Chapter Fourteen. Ember #8
“She’s not in here.” I shake my head. “She went to the bathroom fifteen minutes ago, and I don’t think she returned because she’s not in this room.” Dragging a hand over my mouth and beard, I inhale a breath, trying to calm my racing heart. “I’m about to check the bathroom—”
“Nah.” Eli squeezes my shoulder then steps back. “I’ll go check it out. You stay here just in case she returns.”
“Yeah, okay.” I nod, turning to scan the room one more time. Praying to God that I just missed her the previous two times.
“Be back.”
I make my way through the throngs of partygoers, not pausing to reply when my name’s called by various people. Sam stands near the black marble bar, flirting with the bartender while holding a tumbler of liquor in his hand.
“Sam.”
I hate to break up whatever he has going on, especially since I think getting a good nut would loosen him up, but Ember and her whereabouts are my top priority right now.
He turns around at the sound of his name, still wearing the smile he’d been giving the bartender. But my expression must convey the growing anxiety that’s been clawing at me with razor-sharp, bloody talons because the smile fades, replaced by a stoic mask.
“What’s wrong?” he bluntly asks, reaching behind him to set his drink on the bar top.
“Ember. Have you seen her?” My fingers flex and straighten, flex and straighten.
Sam goes unnaturally still, and he studies me for several long minutes as if he’s searching my face for the reason behind my question.
Finally, he inhales a deep breath then slowly releases it.
“Why are you asking me that, Prince? What’s happened to my goddaughter?” His voice is quiet, low, but the ominous tone would have made a lesser man quake in his Ferragamos.
Not me though. Fear settles in my chest and gut like squatters in an abandoned building, and it’s for Ember, not Sam.
“She went to the bathroom almost twenty minutes ago, and she hasn’t returned. I have a bad feeling about this, Sam,” I lowly admit.
“Maybe she became sick. Or is just taking a moment to decompress. She isn’t a people person, and it could be this ball became overwhelming for her…”
He trails off, and I can practically hear the desperation in his tone as he grasps at straws.
Shit, I can’t lie. I’m clinging to that same hope with cold, trembling hands.
Sam rubs his jaw as he inspects the thick crowd.
The second his shoulders drop, I know he’s come to the same conclusion. She’s gone.
Out the corner of my eye, I catch Eli as he reenters the ballroom. Spotting me, he hurries over, pushing a path through anyone in his way. He appears … grim. His mouth is flattened, eyes hooded, and before he even closes in on me and Sam, I already know what he’s going to tell me.
Acidic bile churns in my stomach, and my chest burns. White noise fills my head, the cheerful sounds in the room fading away. I’m damn near deafened by the rush howling in my ears.
Yet … Yet, when Eli says, “She’s not in the bathroom. I searched the entire area and couldn’t locate her anywhere,” I hear him loud and clear. His words are amplified until they threaten to burst my eardrums.
Panic crouches at the edge of my dark fear, ready and hungry to swamp me in its suffocating, blinding grip. But I can’t afford to give in to the almost sensual temptation to fucking lose it. I have to find Ember. It was my job to protect her, keep her. And I’ve failed.
The weight of that guilt is breathtaking and damn near crippling.
“Where is your mother?” Sam snaps, even as he searches the room again.
“She’s right there in front of the second window,” Eli answers for me.
Michelle holds court, surrounded by a circle of women and several men, laughing and chatting away like a queen with her loyal subjects.
“Wait.” I stalk forward several steps, my hands fisting at the sides of my thighs. “Where’s Kareem?”
The three of us silently go over the guests again, and fuck.
“He’s not here,” Eli growls.
“We need to find his ass.” I don’t wait for them as I pivot and stride for the exit. Urgency and blind rage consume me. It could be a coincidence that Kareem is absent the same time as Ember, but every nerve in my body screams that it’s not.
Eli barks out orders to the Cross security team, ordering them to search the building and all the grounds to find Ember and Kareem via his commlink.
Sam keeps stride with me as we push through the doors and step onto the courtyard.
The soft, almost cheerful bubbling of the fountain is incongruent to the panic pounding in my ears and flooding through me.
Matter of fact, the moonlit beauty of the arches, flowers, lush grass, and shadowed alcoves is an affront to the ugliness of my suspicions and rage roiling inside me.
I round the fountain, peering into the darkened stairs behind the stone columns.
“Nothing,” I murmur. “Fucking no—”
The moonlight hits something in the grass, and it glimmers. Breaking into a run, I reach the object in seconds and pick it up.
A shoe. A lone glass shoe.
Ember’s shoe.