Page 69 of His Assistant

This is it. This is the moment where I can still fix it. I can go upstairs, call Dominic, hand him the phone, and let him be furious. He might yell. I might yell. He would lock down the city. He would do whatever violent, terrifying thing he thinks needs to be done.

Maybe he would find my father. Maybe he would fail again.

The car’s back door opens. No one gets out. I hear my own heartbeat pounding in my ears.

I can still see the blood on the pavement. I can see the outlines of the bodies. My father was taken violently, and this may be my only chance to reach him.

Deep down, I know this may be the worst mistake of my life.

I walk to the car anyway.

26

DOMINIC

Chiara calls me while I’m still on the street outside the safe house. I almost don’t answer. Rafe is standing in front of me with blood on his shirt and three different phones going off between us. My men are trying to pull camera footage from buildings with dead feeds. Tomasso is pacing near his car.

Chiara wouldn’t call now unless something was seriously wrong.

“What?” I snap.

“Sofia’s gone,” she says in a panicked voice.

The whole world narrows to those two words. I go still. Rafe notices immediately.

“What do you mean she’s gone?” I shout.

There’s a breath on the other end of the line.

“I thought she was upstairs,” she says quickly. “She wanted to be alone, and I thought it was okay to give her space. But when I went up to check on her, she was gone.”

For a second, I can’t process it. She can’t be gone. There’s no way out of that place without setting off at least a dozen alarms to alert me.

“Sound the alarm,” I tell her. “The building needs to go into lockdown.”

“I already did.”

“Where did you see her last?”

“I told you, I saw her go to her room. She took the elevator up, there’s no way she slipped past me then. It must have happened later.”

“You were supposed to keep an eye on her.”

“I know that!” she snaps, and her voice breaks just enough to stop me from saying something worse. “I’m sorry, Dom. I’m trying. I didn’t know she would run.”

Sofia did not wander out. She did not get lost in a building she has lived in for weeks. She ran. Or someone made her run.

Fear almost swallows me whole. Sofia is gone. She’s probably done something incredibly stupid, too. Whoever took Marco could have lured her out easily, and she was just angry enough to go.

Then the fury takes over. How could she do this? How could she be so reckless?

“Stay where you are,” I tell Chiara. “Do not leave the penthouse. Do not let anyone else leave the penthouse.”

“Dominic.”

“I’m coming.”

I hang up before she can say anything else.