It's been nine weeks. Sixty-three days since his scent trailed across the loading dock and vanished into a white panel van heading north-west. Sixty-three days since I stood on that concrete platform and pressed my hands against the wall and breathed in the last trace of him before the evening air took it.
I haven't smelled him since. Nine weeks and the scent memory is still sharp enough to cut, but it's memory now, notpresence. I catch phantom traces sometimes — in the penthouse, in the office.
Those traces are fading. The cleaning crew has been through. The air conditioning has cycled. The building is forgetting him.
I'm not.
Viktor runs the casino. I run the search. My father runs everything else, which is the arrangement that none of us acknowledge and all of us understand.
Nikolai moved back into the building the night Theo was taken. Not into the penthouse but into a suite on the twenty-first floor that he commandeered without asking and furnished with items brought from the house upstate. His suits hang in the closet. His coffee maker sits on the counter. His two men stand in the hallway at all times, as if he never left.
He has not commented on this arrangement. Neither have I. The humiliation of it is a low, constant heat beneath my sternum. I am thirty-four years old. I run this organization. And my father has moved back in because I lost my pregnant omega from inside my own building and the empire is bleeding from the wound.
The first two weeks were chaos. I tore the city apart. Every contact, every favor, every debt I'd ever accumulated. I called them all in.
Viktor's people canvassed the industrial district where the van was found. We traced the tire tracks from the rail yard to a rural road heading north-west and then lost them in a network of farm tracks and county roads that branch and merge and disappear into nothing.
I went to Luca Castellano directly. Not a dinner. Not a sit-down at Cipriani's. I drove to his house in Westchester and stood on his doorstep at eleven o'clock at night and asked him where my omega was.
I did it without my father knowing about it, which in hindsight was a mistake.
Luca was in a robe. Silk. He looked surprised to see me, which was either genuine or the best performance I've ever witnessed.
"Dom." He leaned against the doorframe. "What's going on?"
"Where is he?"
"Where is who?"
"Don't."
He held my gaze. The smile was still there. "I heard about the trouble at your casino. The firings. I'm sorry. That must have been difficult."
"Someone took my omega from my building during the firings. The operation inside my casino was run by your people. The timing is not a coincidence."
"I can see why you'd think that." He straightened. The robe fell open at the collar and I could see the chain around his neck, a gold crucifix. "But I don't know anything about an omega, Dom. Whatever happened at your casino, whoever was running whatever operation you think was connected to my family — that's not something I have knowledge of."
He said it as if he were faintly wounded by the accusation. His eyes were steady. The pulse at his throat was steady. The scent coming off him was clean, unremarkable, no spike of cortisol or adrenaline.
Either he was telling the truth or he’s the most controlled liar I've ever met.
I didn't believe him. But I couldn't prove it, and without proof, standing on his doorstep making accusations was doing nothing except showing him how desperate I was.
I left. Viktor drove. We didn't speak.
Week three, my father called Bert Castellano.
I didn't ask him to. I came into my office and found him on the phone, speaking Italian, and by the time I'd processed what was happening, the conversation was over.
" Bert says Luca denies involvement," my father said. He set the phone on my desk. "And Bert believes his son."
"Bert is wrong."
"Possibly. But Bert Castellano has four sons and an operation that spans the eastern seaboard. He is not going to start a war with us over a disputed kidnapping based on his second-youngest's word. If I push him, he pushes back, and we are not in a position to absorb what that looks like."
"So, we do nothing."
"We keep looking."
