I sit up slowly. My head feels like a fucking construction site. “She did?”
“Yes.” Marta lays the suit across the chair by the window, smoothing the jacket. “She also left food for you in the kitchen.”
My chest hurts. I press my fist against my sternum and wait for it to pass. It doesn’t. “What do you mean she ‘left it?’”
The way Marta says it, it sounds like Sophie is gone but I gave explicit instructions to my guards to make sure she stayed here.
“She left enough for several days, all portioned out and labeled.” She almost smiles. “Lucia must like her. She didn’t throw any of it out.”
I’m already standing. “She better not throw out anything Sophie makes.”
The kitchen smells like dark roasted coffee and baking bread. I come through the door scanning the room for her, almost hoping that she’s breaking the rules again and wearing clothes in the kitchen.
But Sophie isn’t here. Lucia stands at the sink, her back to me.
“Where is she.”
Lucia runs the tap then sets a dish in the dry rack.
“Lucia.”
She clatters pots and pans in the sink.
“Lucia.”
She turns and looks at me with a flat expression, wiping her hands on a towel she tucks into her waistband. She says nothing.
I roll my eyes, clench my fists. Women. I pull out my phone and text my security team:
Where the fuck is Sophie?
The bubbles appear as someone starts to respond, then disappear, reappear and disappear again.
FUCK.
Shoving my phone in my pocket, I storm toward the kitchen doorway ready to strangle the first person I see, but Darius and Jett, the two guards I left at the kitchen with Sophie, run in and almost run me over.
They both look startled and I split a glare between them. “Where. Is. She.”
“We fell ill, boss.” Jett says stiffly. “Both of us. We were incapacitated for—”
“How.”
“We’re not sure—” Darius stops. His eyes go to Lucia’s back for one half second, but it’s long enough for me to know exactly what happened.
“Were you eating when it happened?”
My eyes are on Lucia as I say the words. She scrubs the same pot she has been scrubbing since I walked in as if she hears nothing.
Darius clears his throat. “Uh, yes, boss.”
“You look like shit. Get back to your posts.”
Darius and Jett practically vaporize before I finish the sentence. Smart, if useless. I turn on Lucia.
“Is this you? Or did you help her do it?” I move to the counter, lean against it, cross my arms. “Because Sophie has never hurt anyone in her life, and I know what you’re capable of. I grew up in this kitchen.”
Lucia sets the pot in the rack then picks up a glass and holds it to the light to check for spots.
