Chapter Thirty-Two-Atlas
The sun is bright in Mykonos—obscene, really.
It sparkles off the turquoise water as if mocking me. The breeze carries salt and peace and everything I don’t feel.
Cecilia had laughed this morning. Laughed.
She kissed me goodbye with that wicked little mouth and told me not to be late for dinner.
God, I almost stayed.
I almost canceled the meeting. But I didn’t, because I wanted to clear the path.
Handle Li and the General.
Lock in the ore shipments.
Finish dismantling Dimitri’s grip on Hephaestus United so that I could give her everything.
My wife deserves a world without shadows.
I should have known better. There’s no such thing.
My phone rings.
Luc Batiste.
Odd.
He should still be in New Jersey, drowning in meetings and threatening senators with that signature calm menace of his.
This is not his cell. It’s a SAT phone. Immediately, I understand that this call means something catastrophic.
I answer instantly.
“Mr. Batiste,” I say as I stride away from the helipad.
I just sent a courier via helicopter with classified documents to the General’s location. More money, more promises to get things moving again.
A small fee. A minor hiccup. In the long run, this will all be worth it.
My boots hit the deck hard, “Yes? What is it?”
Chaos bleeds through the line—shouts, engines revving, men prepping for a fight.
And then his voice.
Cold. Stripped down.
A man holding panic together with raw fury.
“Where the fuck are you?”
My entire body freezes.
“What?”
“They took her,” he snarls. “She’s gone.”
For a split second, I don’t understand the words.
Then I do.
And my heart stops beating.
“What the fuck,” I grind out, voice already feral, “did you just say?”
“My wife was on the phone with her when they grabbed Cece, you fuck! They took my daughter!”
The world goes silent.
Not quiet.
Silent.
Like God flipped a switch and cut the sound from reality.
Everything inside me breaks in one violent, catastrophic instant.
I don’t breathe.
I don’t blink.
I don’t think.
I move.
I’m already sprinting—across the deck, down the ramp, into the waiting car. A blur of motion fueled by terror so sharp it feels like glass slicing through bone.
“It happened fast, sir,” Michail says beside me, already pulling up the feed on his tablet.
His voice is underwater, far away, barely reality.
He slides the screen into my line of sight, and the second I see the first frame—
My vision tunnels.
“Reports are coming in now,” he continues. “We lost comms with the house.”
Luc is still shouting into the speaker, but his words dissolve beneath the roaring rush of blood in my ears.
And then the footage plays.
Two black SUVs.
Pulling up to my home with military precision.
Angles perfect.
Timing flawless.
Six men in formation.
No hesitation.
No wasted movement.
Silenced weapons.
Suppressors.
Headsets.
Coordination.
Not amateurs.
Not thugs.
Professionals.
And they are already dead—they just don’t know it yet.
The first two guards drop before they can raise their rifles.
Clean shots.
Instant kills.
The others try—God, they try—but it doesn’t matter.
They’re cut down like nothing. Two seconds. Three at most.
My men, slaughtered on my own fucking lawn.
Then Maria appears.
Maria, young and smiling.
Maria, who made Cecilia tea and brought her pastries.
Maria, who brought her toiletries while they talked about dresses and childhood memories.
Maria, who answers the door with trembling hands and a guilty look that turns my stomach into ice.
Was she part of this?
Did she sell us out?
Before I can process the betrayal, before I can even contemplate the punishment she should have suffered—one of the men smirks and then shoots her.
Point-blank.
No hesitation.
She drops like a marionette whose strings have been cut.
My gut hollows out, leaving nothing but fire and knives.
Then—there.
My Cecilia.
Struggling.
Barely conscious.
Her head lolling, her body limp.
Draped over a bastard’s shoulder like she’s an inconvenience.
Like she’s not the woman I would raze continents for.
Like she’s not the center of my sanity, the axis of my world.
Like she’s not mine.
My wife.
My fierce, brilliant, beautiful wife.
My woman.
My reason.
My fucking everything.
They carry her out the door, her limbs swinging helplessly.
Her hair falling over her face.
Her breath shallow.
Her spirit flickering.
She disappears into the SUV.
The door slams shut with a dull thud.
Both cars peel away in perfect formation, engines silent, vanishing like ghosts.
And I wasn’t there.
I didn’t protect her.
I didn’t stop it.
I didn’t see it coming.
I failed her.
I failed the only thing in this world that has ever mattered.
And there is no pain cruel enough to punish me for it—
not until I make them choke on the consequences.
The phone cracks in my grip, glass slicing my palm, blood dripping onto my thigh. I barely feel it.
I throw the ruined device onto the floor of the car.
“Floor it,” I snarl.
“Sir, the pier is full—”
“GO THROUGH THEM IF YOU HAVE TO!”
The engine screams, the car lurches forward, and we tear down the narrow road, scattering tourists like startled birds.
I grab another phone and start making calls—shouting into encrypted channels, activating dormant accounts, pulling every favor I’ve ever been owed across three continents.
I’m calling warlords.
Black-market brokers.
Interpol contacts.
Smugglers.
Airfield owners.
Then I circle back to my father-in-law and the head of Sigma International Security himself.
“I’m moving now.”
“Wait, we’re sending a team to you—”
“I’m not asking your permission. Look for a file with everything I have in your inboxes. It should be hitting them now.”
“You know who did this?” Luc demands.
“Yes, I know who did this. And he’s a dead man.”
Then I’m back to hunting.
I use every network I’ve built.
Every alliance I’ve bought.
Every throat I’ve shaken in dark rooms.
All of it.
All for her.
Because I know who orchestrated this.
Dimitri.
My uncle.
My father’s brother.
The man who has leached off our family’s fallen monarchy for decades—using my father’s death as a stepping stone, using me as a pawn.
He dared touch her.
He dared take her from me.
“All morning,” I growl, pacing the backseat like a caged lion, “I’ve been saving this goddamn arms deal. Making sure Hephaestus United has the means to produce the promised shipments. Ensuring we stay in the game. Protecting my interests. Protecting everyone’s interests.”
I slam my fist into the window hard enough to fracture the glass.
“And for what? So I could get blindsided in my own home?”
Michail speaks carefully, like a man navigating a minefield.
“Sir, what are your orders?”
Orders.
There is only one left.
My voice drops to a low, lethal rumble.
“We kill anyone who stands between me and my wife. We find Dimitri. We raze his empire. We tear his world apart brick by brick. And we track down everyone in my organization with secret loyalties to my uncle—and we end them too.”
And then quieter, but deadlier, I add, “When we get there, whoever finds Dimitri, they leave him for me. And if he has touched so much as a single hair on her head?”
I swallow hard.
“There won’t be enough left of him to bury.”
Because he went and made this personal.
And there’s no power in this world strong enough to protect him from me now.
For a startling moment, I realize everything I’ve ever worked for is meaningless compared to her.
The legacy my uncle covets.
The empire denied to my father, to me?
Money. Power. Who cares?
None of it matters.
Not without her.
Cecilia isn’t some bargaining chip or temporary bride.
She is it.
The thing I didn’t know I was waiting for.
The one person who could slice open my chest and make my heart beat again.
And she’s been stolen from me.
My piece-of-shit uncle?
He dies tonight.
One scream at a time.
I gave him a chance to slink away.
That’s what I’d been doing all morning. Giving him the courtesy of a bloodless defeat.
But now?
Now I’m bringing the war to him.
I want bodies.
I want his name erased from marble, and ledger, and tombstone alike.
He took her.
He touched what’s mine.
And so help me, I will burn down this whole island if that’s what it takes to get her back.
No mercy. No negotiations.
Only fire.