Chapter Thirty One
Alexei
My mood is lethal, my rage unsettling to anyone unfortunate enough to be in my proximity. My staff and men avoid me as if I have become an unknown quantity, unpredictable and threatening. As if getting in my way bears with it the risk of experiencing the lash of my anger.
Possibly this is so. I cannot recall the last time I have felt like this. Maybe I never have.
Catalina’s desertion provokes a wrath that unlike anything else. This pure, cold anger persists in a way my occasional bouts of ire do not. It pulses in my head, claws at the inside of my ribs. A fatal wrath which cannot be tempered, for which there is no ease.
Now that she is gone, I am forced to admit to it. I have been weak. Soft. Too lax, too lenient. Forgiving and tolerant beyond what was ever wise. I sacrificed much to preserve her softness, to enjoy her sweetness.
And she spurns even those concessions I made for her against my better judgment.
She makes a fool of me. No, it is worse even than that—I have made a fool of myself.
For her. I gave her every tool she required to leave me of my own accord.
Hundreds of dollars stuffed into her hand. More freedom than she deserved.
And at the first opportunity, she betrays me. She solicits my trust with her innocent face and her sweetness. And she stabs me in the fucking back. I gave to her this knife she twists into my flesh. Like a fucking fool, I hand her my heart and she tears it to pieces.
It will never fucking happen again. She will no longer sink her kitten-claws into me with impunity, no longer enjoy my indulgence, my patience with her sass and her tantrums and her smart fucking mouth.
Too often I have humored her, spoiled her.
Allowed her in my generosity to pretend an agency that was never hers.
When I find her, she will learn better.
But first I need to fucking find her.
The bookstore has security cameras only at the entrance and over the registers.
They are more concerned about their staff stealing cash than patrons stealing books.
There is only the briefest of glimpses of her upon the security feed as she enters the store.
She casts a long look over her shoulder at my men who—at my fucking instruction—wait for her outside.
So she does not feel so watched, her every movement observed and reported on.
She disappears into the bookshelves. And then she disappears from my fucking life.
No one took note of her as she browsed. She caused no disturbance, did nothing to draw attention to herself.
It is only when she does not emerge again in her allotted time that my men grow suspicious and alert me to this.
The back door through which she escaped leads only to a parking lot where there are no security cameras at all.
With hundreds of dollars in untraceable cash in her pocket and my attention diverted—because I fucking trusted her—she flees undetected.
She is not seen again on any camera. She has disappeared into the ether just as she did when first she fled from her family.
And I have given her the tools she needs to hide herself from me. Her sole mistake—texting her dead brother’s burner phone—is one she will not make again.
My men are kept busy canvassing the city, chasing down every morsel of information it is possible to find.
They buy it from anyone they can, threaten it out of anyone who cannot be bought.
They scour airports, bus and train stations, taxi dispatchers.
They collect descriptions of women who have come and gone through these places who match Catalina’s descriptions, but this is all for nothing.
Nothing so far has revealed her location. She knows how to disappear, now. How to stay hidden. I told her this, too. And with each day that passes, my wrath grows. It collects upon itself until it is a seething mass that burns ice cold in my chest.
She underestimates me if she thinks I will give up so easily, if she thinks she can hide from me forever. I will burn this fucking city to the ground before I let her go. I will burn the world to ash before I allow her betrayal to go unpunished.
If Catalina thought herself too much a captive before, she will soon learn better. She will learn how generous I was with her, how good this life she has abandoned could have been. Would have been.
And she will learn, also, what it means to earn the ire of a man like me. She will learn the difference between what could have been hers, and what will be from now on. She will learn what it means to truly be a prisoner.