At two in the morning on a Tuesday in week eight, I sit in the penthouse and I look at the sofa.
The blanket is still in the hall cupboard where Theo folded it the morning he found out he was pregnant.
I kept him on that sofa for a month. My pregnant omega, carrying my child, sleeping on a leather sofa, twelve feet from my bed, because I wouldn't give him his own room until he demanded it.
He asked for a bed and a lock. A bed and a lock. The bare minimum of autonomy and he had to negotiate for it.
If I get him back —whenI get him back — I can't put him back in the cage.
I don't know what to offer him instead. I don't know what "instead" looks like. I've never had to earn anything from someone who couldn't be bought or intimidated or strategically outmaneuvered. Theo Holland is immune to all three.
I sit on the sofa and I press my hands flat on the leather where his body used to be and I breathe in and the scent is almost gone.
"I'm going to find you," I say to the empty room. "And then I'm going to let you choose."
The words sit in the silence and nobody argues with them.
Week nine. Tuesday. The phone rings at six in the morning.
Viktor's voice: "Cath's handler just called her. He wants to meet. Face to face."
I'm already standing. "Where?"
"Diner off Route 9, just south of Poughkeepsie. Two hours."
"She's going?"
"She's already in the car. She called us from the road. She's scared, Dom."
"Is Lily secure?"
"Lily's secure. Full team on the house. Nobody in or out without our knowledge."
"I want eyes on that diner. Not inside. Down the road. License plates, photos, anything."
"Already arranged."
Viktor hangs up. I get dressed. I go to the twenty-first floor and knock on my father's door. One of his men opens it. My father is at the small desk in his suite, dressed, reading. He's always dressed. I don't think he sleeps either.
I tell him about the meeting.
He sets down his reading glasses. "The handler is making a mistake. Face-to-face means he's under pressure. Either Luca is escalating or the handler is freelancing. Either way, he'll be sloppy."
"That's what I'm counting on."
Cath meets the handler at a diner called the Blue Plate off Route 9. She sits in a booth by the window and orders coffee and waits. Our people are in a parking lot two hundred yards south with a long lens on the entrance.
The handler arrives in a gray sedan. The same gray sedan that used to drive past Cath's daughter's house. He's mid-forties, heavy-set, in a dark jacket. He sits across from Cath and orders nothing.
Viktor feeds me the report in real time over the phone from the surveillance car.
"He's talking. She's listening. She looks calm."
"The plates on the sedan?"
"Running them now."
The meeting lasts fourteen minutes. The handler leaves first. Cath waits five minutes, pays for her coffee, and walks to her car. She drives north for ten minutes, then pulls into a rest stop and calls Viktor.
