Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Ilya
The flower in my hand dropped to my side, the delicate petals hitting my thigh and scattering over the floor.
"What do you mean she’s gone?" I asked. The nurses behind the desk looked at each other, their faces growing pale in the face of the anger coming off of me in waves.
"Check again. Her name is Daisy. She came in from a house fire.
" And is pregnant with my child, I added silently.
"She was in that room right there." I pointed behind them.
Both of them turned. "We know, sir, but she discharged herself this morning." One looked at her watch. "About three hours ago."
"Well, she didn’t even sign the right paperwork, but she was seen leaving. She looked like she was in a rush and had a bag with her," the other added.
The world tilted on its axis.
Daisy was gone. And I knew what that meant. She had run again because that’s what she did. She ran from me without even saying goodbye. This time she was running because she thought I was going to snatch her baby from her again.
She didn’t realize I knew the truth now.
Daisy always thought the worst of me.
"Thank you," I muttered, and turning on my heel, I stalked back to my car. By the time I reached it, my hands were shaking so much that the flowers fell and hit the pavement. Scattering red rose petals everywhere like giant drops of blood.
"Boss?" Seeing my face, my driver straightened. "What’s going on?"
"She’s gone," I said in a completely flat, emotionless voice.
Daisy was gone, and I didn’t know where.
"How can that be true?" A line appeared between his eyebrows.
I rounded on him, anger tightening the skin over the bones of my face. "It is true," I snapped. "She discharged herself earlier this morning. She left."
For a second, there was a look of fear on his face. "I get that, boss, but she has nothing. No passport, no money, she only has the clothes on her back. She can't have gotten far."
Pausing for a second, I mulled over his words. Everything he had just said was true. Daisy had nothing, not even an old family home to go back to. She really had limited options.
It wasn’t like last time, I told myself firmly. My grandfather was dead and gone.
"Have someone check her old place," I ordered, folding my body into the car. "I want all of her old haunts searched. I don’t know what she’s playing at, but I want her found before dark."
She won’t get away again. Not this time, I added silently. I wouldn’t allow her to run. Not now that I finally knew the truth. If she really wanted nothing to do with me, then I would possibly consider letting her go, but not like this.
Daisy and I needed to sit down and talk. She needed to know the truth.
Closing the door softly behind me, I yanked my phone out. There was one place I needed to check, one place she might have gone.
"Hi, this is Mr. Popovitch. I am coming by to collect my son, Alexander Popovitch." I paused as the receptionist began to speak, literally tripping over her own words.
"Mr. Popovitch, Daisy—"
Letting out a sigh of relief, my eyes closed. "She’s there? Can you keep them both there until I get there, please? It’s of the utmost importance. I’ll be less than an hour."
If she was there, she was safe. We would have to discuss her running off against doctors' orders and not telling me where she was going, but she was safe, and that was all that mattered.
"I’m sorry, Mr. Popovitch. Neither Daisy nor Alexander are here. She signed him out of school this morning. Said that you had a family emergency."
I dropped the phone.
Daisy had taken my son.
It was like all the old feelings, so close to the surface all the time, came rushing back.
Daisy had taken my child. And now she was on the run? With nothing to her name. That didn’t make sense, unless of course she had help from somewhere. Had she purposely been put back into my path by my enemies? Everyone knew that my one weak spot was Alec.
Well, Alec and, as much as I hated to admit it, even to myself, Daisy herself.
Had she known the depths of my feelings for her? I couldn’t be sure, but there was one thing I was certain of. If Daisy wanted revenge for what she thought I had put her through, then taking my son would be the perfect way to get it.
The hand holding the phone clenched so hard that my knuckles went white and cracked painfully loud.
"Boss?" The driver turned in his seat as I cursed long and loudly. "What’s happened?"
"She’s taken him," I muttered, ending the call. "She’s fucking taken Alec and run."
And she was going to pay. I was going to make her pay for fooling me once again. I was going to make them all pay, including every single person who was helping her rip my reason for living away from me.
There was no sign of them. It was like they had disappeared into the thick air of New York City, and it didn’t matter where I looked, they weren’t there.
None of that made sense. Where could she go?
A penniless woman with a child without even identification.
She didn’t have money, she didn’t even have a place to go, and yet she was gone, and she had taken the light of my life with her.
Even if someone, one of my many enemies, was helping her, there would be some whisper of it in the underworld.
"Boss."
My head snapped up. I hadn’t heard anyone arrive in the penthouse, but then again, I hadn’t really been paying attention. My thoughts were all on her and this fresh hell she was putting me through.
Maybe this was my punishment. Daisy wasn’t the sweet and innocent woman I had fallen in love with, so she may have wanted her own revenge on me.
But she would have needed help. She couldn’t have kidnapped my son and disappeared alone.
As far as I knew, she had no one in the states who would help her.
None of my connections had heard anything.
The only rumors swirling around the underground were that she was back in my life.
Nothing more and nothing less. My enemies might have moved against me, but not any of the families in the city.
In fact, there was definitely not anyone in the city who would help her when I actually calmed down enough to think about it.
I was too feared, and any contacts I had tried in the UK hadn’t even known who I was.
No one had heard from her in days, and everyone was worried about her safety but me. I wasn’t worried about her because I was going to kill her once I found her. If she was dead, then she would never be able to hurt me again. She would never make me dream of her and the future we could have had.
No, but I could absolutely never kill her. She was Alec's mother, and she was even carrying my second child!
I shook my head. Sweet Jesus, my thoughts and feelings were a mess. Even now I went from hating her to loving her so quickly that I felt like I was giving myself whiplash.
One second I thought this was revenge, that she was working with someone else to bring me to my knees, and the next I thought about it and realized how ludicrous that was.
Whatever was happening here, the rush of emotions warring inside of me was making it impossible to think clearly.
"What is it?" My eyes narrowed as my driver strode toward me.
"This." He lifted something in his hands, and I stared at it in shock. "I went back to the hospital to try and retrace her steps, and I found this."
Dropping it to the desk, he stepped back.
The bag was blue, with brown leather straps. Designer. I knew that because it was mine. I had packed some of Daisy's clothes and dropped them into the hospital only last night.
If she had run, why would she run without clothes? Why would she have just left the bag on the sidewalk?
Fuck, this was making less and less sense.
Except it kind of did, and I was just a blind fool who hadn’t seen the reality right in front of my face.
"You think—" raggedly I let out a breath. Reaching up, I tugged at my hair, yanking it at the roots so it stood on end. "You think someone took her?"
Why hadn’t I thought of that before? Why had my brain gone straight to her betraying me? It made sense if someone had taken her. In fact, her and Alec being kidnapped made more sense than any other thing that I had been mulling over.
Fuck.
I had so many enemies that it was shocking that it hadn’t happened before.
He stared at me for a second before nodding. "There’s something else. I checked the hospital security footage."
My head snapped up. "And?"
"She walked out on her own but," he took a deep breath, "a nurse walked into her room half an hour beforehand."
My eyebrows lifted in question. "So? Nurses were in and out all the time." I didn’t understand why that was such a big deal. It was a hospital; nurses were everywhere.
"I asked around. She wasn’t a nurse. No one had ever seen her before."
I fell back into the chair. My chest was rising and falling rapidly. Had I spent the entire day searching for her, thinking that she had run from me? When in reality, something else had happened to her?
If that was true, and I knew deep down it was, I had wasted hours and hours looking in the wrong directions. Anything could have happened to them in that time.
I didn’t even want to imagine what they were going through. The thought made me feel sick.
I had been so blind to what was right in front of my face, so sure that she was always to blame that I had not even realized what was really happening.
"Find her," I snapped, all the anger I was feeling towards myself aimed in the innocent man’s direction.
"Already on it." He paused. His eyes searched my face. "There’s something else."
I sighed. Of course there was. There was always something else. "What?"
"I went to Alexander’s school."
My head snapped up at that. "Why?"
"To ask some questions." He met my gaze steadily. "Important questions."
I sat up a little straighter, steepling my hands together on the desk. "And?"
"She arrived with a man in a suit. The school assumed he was one of Alec’s security detail? But they didn’t recognize him. They said the man was," he bit his lip, "nervous, but it was Daisy herself that made them wonder. She’d been crying."
"And they didn’t say anything?" I snapped. I hated that Daisy might have been forced to take our son from the safety of his school. What had happened to her to make her cry?
I pushed the thought away.
"They asked, but Daisy said the family emergency was making her sad and it was nothing."
I scoffed. "And they believed her?" I knew Daisy. She had no poker face. She couldn’t lie. I knew that about her.
"No, not really, but she threatened them with you."
I did a double-take at that. Everyone in my son's school knew who I was, but when I stepped through those doors, I wasn’t Ilya Popovitch.
I was just Alec’s dad. I would never threaten the teachers or staff.
Not ever, and Daisy would know that. Which meant she was leaving me a message.
It was Daisy’s only way of telling me what was happening to her and Alec.
"Fuck." Balling my hands into fists, I slammed them down onto the desk. "She was trying to leave me a message."
"A message, boss?"
"Someone took her. Snatched her straight from the street outside the hospital and forced her to go and get Alec. It’s the only reasonable explanation."
I was so slow. So unbelievably fucking dense that I hadn’t even seen what was right before my eyes. Daisy hadn’t run from me; she had been taken from me.
For the second time. The first time, it had been my grandfather who had snatched her away from me, and I had spent six years grieving and hating a woman I thought had died leaving me and our son.
Now someone else had done the same, only this time they had taken my child as well, and I knew that neither one of them had gone willingly.
Someone out there in this city of millions had my woman and my child, and I had wasted hours and hours looking in the wrong places.
"Has there been any ransom calls or letters?" I asked, but I already knew the answer. If there had been, I would have been told or taken the call myself.
"No, boss."
"Bodies?" I fucking hated asking that, but I had to know.
"None."
If someone wanted money, they would have made the ransom call by now; if my enemies wanted to make a point, their bodies would have been left for me to be found.
That meant someone still had them.
And it was personal.
It was also all my fault. If I hadn’t spent all day thinking the worst, I could have prevented this. More than that, I could have been nicer to Daisy. I could have told her my feelings and listened to hers.
She had gotten into that car and probably had a gun pointed at her. And she would have thought I was the one that ordered it right up until the moment they had demanded she get Alec.
What had they threatened her with to make her do that? Or had they hurt her? The school hadn’t mentioned bruises, but that didn’t mean anything. There were ways of hurting someone without leaving a mark. I should know.
All of this was my fault, and if anything happened to them, I would never forgive myself.
For a second, I let my eyes close, and then taking a deep breath, I met my man’s eyes. "Someone has taken them."
He didn’t say a word. But I could tell by the look in his eyes that he agreed.
"Someone who knows too much about me and my thought patterns." I hated admitting that even to myself because it meant whoever had orchestrated this knew me. Probably one of my men or—
My brow furrowed.
"I can’t trust anyone."
"Boss."
"I want them found, quickly and quietly, but," chewing on my lip, I stared at him.
If someone I knew personally was working against me, then there were very few people I could trust. "I don’t want anyone to know I know they were taken.
" I met his eyes steadily. "I want everyone to think she kidnapped Alec and I want him back. I don’t care what it takes. "
There was a heartbeat of a pause as he digested my words, and then he nodded. "I’ll make sure everyone thinks you want her alive so you can deal with her yourself. Someone will talk. I’ll put it out there that there’s a handsome reward for information."
"I know. Good idea." Pinching the skin between my eyebrows, I stood. Someone somewhere would talk and give us a lead if we offered enough money, and honestly, I would pay anything to get them both back. All I could do was hope that we got that information before something happened to them.
The thought made me feel sick. Was the only woman I had ever loved and my son being tortured even as I sat here talking about them? Was Daisy in pain? Because I knew she would protect Alec until her dying breath.
Fuck.
"And when we find out who took them, what do you want us to do?"
I didn’t even pause. Usually, I would have dealt with this kind of thing myself. Slowly and painfully until they begged for death, but all that mattered right now was that I got Alec and his mother back.
"Kill them." I swept out of the door, my feet heading towards the elevator because there was someone I needed to see. "Kill them all."