Samil tried to kill them. He tried to kill me, but fuck that. He tried to kill mychildrenand instead killed their mother.
“I’m going to kill him,” I declare. “I’m going to squeeze the life from him with my bare hands and watch his eyes as he dies.”
“As much as I’d like to think you’re not serious, I know that you are. Except you understand you can’t, of course.”
Nora. My children’s mother. That fucking motherfucker. He killed her.
I flip over to Rowan, murder blazing in my eyes. “No? Tell me why not. I am king and he killed my wife. The queen of my country, when he was actually trying to kill me and my children, the future heirs, instead. How is killing him not self-defense?”
“It was investigated, Sebastian. All of it was. If he had done something to the helicopter, it would have been found!”
“Here,” Javier interrupts, and I turn my focus back to the screen. Rowan rounds the desk so we can all see the monitor. Javier taps something on the keyboard, blowing up the image, and we watch as the maintenance crew goes through their checks. It’s grainy, but nothing seems out of order. We continue to watch and watch, speeding up the tape a bit, and still nothing. The maintenance crew finish and then it’s over. Just an empty hangar with the exception of the helicopter.
Maybe I was wrong about Samil tampering with the helicopter.
“Wait. What was that?” Javier asks, bolting forward in his seat, his face practically pressed to the screen.
“What?” Rowan questions, and I squint, not having seen anything either.
“That blip. Look.” He rewinds the footage and points to the far right side of the screen. “Did that wrench move? It was in the other spot next to the socket wrench before, was it not?”
“I don’t know,” Rowan says skeptically. “Maybe?”
We rewatch it one more time and yes. A wrench is in one place one second and in another in the next. Tiny. Nearly impossible to see. Easy to miss since nothing else is out of the ordinary or even appears to move. Just that one wrench and if you were to blink, you’d miss it.
“He must have tampered with the video,” I state. “His only fuck-up was putting a wrench back in the wrong place, and god, of the three of us, only one of us caught it.”
Javier nods absently as he types something into the search, and the image changes to blocks of cameras from Nora’s parents’ estate. He scrolls through that day starting at midnight, and we find it.
Nora fighting with Samil.
There is no audio, but the two seem to be going back and forth. She’s shaking her head, visibly upset, and he keeps coming at her, after her. Relentless fucker wouldn’t leave her be.
Finally, she shoves him away, shakes her head one last time, and he leaves. He leaves to go tamper with the helicopter he knew I and the children would be on later. And we didn’t catch it because he was smart enough to cover his tracks, and we didn’t check this footage before because why would we?
“Jesus Christ,” Rowan is speechless, his hand over his mouth as he stares at the monitor. “I can’t…I can’t fucking believe that. I can’t fucking believe that.”
“Where is he now? He stormed out of the ballroom. Where did he go?”
Javier switches the feed to the palace, and all I can think about is how relieved I am that Bellamy and the children are in the ballroom surrounded by hundreds of people and royal attendants.
“This is him leaving the ballroom.” Javier points to the back of Samil’s head in the video feed. “He’s heading for the stairs.”
I watch as he picks up a vase and smashes it against the wall before storming out. Javier changes the camera, and the valet retrieves his car, and Samil climbs in and tears out of the driveway. Thank God. But now we have to find him and?—
My phone rings in my pocket, and when I see it’s Althea, a silent dread fills my stomach.
“Althea?” I answer, my gaze slingshotting between Rowan and Javier.
“Sebastian, where are you?”
“In my office. What’s wrong?”
“Bellamy. She left to use the restroom and hasn’t returned.”
Fear grips me, freezing over my insides. “When? How long ago?”
“It’s been at least fifteen minutes. The attendant who wentwith her hasn’t returned either. I tried to call her phone just now and it rang once and then went to voicemail.”
