CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
AXEL
The flight was agonizingly slow. I spent most of it on calls with my CIA contacts, a private investigator, Bernard, and my brothers.
I’ve never wanted to extricate myself from my own skin more.
Maybe when I was summoned to my house fire, informed two bodies were pulled from within, and discovered my mother was one of them. Maybe then.
But the rage threatening to crack through my outer shell feels foreign. I can’t fucking breathe or see straight or think.
The last sighting of Zara’s trackers was in New Orleans, which is utterly baffling.
And then they went off. I can’t have the entire city searching for her, like I would traditionally do, because there’s the risk that some of the officials who are in my pocket are also in KORT’s.
Instead, I’ve got my brothers covertly combing the city.
Bernard grabs me as soon as I exit the limo in the garage, towing me inside.
An up-tempo swing song is piped through the sound system, and it makes me want to smash a cymbal over someone’s head.
We take my private elevator and breeze straight to the penthouse office so we don’t disturb anyone or alert the masses that I’m here.
As soon as we’re inside, I drag my hand over my mouth, willing my lips to stop threatening to quiver.
“Tell me you have intel. Or that you have a hunch. Tell me she didn’t fucking leave me.
Tell me we can find her before KORT does.
Tell me something that will keep me from blowing up the whole goddamn city. ”
“You clearly haven’t slept in twenty-four hours, so have a seat before you collapse.
” He shoves a glass of scotch in my hand, dipping his chin to it in a command to drink and probably to calm the fuck down.
As I guzzle a hefty swill, he continues, “I’ve found some things.
And I’m no less confused than you are about what the hell is going on, but I think the possibility of her betraying you is greater than you’d like it to be. ”
He should’ve just fucking thrown a hatchet at me. That would’ve hurt less.
It takes every morsel of willpower in me not to hurl my glass.
“Well then, I’ll need to relieve you of any duties regarding this, Bernard, because I will not have anyone helping me who does not believe in my fucking wife.
” My voice teeters on the manic edge of an irate bellow while also infusing a chilling equanimity—it’s sinister even to my own ears.
“Even if she fucking escaped me so she can put me in the goddamn ground, anyone who wants to be in my good graces until that happens will attest to her innocence.”
In his very Bernard way, he furrows his salt-and-pepper brows. “You’d rather die defending her than live believing she was a traitor—is that it?”
This man is my mentor, the closest thing I have to a father and a guide, and he’s breaking me when I’m already fucking broken.
“Yes.” I swig the remainder of my drink, slam the glass down, and pace with my heart in my throat and a murderous wrath pumping through my bloodstream.
“Zara is life. Maybe you can’t see it, but I’m convinced I was a corpse for the last forty years, so yes.
If I have to return to the grave, let it be with her beauty still with me. ”
“Good,” he breathes, waiting for me to twist back to him. “There’s no way that girl betrayed you or left you. She loves you with everything she is, but I wanted to see where you were at.”
Relief shudders out of my lungs. He fucked with me, but it only makes me love him more because he did it for her, and Zara deserves to have people in her corner.
If it were anyone else who’d disappeared, I would have mixed emotions about him confirming they hadn’t betrayed me because I would assume they’d been kidnapped.
But with Zara, if that’s the case, I fear more for whoever managed to take her.
That’s not to say I’m not worried about the prospect of someone daring to do her harm.
I will destroy anyone who so much as causes her to frown—unless she annihilates them first. But if she left me on purpose, it might be a hell of a lot harder to get her back.
After I make myself a cup of coffee, allowing the steamy bitterness to soothe some of the gravel in my throat, I sit catercorner from him. “What have you found?”
He glances at his phone. “A few things on Kratos, but nothing earth-shattering. They are largely a mystery to all. Perhaps the biggest piece of intel I have is that she was here—or her bracelet was.”
My thrashing heart slams into my sternum with brute force. “What the hell are you talking about? Why didn’t you fucking lead with that?”
“Because we’ve searched and she …” He trails off, and it’s then that I notice the heavy bags under his eyes and the heart on his fucking sleeve. “It was brief—maybe three minutes, tops—before her tracker was disengaged, but the bracelet accessed an entrance in the North Tower.”
I’m up and striding to the door, ready to conduct my own search. “Cameras?”
“Wiped.”
“All of them?” I scoff, peering at him from the threshold.
“No.” He rises, shaking his head. “Just the one that would offer a view of the door.”
“And we didn’t get anything beyond that?”
He rubs his jaw, patently disappointed in his response.
“Unfortunately, we have nothing that looks like her or anyone we can’t identify.
Initially, I believed maybe whoever had her had taken her for access.
But then we should have a glimpse of someone here who wasn’t authorized to be here.
From what we’ve gathered, she used a concealed passageway near the North Tower entrance that Maddox had escorted her through a while back, and she accessed coded entries within the walls. ”
“She’s here then,” I grind out, half wanting to hug her if she is and half wanting to throttle her. “She has to be.”
His face falls—this is why he didn’t lead with it.
“I don’t believe so, but the entire resort is on lockdown.
No one is coming or going without being screened.
We cleared the penthouse and Maddox and Tessa’s apartment.
And I have Kane digging through the footage from the entire resort for the last few hours.
But we suspect she wedged a few doors in order to exit. ”
I start to head out, but I turn back. “This was when, an hour ago?”
“About an hour and a half.”
I storm out of my office, scouring the penthouse for any fucking sign that she returned—nothing—before heading to my bedroom.
The second I walk in, my stomach wrenches.
I can still feel her, like she imprinted herself on every facet of my life.
Even knowing that the loyalty test was coming, I never expected to be alone here again.
I thought she’d be torn apart, maybe forced to choose between her family and me.
But we’d be together and I’d be able to read her, to subtly guide her.
Or to eradicate any motherfucker who threatened to steal her from me.
Scanning every nook and cranny for something out of place or somewhere she might stow away, my attention finally settles on our bed. And sure enough, on my bedside table sits her bracelet.
And a stone.
She was fucking here.
She’d left me on purpose. I think I knew that all the way back in Greece, but it’s gutting to be facing the truth nonetheless. Did she arrange for that battle? For us to fight in that church? No. She killed too many of them for it to be a setup she’d planned.
Maybe she took it as a sign to flee?
I trudge closer, eyeing that small rock with so many conflicting emotions surging in my veins that I can’t make sense of it.
My mind immediately replays the first time she mentioned this symbol.
“I chose to become the best, to see the work for what it was, to concentrate on jobs that made the biggest difference. One stone.”
“One stone?” I ask.
“It’s something my father says—a play on that kill two birds with one stone saying. Our stone isn’t used to kill two birds. We kill one to save another. Every life taken is a life saved. One stone.”
I pick up the small rock, palming it as I try to decode this message, and then I spot a slip of paper. It only has one line scrawled on it.
Je m’en suis sorti avec difficulté. J’ai planifié ca avec douleur.
It’s French. I escaped with difficulty. I planned this moment with pain.
That’s a paraphrasing of a quote from the movie The Count of Monte Cristo.
We chatted a bit about how the most famous lines from that film never appeared in the original text written by Alexandre Dumas, so her paraphrasing is a play on how things get lost with progression.
I’m assuming the French is to reveal that it’s her, since she was my translator, but to be less obvious to anyone else who found it.
But the biggest clue she left is that the movie quote states it was planned with pleasure, not pain. She’s telling me that what she’s doing is not what she wanted. It’s what’s necessary.
One stone.
Maybe the fact that she disengaged the tracking inside the clasp of her diamond collar, but didn’t leave it here is a message too. A vow that she’s still mine.
Or that’s my colorful spin on it. I don’t fucking know.
Except I do know her. I knew her the second she appeared on my goddamn security camera with that gorgeous mahogany mane, a fierceness that could incapacitate any man, and a beauty that demanded to be seen as royalty.
My soul realized she belonged to me even then.
And I learned her day in and day out. Her brilliance, her skill, her wit, heart, and desires.
I guess planning something with pain could be her admission to carrying out a mission that betrays me in some regard.
She ran. She was here, where she’d be safe. Where we could be together. And she left.
There’s no way around that, but she also risked everything to get me this message.
I snap a quick picture of the note, the bracelet, and the stone.
Depending on what she’s doing, if this all goes to shit and I need to prove her loyalty to KORT, this might help.
But I need more. And I need to find her before KORT or Kratos does.
I may not know where she is or what she’s doing, but there’s one place I can find out.