I brought him here. Called Dante when I should have kept running. Trusted his protection when I should have known better than to think anywhere could be safe. And now my son is with monsters.
“Scarlett.” Marco’s voice breaks through my thoughts. “The doctor needs to check on Rosa. You should come with me.”
I let him lead me from the room to the medical wing on legs that don’t feel like mine. Everything feels distant and disconnected. Like I’m watching this happen to someone else.
Rosa is laid out on a bed with Dr. Giovanni working on her head. There’s so much blood. Her face is pale and swollen and she’s not moving.
“Concussion,” the doctor says without looking up. “Severe. She tried to fight them off but there were too many.”
She tried to protect him. Tried to stop them from taking my baby. And they beat her unconscious and took him anyway. The guilt is crushing. Suffocating. I can barely breathe past it.
“Is she going to be okay?” I hear myself ask.
“She’ll live. But she needs rest and monitoring for the next twenty-four hours.”
I sink into the chair beside her bed and take her hand. It’s cold and limp.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I’m so sorry.”
She can’t hear me, but I say it anyway because the guilt has to go somewhere.
I sit there for maybe twenty minutes before the shaking gets worse and I have to move. Have to do something other than sit still with my thoughts.
The house is chaos. Guards running everywhere. Phones ringing constantly. Men shouting orders and coordinates and search patterns.
But no one has found Viktor. No one knows where he took my son.
I find myself walking to Dante’s office without meaning to. The door is hanging off its hinges and I can hear him before I see him.
“I don’t care if you have to tear apart every building in Brooklyn! Find him!”
I step inside and stop.
The office is destroyed. Completely demolished. His desk is overturned and splintered. The computer monitors are smashed. Papers everywhere. Books ripped from shelves and thrown across the room. Even the heavy chair is broken into pieces against the wall.
And in the middle of it all is Dante, breathing hard, his shirt torn and bloodstained from his split knuckles.
He’s on the phone and his voice is something I’ve never heard before. Raw. Uncontrolled. Filled with rage so intense it makes the air feel dangerous.
“Seventy-two hours,” he snarls. “We have less than three days to find my son. So stop telling me about problems and start giving me solutions.”
He hangs up and immediately hurls the phone against the wall where it shatters.
Then he picks up what’s left of a lamp and throws that too. Then a picture frame. Then anything else within reach.
I’ve never seen him like this. Never seen the control slip even a fraction. But right now there’s no control. Just pure destruction and rage.
Marco appears behind me. “Boss, we’ve got teams checking Viktor’s known associates. His apartment was cleared out but we’re tracking?—”
“It’s not enough!” Dante roars. He grabs what’s left of his desk and flips it completely over. The crash is deafening. “My son is out there with a traitor and you’re checking apartments?”
“We’re doing everything?—”
“Then do more! Bring me Viktor’s family. His friends. Anyone who might know where he’d take a child. I don’t care what you have to do to make them talk.”
Marco nods and backs out quickly.
Dante stands there breathing hard, staring at the wreckage around him like he doesn’t recognize it.
