Chapter 38 NICK
NICK
Avery is somewhere inside these walls, and the woman who took her is here too, and every second I waste is a second too long.
I don't knock. I pound. Hard enough to rattle the frame, hard enough to announce exactly what kind of man is standing on the other side of this door.
"Avery!"
No answer. Just the hollow echo of my voice bouncing off the narrow hallway.
I pound again. Harder. The wood groans under my fist.
"Nadiyah Marchal! Open this goddamn door!"
Silence. Then, movement. The soft shuffle of feet. The scrape of a chain lock being drawn.
The door opens partway, the chain still engaged, and an elderly woman in a headscarf peers through the gap.
Dark eyes, weathered face, an old cardigan draped over a loose housedress.
She looks anxious. Terrified. Behind her, a small boy clings to her leg.
He’s maybe four or five years old, with dark curly hair.
He watches me with the wide-eyed wariness of a child who has learned that strangers can be dangerous.
I've never seen either of them before.
"Where's Nadiyah Marchal?"
The old woman shakes her head frantically. Her mouth works, but the words that come out are fragmented, accented, barely English. She doesn't seem to understand me—or doesn't want to.
The boy tugs at her skirt. "Maman?" His voice is small, worried. "Where's Maman?"
The grandmother—she has to be the grandmother—shoos him back with hushed, urgent words in Arabic if I had to guess.
"I'm looking for Nadiyah." I grip the doorframe, forcing myself to stay on this side of the threshold even though every instinct is screaming at me to tear through the fucking chain and search every room. "I know she's with my wife. Avery. Where the fuck are they?"
The old woman's eyes fill with tears. Distress flickers across her weathered face. And guilt—I'd stake my life on it.
"I don't know," she says. The words are broken, halting. "Sorry. I'm sorry."
She starts to close the door.
Oh, no fucking way. I’m not having it.
I shove hard—one sharp motion—and the chain snaps, the frame splinters, and I'm through. The grandmother stumbles backward with a cry, clutching the boy against her. I'm already moving past them into the apartment.
"Avery?"
My voice echoes off the walls. The space is small. Cramped living room, kitchen visible through an open doorway, a narrow hallway leading to what must be bedrooms. I can see most of it from where I stand.
She's not here.
"Avery!"
Nothing. Just the grandmother's rapid, frightened words tumbling over each other, and then the boy—the little boy who asked about his mother—starts sobbing now, face crumpled, tears streaming down his cheeks as he throws himself against his grandmother's legs.
The sound cuts through me. A child's wail. Pure terror.
Fuck. I'm terrifying a child.
I force myself to stop. Breathe. Pull back from the edge of the rage that’s been building since I read Avery’s fragmented text.
I didn’t come here to traumatize a kid. Part of me hates myself for the fear I see in his eyes.
The other part of me just wants to find Avery and to hell with any collateral damage.
I turn to the grandmother. Her eyes are wet, her hands trembling where they rest on the boy's shoulders. She knows something. It’s written in every line of her face.
"Tell me where to find Nadiyah." I keep my voice low. Controlled. It takes more self-restraint than she'll ever know. "I need to find my wife. Has she taken Avery somewhere?"
The woman searches for words. Her English is broken at best, her thoughts clearly outpacing her ability to express them.
"My Nadiyah..." She presses a hand to her chest. "She's not well. Too much pain." Her voice cracks. "Too much anger. For too long."
"Where did they go?"
More tears. "I tell her no. I tell her this is wrong. Terrible ideas. Terrible plans." The grandmother's face crumples. "She does not listen. She never listens anymore."
My phone buzzes in my pocket. Gabe's number on the screen. I ignore it. There's no time to talk. Not with the boy sobbing and the old woman breaking down and Avery still missing.
"Where. The. Fuck. Did. They. Go."
The grandmother flinches. The boy cries harder, pressing his face into her skirt.
I'm getting nothing useful. She knows something is wrong. She knows her daughter is planning something terrible, but she doesn't seem to know the specifics. Or can't articulate them. The language barrier is a wall I don't have time to climb.
My gaze sweeps the apartment, searching for anything that might tell me where Nadiyah took Avery. I stop when I see the small bookcase against the far wall.
Framed photographs. Arranged with care, clustered together in a way that speaks of devotion. Of memory tended like a garden.
I move toward them, my pulse hammering.
The first image that catches my eye is a woman—Nadiyah, years younger, her face transformed by a smile I've never seen on her. Open. Radiant. Incandescent with joy. She's leaning into a man who stands beside her, his arm wrapped around her waist in an intimate, proprietary way.
The man is older. Much older. Silver hair, olive skin, distinguished features, the bearing of wealth and power. A wedding band glints on his left hand.
I know that face.
The name surfaces from eighteen months ago, rising from the depths of memory like something drowned.
Omar al-Hassan.
The hotel acquisition in Dubai. A family legacy, generations old, crumbling under the weight of the patriarch's stubbornness and his grandchildren's greed.
Omar was the last holdout—the aging lion who refused to accept that his time had passed, who summoned me to the rooftop of his high-rise hotel to beg me to reconsider a deal his own family had already signed.
I should have known that day couldn't end well.
The desperation in his eyes. The way his hands shook when he gripped the railing.
But I was so focused on the acquisition, so certain that business was just business, that I told him there was nothing I could do.
The papers were already being finalized. His family wanted out.
And then he stepped off the roof.
I watched him fall. Stood there frozen while his body plummeted dozens of stories and hit the concrete below with a sound I still hear in my nightmares.
His blood was still drying on the pavement while lawyers shuffled paperwork in the lobby, and I told myself it wasn't my fault.
His pride killed him, not my ambition. My offer was generous. The family wanted out.
But now I'm standing in the apartment of Omar's mistress, staring at photographs of a life I destroyed, and my wife is missing.
The floor drops from under me.
I turn back to the grandmother. My voice is quieter now, but no less urgent.
"Your daughter. Nadiyah. Think, please. Where did they go?"
The woman searches for the words. "I don't know. I hear the door, I come out, they are gone."
I pull out my phone. Check the ping on Avery's location.
The dot hasn't moved. Still in this building. Still here.
My gaze lifts toward the ceiling and a sickening feeling washes over me.
Ah, Christ. The roof.
Nadiyah didn't take Avery out of the building. The phone signal confirms it. She took her up.
The image from Dubai surfaces unbidden. Omar on the rooftop. The wind. The ledge. The moment before he stepped off.
The symmetry is obscene. Deliberate. This isn't random. It's ritual. Nadiyah intends to recreate the death that broke her, and she's using Avery to do it.
Ah, Christ.
Please. Don't let me be too late.
I'm already moving. The stairwell door is at the end of the hallway. I shove through it without breaking stride. The concrete and fluorescent light swallow me, and I take the stairs two at a time.
One flight. Two.
Every landing is marked with a painted floor number. Third. Fourth. Fifth. My lungs burn. My legs burn. None of it matters.
The sixth-floor rooftop access door comes into view, and I hit the push bar at full speed.
The door slams open and stays there.
Cold air. Gray sky. Wind that cuts through my jacket like a blade.
And then I see them.
The scene registers in fragments, my mind processing faster than I can absorb.
Avery. Fifteen feet from a ledge. Her hair whipping around her pale face, her green eyes finding mine the moment I appear.
"Nick—no! Stay back!"
Nadiyah. Positioned beside her, one hand gripping Avery's arm. The instant I appear, she yanks Avery backward, pulling her in front like a shield.
The gun. I see it in the same moment it moves, rising from where it was held at Avery's side to press against her temple. Black metal against blonde hair.
Nadiyah's voice carries across the distance, calm and clear: "Stop."
I halt. My lungs lock. Every muscle seizes at once, my body refusing the next breath.
For one terrible instant, the world narrows to that single point of contact—the gun barrel against Avery's head. My wife. The mother of my child. My hands are shaking. I can feel my pulse in my temples, in my scarred knuckles, in the pit of my chest where some of the hope I’ve been carrying has just gone dark.
The city roars below us. The gray sky stretches overhead, indifferent. None of it exists. There is only Avery, and the woman holding a gun to her head, and the vast, unbridgeable distance between where I stand and where I need to be.
I raise my hands. Slowly. Palms out. Empty.
"Avery."
Just her name. Not a command. A grounding. A tether thrown across the impossible space between us.
Her eyes are wet, but she's holding herself together. She gives me the smallest nod that seems to say, “I'm here, I'm okay, I'm still fighting” and my chest unclenches by a fraction. She's alive. She's conscious. She hasn't given up.
Neither will I.