, bambina?”
“I’ve always been a lost thing.”
We moved in teams around the neighboring countryside, spreading farther and farther out in circles. My phone rang when dawn was creeping over the horizon.
“I got my brother’s message.” Kirill Chernov’s voice spoke in my ear. “Sounds like you need a little help in the Garden State.”
“What kind of help can you offer?”
“It depends on the situation,” Kirill mused. He sounded far too cool for comfort, compared to the hot and burning storm of emotion inside me.
“The situation is that my wife has been taken-,” I cut off, reining in my pure, undiluted fear. “Something I’ve heard you have experience with.”
Kirill chuckled. “Any chance you have a half-brother waiting in the wings to cause havoc?”
“Unfortunately not,” I snapped. He was talking about the time his brother Nikolai had kidnapped the captive little bride Kirill had been keeping in his penthouse. His childhood sweetheart and lifelong obsession. Kirill had stopped at nothing to get her back. Now, I knew how he felt.
“Then go to your enemy list. I’m confident you have those. No one becomes the capo dei capi of New Jersey without stepping on a few toes.”
“I know who took her. I just don’t know where.”
“Well, my enemy’s enemy is my friend, isn’t that the saying? I’m sure you’ve done your research on the men who took her, so the question is – who has something to gain from helping them?”
Fuck. I was distracted and unbalanced. Making mistakes I couldn’t afford. This wasn’t like me. Now, when control and precision mattered the most, I was a fucking mess for the first time in my life.
I finished talking to Kirill and dialed Giada, and was immediately surprised to hear Lucy’s voice in my ear.
“Lucy? Are you ok? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I just can’t stay in my room anymore. I want to help,” she said quietly.
I nodded, my urgency pushing everything else aside. “Giada already checked out Commissioner Reynolds and Judge Ellens’ residences in the state. I need her to check out more distant connections, exes, siblings, fathers-in-law…everyone.”
“Ok, I’ll tell her.”
It only took Giada five minutes to call me back. She didn’t waste any time.
“700 Riverside Drive, Crestwood – Commissioner Reynold’s ex-wife’s brother-in-law’s place,” she said quickly. “It’s twenty miles from where the rosary was found.”
“Send coordinates to the rest of the men.”
“Done. Ren!” Giada shot out before I could hang up. ‘Go and bring her home.”
“Just try and stop me.”
