Page 27 of Accidental Alliance

The knot in my stomach twists harder when there is no answer.

I rake a hand over my face, exhaustion making everything feel too amplified. This entire day has been one long exercise in restraint, and now that I am here in the quiet wreckage of what I chose, I can feel all of it starting to crack.

My gaze catches on the hallway leading down to the bedroom and I stop. From where I stand, I can see only the edge of the doorway and the faint light coming in from the window. I move toward it slowly, almost against my own will, every step heavy with dread and something far more dangerous than that.

I stop in the doorway.

For one suspended heartbeat, I forget how to breathe.

The sight of it empty nearly puts me on my knees.

She’s gone.

6

ELIO

For three days, I do not hear from her.

Not a call.

Not a text.

No whisper through a mutual contact or sighting passed along by one of the men I trust. Not even through an indirect message people in our world know how to send when they do not want a paper trail leading back to them.

She disappears so completely, it feels intentional.

Maybe that is the point.

The silence settles into my bones by the end of the first day as a slow poison I cannot spit back out.

At first I tell myself she needs space. That grief has its own gravitational pull no one can escape from and no sane woman would want the man who allowed her to wake up alone and uninformed anywhere near her after a blow like that.

I tell myself she is with family or hidden away, guarded and somewhere safe enough to collapse without having to worry who might see her do it.

I am not sleeping much to begin with, but whatever scraps of rest I used to get vanish entirely after that.

Night becomes a series of pacing loops through my apartment, the whiskey bottle I’ve never touched slowly growing emptier and emptier while the city glows beyond the windows to a kingdom I have no hand in owning.

I find myself staring at my phone for stretches of time that make me feel insane, waiting for it to light up with her name.

But it never does.

I have never begged for anything in my life. Not for loyalty, mercy, for honor, and especially not for love.

But with every passing hour of her silence, I get closer to understanding what kind of man would drop to his knees for a single word from the right woman.

And the worst part is that I deserve it.

I deserve every second of not knowing where she is, how she is, whether she is sleeping or eating or drowning under the weight of her grief. I deserve to stare at a blank screen until my eyes burn.

I deserve the tightening in my lungs every time my phone buzzes with someone else’s name.

I answer when I have to. I give orders, sit in meetings, put on my suit and my face and my voice, and to everyone around me, I am exactly what I have always been, a man built by discipline and forged through violence.

A man who does not bleed in public no matter how deep the knife goes.

But inside, I am unraveling stitch by stitch.