Chapter 18 Dom
"They exited before the first camera. There's a two-mile stretch between the on-ramp and the first highway camera. Somewhere in that stretch there's an exit or a turn-off."
Viktor pulls up the map. It’s an industrial area with warehouses, storage facilities, a decommissioned rail yard. Plenty of places to hide an omega.
"Get people down there. Every building, every lot."
"On it."
He leaves. I stand for a moment thinking, then turn around, planning to grab my coat and join them. There is no way I am standing in this penthouse while my omega is out there.
The elevator chimes. My father walks in wearing the dark coat, his face set in the expression he wears when he has already decided what is going to happen and is simply waiting for reality to comply.
He stops in the living room. He looks at the sofa and his nostrils flare.
"Stinks of omega in here."
"Hello to you too."
He takes his coat off and lays it over the chair. He doesn’t sit. He stands there with his arms folded.
"Give me details."
I tell him. The stairwell. The loading dock.
The white van and the camera gap and the eleven minutes and the fact that they timed it perfectly, that they used my own purge as cover, that they walked into my building and took my pregnant omega while I was standing floors away firing the people they'd already written off.
My father listens. He doesn't move.
“This is a problem,” he says.
And that’s it. That’s the line that makes me lose it. I’m done being polite to him.
“No shit, Sherlock.” I say.
“Watch your mouth.”
“Why? All you do is come in here and tell me I have problems I already know about and criticize me for them. Do you do anything to actually help? No. I’m done with it.”
My father looks like he wants to punch me in the face. “So, what are you going to do? Since you’re so clever.”
I shrug into my coat. “I’m going to Luca's house and he and I are going to have a conversation. Maybe you’re right about something. Sometimes the old ways worked best."
"No. You're not."
"He has Theo. He has my child. Your grandchild."
The room goes quiet. My father's hands tighten. I can see the shift in his knuckles, the tendons standing out against the age-spotted skin.
"How far along?"
"Early. A month, maybe five weeks."
He's quiet for a long time. He looks at the sofa again.
"A grandchild," he says.
"Yes."
He sits down. It's the first time in this conversation that he's taken a seat and the movement is slow, deliberate. He lowers himself onto the sofa, onto the exact spot where Theo sleeps, and rests his hands on his knees.
"Your mother was pregnant when I decided to keep her," he says. "I didn't know it at the time. She told me three weeks after the fact."
I've never heard this.
"I was going to let her go. She was a complication. I had enemies who would have used her against me and I was younger than you are now and not as careful. But she was pregnant and that changed the calculation."
"Because of the baby."
"Because of the family. An empire without heirs is a business.
A business can be sold, broken apart, absorbed.
A family endures. I kept your mother because she was carrying you.
And then I kept her because she was carrying you and I loved her.
Those are different reasons but they arrived at the same conclusion. "
He looks up at me from the sofa. His eyes are pale and steady and for once I can read what's in them.
“I’d want to kill Luca too,” he says. “"Which is precisely why you're going to sit in this office and think instead of driving across the city to do something that gets all three of you killed.
" My father's voice hasn't changed. It's the same level, measured tone he uses for everything.
"The Castellanos took your omega because they want something.
They haven't called yet, which means they're letting you feel it.
When they call, and they will, you need to be in a position to negotiate.
You can't negotiate from a jail cell or a body bag. "
"I'm not going to negotiate."
"Yes, you are. You're going to agree to whatever Luca asks, you're going to get Theo back, and then you're going to destroy him. That's the order. Not the other way around."
"What if they hurt him?"
"They won't. Not yet. He's leverage, Dominic. He's only useful intact. Luca Castellano is smarter than his father in some respects and one of them is that he understands the value of a hostage who can be returned undamaged. A damaged hostage means war. An undamaged hostage means a deal."
The logic is sound. The logic doesn't touch the thing inside my chest. I told Theo he was protected. I told him the Castellanos wouldn't get to him. I said it with the same certainty I say everything.
He was starting to believe me.
"Viktor," my father says. He hasn't raised his voice. Viktor appears in the doorway within seconds, which means he was just outside.
"You told me Cath communicated with the Castellanos through a prepaid phone. Does she still have it?"
Viktor looks at me. I look at my father. The thought hadn't occurred to me. We fired Cath to maintain her cover. The Castellanos think she's been caught and dismissed. But the phone. The prepaid phone they left in her locker six weeks ago.
"Call her," my father says.
Viktor dials, putting the phone on broadcast. The ringing fills the office. Two rings. Three. Four.
"Viktor?” Cath's voice, strained, alert.
"Cath. Are you somewhere you can talk?"
"I'm at home. What's happened? I saw the security team clearing people out after I left. What's—"
I take the phone. "Cath, it's Dom. Theo's been taken. From the building, this afternoon. Castellanos."
Silence. Two seconds.
"Oh God."
"The phone they gave you. The prepaid. Do you still have it?"
"It's in my handbag. I always keep it on me. They said I had to answer within two rings or—" She stops. "It hasn't rung. Not since this morning."
"What did they say this morning?"
"Nothing unusual. The usual instructions. Which tables, which shifts. Except." She pauses. "There was something. He told me to make sure I was working the main floor between four and five today. Visible and in position. I didn't think anything of it."
"They don't know you've been turned," I say.
"No. They think I was fired with the others."
"They'll contact you," my father says from across the room. "They think you're angry and frightened and newly unemployed. You're useful to them again. They will reach out."
"And when they do?" Cath's voice is thin.
"You answer. You tell them exactly what happened. You're furious. You want to know what happens now, whether Lily is still safe. And you listen. Any location, any name, any sound in the background that tells us where they're operating from."
"You want me back in."
"I wouldn't ask if there was another way."
There’s silence on the line. I can hear a television in the background. Cartoons. Lily is there. Cath is in her living room with her granddaughter and I'm asking her to put herself back inside the machine.
She exhales. A long, shaking breath. "Whatever you need, Dom. You know that."
The line goes dead. I set the phone on the desk.
Viktor's tablet buzzes. He picks it up, reads, and his face changes.
"They found the van," he says. "Decommissioned rail yard, mile and a half from the highway exit. Abandoned. Engine's still warm. There are tire tracks from a second vehicle beside it. Another van, standard width. They switched."
"Direction?"
"The yard exits onto a rural road heading north-west. After that, the camera coverage disappears completely. We're into farmland and forest."
North-west. Away from the city. Away from Luca's known properties, which are all in the metro area. Wherever they've taken him, it's not somewhere obvious.
"Keep looking," I say. "Every traffic camera on every road heading north-west within a fifty-mile radius. And get Cath's phone on a trace. If the Castellanos call it, I want to know where the call originates."
Viktor nods and leaves. My father remains in the chair.
The office is quiet. The city glows outside the window.
Somewhere out there, in the dark, on a rural road heading north-west, Theo is in a vehicle with people who took him from me and I am sitting in this office because my father told me to sit and for the first time in my adult life, I believe my father is right about something.
My gaze catches sight of Theo’s notebook, left on the side table. I reach over and open it.
It’s not the first time that I have. The coded notes cover page after page, a cipher that only he can read. I turn the pages slowly. His handwriting is small and precise and consistent. He wrote this sitting at the table in the bar. He’s never trusted me. It seems he was right.
I close the notebook. I put it in my desk drawer. I pour a glass of water because if I pour scotch I won't stop and I need to be clear when Luca calls.
My father watches me and I ignore him. I drink the water and I look at the window and I wait for a phone to ring. It doesn’t.