It takes every morsel of willpower in me not to hurl my glass. “Well then, I’ll need to relieve you of any duties regarding this, Bernard, because I will not have anyone helping me who does not believe in my fucking wife.” My voice teeters on the manic edge of an irate bellow while also infusing a chilling equanimity—it’s sinister even to my own ears. “Even if she fucking escaped me so she can put me in the goddamn ground, anyone who wants to be in my good graces until that happens will attest to her innocence.”
In his very Bernard way, he furrows his salt-and-pepper brows. “You’d rather die defending her than live believing she was a traitor—is that it?”
This man is my mentor, the closest thing I have to a father and a guide, and he’s breaking me when I’m already fucking broken.
“Yes.” I swig the remainder of my drink, slam the glass down, and pace with my heart in my throat and a murderous wrath pumping through my bloodstream. “Zara is life. Maybe you can’t see it, but I’m convinced I was a corpse for the last forty years, so yes. If I have to return to the grave, let it be with her beauty still with me.”
“Good,” he breathes, waiting for me to twist back to him. “There’s no way that girl betrayed you or left you. She loves you with everything she is, but I wanted to see where you were at.”
Relief shudders out of my lungs. He fucked with me, but it only makes me love him more because he did it for her, and Zara deserves to have people in her corner.
If it were anyone else who’d disappeared, I would have mixed emotions about him confirming they hadn’t betrayed me because I would assume they’d been kidnapped. But with Zara, if that’s the case, I fear more for whoever managed to take her. That’s not to say I’m not worried about the prospect of someone daring to do her harm. I will destroy anyone who so much as causes her to frown—unless she annihilates them first. But if she left me on purpose, it might be a hell of a lot harder to get her back.
After I make myself a cup of coffee, allowing the steamy bitterness to soothe some of the gravel in my throat, I sit catercorner from him. “What have you found?”
He glances at his phone. “A few things on Kratos, but nothing earth-shattering. They are largely a mystery to all. Perhaps the biggest piece of intel I have is that she was here—or her bracelet was.”
My thrashing heart slams into my sternum with brute force. “What the hell are you talking about? Why didn’t you fucking lead with that?”
“Because we’ve searched and she …” He trails off, and it’s then that I notice the heavy bags under his eyes and the hearton his fucking sleeve. “It was brief—maybe three minutes, tops—before her tracker was disengaged, but the bracelet accessed an entrance in the North Tower.”
I’m up and striding to the door, ready to conduct my own search. “Cameras?”
“Wiped.”
“All of them?” I scoff, peering at him from the threshold.
“No.” He rises, shaking his head. “Just the one that would offer a view of the door.”
“And we didn’t get anything beyond that?”
He rubs his jaw, patently disappointed in his response. “Unfortunately, we have nothing that looks like her or anyone we can’t identify. Initially, I believed maybe whoever had her had taken her for access. But then we should have a glimpse of someone here who wasn’t authorized to be here. From what we’ve gathered, she used a concealed passageway near the North Tower entrance that Maddox had escorted her through a while back, and she accessed coded entries within the walls.”
“She’s here then,” I grind out, half wanting to hug her if she is and half wanting to throttle her. “She has to be.”
His face falls—this is why he didn’t lead with it. “I don’t believe so, but the entire resort is on lockdown. No one is coming or going without being screened. We cleared the penthouse and Maddox and Tessa’s apartment. And I have Kane digging through the footage from the entire resort for the last few hours. But we suspect she wedged a few doors in order to exit.”
I start to head out, but I turn back. “This was when, an hour ago?”
“About an hour and a half.”
I storm out of my office, scouring the penthouse for any fucking sign that she returned—nothing—before heading to my bedroom. The second I walk in, my stomach wrenches. I can still feel her, like she imprinted herself on every facet of my life. Evenknowing that the loyalty test was coming, I never expected to be alone here again. I thought she’d be torn apart, maybe forced to choose between her family and me. But we’d be together and I’d be able to read her, to subtly guide her. Or to eradicate any motherfucker who threatened to steal her from me.
Scanning every nook and cranny for something out of place or somewhere she might stow away, my attention finally settles on our bed. And sure enough, on my bedside table sits her bracelet.
And a stone.
She was fucking here.
She’d left me on purpose. I think I knew that all the way back in Greece, but it’s gutting to be facing the truth nonetheless. Did she arrange for that battle? For us to fight in that church? No. She killed too many of them for it to be a setup she’d planned.
Maybe she took it as a sign to flee?
I trudge closer, eyeing that small rock with so many conflicting emotions surging in my veins that I can’t make sense of it.
My mind immediately replays the first time she mentioned this symbol.
“I chose to become the best, to see the work for what it was, to concentrate on jobs that made the biggest difference. One stone.”
