Page 67 of The Kingpin’s Bride

Someone had helped them. Someone with resources. The knowledge sat under my ribs like a second pulse I could not quiet. Fucking traitors.

Morena was standing in the center of the room holding Camilla’s photograph against her chest with both hands. The soft white top I had dressed her in clung to the shape of her. Her bare feet were planted on the marble as if she had decided the floor itself might disappear if she moved.

She did not look up when I entered. She did not need to.

The air in the room had changed. I had seen that stillness before on men who had decided the cost of living was higher than the cost of dying. On her it looked different. It looked like something that had finally run out of places to hide.

“You eavesdropped,” I said.

It was not a question. Her fingers tightened on the photograph until the edges bent. When she finally lifted her face the blue of her eyes was raw and wet and completely unbroken by fear. What lived there instead was worse. “You aren’t trying hard enough.”

The words came out low and cracked. Then louder.

“I need you to try harder!”

I closed the door behind me and stayed where I was.

“The trail went cold. I’ll fix it.”

“Fix it?” The sound that left her was almost a laugh, sharp and ugly. “She’s four years old. She’s been with him for months.”

She came at me with her fists.

Open hands first, striking my chest and shoulders with more force than I expected from the slight frame I had held under the stage lights. Then closed fists, the blows landing against my ribs and the hard plane of my sternum. She was crying now, the sobs tearing out of her between every strike, years of swallowed terror and the public claiming and the cream and the collar and the murder she had watched all pouring out at once. I let her hit me.

I kept my arms at my sides and took every blow. The physical impact was nothing. The sound of her breaking was the thing that opened the floodgates.

She had endured the auction. She had endured the public consummation. She had asked for the cream and licked my release from the floor and come on my cock while the image of a dead politician was fresh behind her eyes. She had never fully broken in front of me until this moment.

“You promised,” she sobbed, fists moving. “You said you would bring her home. You said it.”

Her voice cracked completely. The next swing was weaker. I caught her wrists before the following blow could land and held them against my chest. She fought the restraint, twisting, trying to pull free, the collar shifting against her throat with every desperate movement. “Let go of me.”

“No.”

“I heard you,” she said, the words raw. “I heard every word. Empty airstrip. No flight plan. Vanished. We’re never going to find them. Only I can do that now.”

I kept her wrists locked in my hands and forced her to meet my gaze.

“The trail is cold. That is the truth. Dario had help. Camilla is alive,” I pleaded. “I talked to her myself, remember? She’ll be waiting for you somewhere. I am burning every resource I have to find them. I will not stop until she is breathing in this penthouse or I am dead. That is also the truth.”

Morena stared at me for a long second. Then something in her expression shifted, the grief hardening into something sharper and more final.

She wrenched one hand free with a strength born of pure desperation and reached behind her. When her arm came back there was a knife in it.

The edge caught the light as she raised it between us.

Her hand shook violently. The point of the blade was aimed at the center of my chest.

“Let me go.”

I looked at the knife, then at her face. “Let you go where? Also, fuck no.”

“You have to let me leave. I will only come back when you have Camilla. Not before. Only when she is safe,” she insisted.

“You are not walking out that door.”

She made a broken sound and used her free hand to yank the heavy gold ring from her finger. The pale, expensive stone flashed once before she threw it. The ring struck the center of my chest and fell to the marble with a small, final sound. She stared at the place it had landed as if the act of removing it had cost her something she could not name.