A door opened.
His head jerked up, pulse slamming against his ribs, thinking it was his staff, thinking someone finally had news, thinking—-
But the door to his office remained closed.
The sound had come from behind him.
He knew what he'd heard. The soft click of a handle turning, the whisper of hinges, a sound so small that he shouldn't have been able to hear it over the hum of the building and the blood in his own ears, and yet he'd heard it, the way he heard her footsteps, the way he heard everything about her whether he wanted to or not.
"Olivio?"
His body moved before his mind caught up.
He was on his feet and turning with a speed that nearly cost him his balance, and disbelief locked every joint rigid, because Chelsea was standing in the doorway.
Not the office door.
The other doorway. The one that connected his office to the private bedroom adjoining it, the room he'd mentioned to her once, in passing, on their third night, when she'd asked why there was a door behind his bookcase that she'd never seen him open.
She'd been here.
The entire time.
The entire time he'd been pacing this office, calling in favors across two continents, exposing his heart to every person he knew, mobilizing the combined resources of the Cannizzaro and Marchetti networks to search a city of three million people—-
His wife had been twenty feet away, asleep in his bed.
And when he took it all in, her appearance, the mussed hair, the braid half-undone the way it was always half-undone but more so now, as if sleep had finished what her restless hands had started, the rumpled clothes, her eyes swollen and red-rimmed and blinking against the office light with the dazed confusion of someone surfacing from a depth they hadn't planned to reach—-
She was looking at him the way she'd looked at him on Day One. Like he was something she couldn't quite believe was real.
Except this time, her eyes were full of tears.
Chapter Eleven
CHELSEA CURLED HERSELFinto a ball and just breathed. She had been here for hours. The tears on her cheeks had already dried, but her heart had yet to stop breaking.
