“Ramiro. Block the line, and stop interrupting me with this.”
I could hear the faint ring of my phone on the desk, but I ignored it the way I had been doing all morning, keeping my attention fixed on the document beneath my hand.
Ramiro moved before I could stop him.
He crossed the office swiftly, picked up the phone, and I did not even look up.
“They sent a text message, Boss.” His jaw tightened faintly as he read the screen.
Before I could decide whether it was worth acknowledging or discarding, his voice changed.
“Boss...”
He hesitated, just long enough for the air in the room to shift.
“It concerns Miss Loretta.”
Everything inside me stopped.
The pen slipped from my fingers and hit the desk with a sharp clatter.
Panic cut through the restraint I had built over eight months. It was the first real news of her since she vanished from my life, and I could hardly remain steady.
My voice dropped, low and unsteady.
“Speak properly. Is she well?”
Ramiro swallowed once.
“She’s in labor.”
The words did not register immediately.
Labor.
“She’s having severe contractions. Active labor.” His eyes held mine carefully. “She asked the doctor to call you personally.”
For one brutal second I forgot how to breathe.
Loretta was... pregnant.
Pregnant?
The realization hit me like a bullet straight through the ribs.
My wife had vanished eight months ago with divorce papers on the nightstand and a warning written beneath her signature in elegant black ink.
Do not come after me.
I’m done.
If you try to find me, I will make sure you never see me alive again.
But I had gone after her anyway—hunted her across borders and silence itself, as though sheer will could drag her back into existence. And yet there was nothing. Not a trail. Not a shadow. Not even the faintest mistake left behind for me to follow.
I had wondered how she managed it so perfectly, so surgically precise that even men like mine—men who owned information, cities, silence—came up empty. A man like me, whose reach was supposed to be absolute, reduced to searching shadows.
Was she still in the city? Had she crossed borders I was never informed of? Had my own men failed me, or had she simply learned how to disappear from someone like me?
