Page 111 of Vow to Claim You

Half an hour.

In half an hour, a woman can disappear. A woman can be taken. A woman can bleed out in an alley while the city steps over her body and keeps walking.

In half an hour, everything can end.

Eero’s hand closes on my arm, and I turn to face him. “What do you need?”

“Car. Now.”

Tassilo already has his phone out, fingers moving across the screen. He knows the protocol. After the last attempt on my life, I had a tracker placed on her. She doesn’t know about it. I didn’t tell her. Didn’t want to explain why a man who married her out of obligation would need to know where she is at all times.

The location appears on Tassilo’s screen. An address on the edge of a village. A café.

The car tears out of the gates. I drive because I wouldn’t stand sitting idly in the back seat. Eero sits beside me, silent for once in his goddamn life. Tassilo and Maylin are behind us, a second vehicle of my men in the mirror.

My hands are steady on the wheel, my knuckles turning white.

She’s fine.

She went somewhere without telling anyone, and she’s fine, and when I find her, she’ll look at me with those black eyes and say something sharp, and I’ll say something cold, and we’ll drive back to the house and⁠—

The image fractures.

My mind runs scenarios, and I can’t stop it. The thought of finding her hurt feels like a knife sliding between my ribs.

The tracker shows her stationary.

Stationary means she’s still there.

Stationary could also mean she can’t move.

Stationary could mean…

“She’s going to be fine,” Eero says. He’s watching me, reading me the way he’s always been able to, even when I give him nothing to read.

I don’t answer. My foot presses harder on the accelerator. The engine screams.

Something in my chest is screaming too—something I’ve spent my whole life learning to silence. It isn’t silent now. It’s loud and raw, and it tastes like fear, which is impossible, because I don’t feel fear. I’ve had guns to my head. I’ve watched men die. I’ve killed with my own hands and slept soundly after.

But this.

Her.

The possibility of finding her… I can’t finish the thought.

I drive faster. Eero glances at me but doesn’t tell me to slow down. He knows better.

Fear. Actual fucking fear pounds through my blood like a second heartbeat, and no amount of control will make it stop.

We pull up short of the café, headlights killed, and I know before the wheels stop turning that I’m looking at a kill-box. The street is wrong. Too quiet. Too dark. Someone has cut the power to this entire block, every window swallowed in black. A sedan sits across the road with the wrong plates, angled for a fast exit. Two silhouettes occupy the front seats.

Tassilo’s car glides in behind ours. I hear doors open. Boots on asphalt. His men fan out without a word.

“Boss.” Tassilo is at my window, voice flat. “This is a setup. Whoever built it wants you through that door fast. We hold. We ring it. We take the building on our terms—ten minutes⁠—”

“No.”

“Aric,” Eero urges. “He’s right. They drew this to bring you in stupid and alone. That’s the entire point of it.”