chapter 33
Avira
I swear I will never behave like a stubborn idiot again.
Never, till the day I die. Right now, I’m in so much pain I feel like dying.
I’m conscious for five minutes, then drift into an unconscious, dreamless sleep for thirty to forty minutes.
It’s been this way since three in the morning.
My fever hasn’t gone down even a bit since last night.
Zoan has already called Lyn five times since morning. And it’s still morning. She keeps asking him to have patience—patience, which Zoan loses very rarely.
I blink my eyes to keep them open, trying to feel my surroundings.
My room’s door opens and Wen enters. “What have you done to yourself?”
I guess Zoan has already spread the news of me catching a cold.
She sits beside me and touches my forehead. “You’re burning up. Have you taken the medicines?”
I nod.
She sighs. “You’re looking like a red cherry. Have you canceled your event?”
I shake my head. “I don’t want to cancel it. I canceled the last one as well in September,” I say in a slurred voice.
She chuckles. “You can’t even speak properly, and I’m sure you can’t stand either.”
I sigh. “They organized this event especially for me. I don’t know how to refuse.”
Her eyes shine with a mischievous grin. “I can go in your place. I’ll really enjoy the love of your readers. And don’t worry, I’ll sprinkle tonnes of love over them.”
I chuckle weakly. “And no one will know it’s not me.”
“The only photos of you available on the internet are far shots. And it’s been six months since your fans last saw you. I’ll just straighten my hair and—tada—Ash Penny is ready.”
Well, she is not wrong. From afar, no one can tell the difference between us. Our distinctive features—like our eye shapes and the slight differences in our mouths and smiles—are only visible up close.
“How will you behave there? We need you to rehearse,” I ask her with a tired grin.
She sits up straight on the bed. “I will sit there on the chair. People will come in line, I will sign their books, and I will have a short talk with each one of them, like, ‘You are lovely,’ ‘Thank you for calling me beautiful,’ ‘I’m so happy you enjoyed the book,’ ‘Aww, thank you, you are also very sweet.’”
I chuckle at her vivid facial expressions. Well, she wasn’t wrong when she said she would sprinkle love on my readers.
She gets up, grinning. “Then it’s done. I’m taking your place.”
Zoan comes inside the room. She meets him at the door. “I’m going to the event at her place. You take care of her, I will ask Leo to come with me.” She winks at him and leaves.
Zloban
After sleeping throughout the afternoon, by evening her fever finally subsides. I hate seeing her in pain. Her voice has also returned to normal.
She finishes the soup and hands me the bowl. “What’s the time?”
I check my watch. “6:13 PM,” I tell her, wiping the corner of her mouth.
“The event must have ended,” she murmurs before asking her AI assistant to call Wen. She doesn’t pick up.
At the same time, my phone rings. I pull it from my trouser pocket. Leo is calling me. I have a feeling it’s not a good call.
I get up from the bed, pick up the call, and press the phone to my ear.
“Someone kidnapped Wen,” his cold voice comes through the phone.
I frown. “How? With our security, not even an ant could enter without our permission.”
“She was sitting there. For five seconds, the light went out, and she vanished. The chair she was sitting on had a hollow ground that wasn’t there yesterday. The ground led to a tunnel which opened outside the security campus. I’m sending you the footage.” He cuts the call.
His message pings. I open the video. A round piece of concrete jumps into the air, and a man wearing gloves, carrying an unconscious Wen over his shoulder, walks out of the hole.
He looks toward the camera and waves his hand.
I zoom in on his face. I’ve never seen this face before, grey eyes, fearless.
He has a smirk that belongs to someone who knows he’s won.
Either he is very stupid, or he is incredibly brilliant.
The latter possibility seems much more likely.
He kidnapped her under our noses without even bothering to hide himself.
“What happened?” Avira asks me.
I look at her. “Wen has been kidnapped.”
She gets off the bed, her face drained of color and eyes wide. “Who kidnapped her?”
I hand her my phone. She sits on the bed, watching the footage.
I take the phone back. “I need to find out who he is.”
I walk toward the door. She follows me. We enter my study. I open the same video on my desktop and feed this man’s footage into my system. It scans, then returns no results. This is the first time this guy has been spotted in the USA or Canada.
“What do you find?” she asks, looking between my screen and me as I sit at my desk.
“Nothing.”
I watch the consecutive camera footage, him carrying her into the car, his car driving through the city, then turning into the woods, where there are no cameras.
“It’s my fault,” she murmurs.
I look at her.
“I should have canceled the event,” she says, staring down.
I push myself up from the chair and stand in front of her. “Don’t feel guilty about it. We will find her.”
Even if this man has crawled up from the depths of hell, we will find him. Every country on this globe will make finding this man a national emergency. He cannot get away after kidnapping the king’s daughter.
But then, a thought pierces my mind, sending a searing shiver down my spine. He hadn’t intended to abduct Elowen, his target was Avira. My chest tightens at the realization. He had schemed to take my Dove.
He can’t live. I will destroy him.
I cup her jaw. “You can go rest. I promise I will find her very soon.”
She shakes her head. “I will stay here.”
I kiss the top of her head and sit back down at my chair.
I will need to scour all the security camera footage throughout the world, combing through every country’s legal and illegal systems individually, until I find him.
And then I will end him in the worst way imaginable, along with everyone connected to him.