Subba and the others followed me up, weapons out. “Let me take point!Nicolai!For fuck’s sake, Nicolai, at least let me go infront!”
I galloped up the steep steps by twos and threes to the third floor as fast I could manage.
On the top floor, I glanced out the window as I called and searched. Three of my other men who’d been with me ran into the courtyard, scanning.
Abimbola was talking on his phone as he searched the sky.
Sirens wound up in the distance.
I stood at the top window of the building, my hands pressed against the anachronistic glass, staring in horror at my security men far below, wandering fuckingaimlesslyinstead offinding her.
I knocked over a chair looking under a table on one level, stripped back bedsheets from an obviously empty bed on another.
I should have made her leave me when I’d received the video. I should’ve been the frigid bastard that I was to everyone else. I should have hurt her feelings and watched disdain grow in her eyes.
Ueli should have dragged her away and dumped her and her beater car in a back alley of Las Vegas, where she would’ve been safe from my world. I should’ve screamed at her and said unforgiveable thingsto make herleave me.
That lawyer of hers should have earned her goddamned Birkin purse and convinced Lexi to get the hell away from me.
I’d been too selfish to be the man who could drive her away because I couldn’t have borne the anger in her eyes. I was an idiot.
I was in Hell.
My phone rang in my hand, and the screen lit up.
Unknown number.
I juggled it, shouting and running my thumb over the slider at the same time. “Lexi?Lexi!”
A Russian man’s voice, hoarse with late middle age and a lifetime of scalding vodka, said, “She is gone. You will not find remains. You should plan rest of your life.”
A woman-sized hole ripped in my world, sucking my soul into darkness.
Air ceased to exist in my body. My lungs and heart collapsed inward, and I choked.
No. Don’t.
Come back.
Horror struck me, that Volkov, forsurelyI recognized Volkov’s voice, had murdered her.
He’d taken her from me.
I wouldannihilatehim, and Alina, and everyone else he loved. Not asmearof them would remain.
The stone floor of the third level of Juliet’s House rushed at me. I shoved it away with my hand but couldn’t fight its gravity. The stone floor froze my hand and grew up my arm to my heart.
My forehead pressed the stone.
A picture flashed on my phone screen.
A woman with dark, unseeing eyes lying on these pale terra cotta stones, scarlet blood sticking to the porous rock and the curves of her face I’d touched that morning.
My heart?—
Her slack mouth, empty of breath.
Her gaze, unfocused.
