16. Matteo
— ? —
Matteo
The whole thing takes ninety minutes and settles nothing that couldn’t have waited, which is exactly what I tell the men who dragged me out of bed before I leave them standing there looking wounded.
Bennett’s people were bluffing, the way frightened people always bluff.
I should have trusted that and stayed in bed with the only person who has ever made a Tuesday feel like a gift.
I take the stairs to my apartment two at a time because I’m actually excited about a picnic, which is a sentence I would have paid money never to think, and I open the door already talking.
“Tell me you didn’t eat all the olives without me. I will end this relationship over olives, I want you to know that.”
The apartment is empty.
The picnic basket sits on the counter exactly where we left it, two of everything, and propped against it is an envelope with my name in her handwriting, and the second I see it the bottom drops out of my stomach, because Ursula doesn’t leave notes.
Ursula is right here. That’s the whole point of Ursula.
I read it once. Then again, because the first time my brain refuses to process it.
Gone to get my mother back. It’s a trap and I know it’s a trap.
The rest of it, the marina, the yacht, don’t be angry, be fast, barely registers. She knew. She wrote the words it’s a trap and then she went anyway, because it’s her mother, because there are things this woman cannot be reasonable about, and I love her for it and it is going to stop my heart.
I call her phone. Once, twice, voicemail. Again. Voicemail.
I am already out the door.
The drive to the marina takes eleven minutes and costs me a decade of my life. I abandon the car across two spaces and run the length of the dock, my shoes hammering the planks, seabirds screaming overhead, and I know before I reach the end. I know from the empty water.
The slip is empty. Loose ropes. Choppy gray water and a terrible, yawning absence where she should be.
The yacht is gone. She’s on it. And I let her out of my sight for ninety minutes over a meeting that didn’t matter.
I’ve built companies from nothing, negotiated deals worth billions, faced down men who wanted to bury me, and none of it prepared me for standing on an empty dock with the woman I love somewhere out on that water with two people who want her dead.
The Orchid House.
The thought cuts clean through the panic. Dayana. The society has resources, networks, reach I don’t understand. If anyone can find her, they can.
I drive like a madman. Red lights mean nothing. Speed limits are suggestions. Other cars are obstacles to be avoided. The city blurs past me in a streak of color and noise and I don’t see any of it. All I see is Ursula’s face this morning, soft with sleep, trusting me to keep her safe.
I failed her.
The Orchid House looms ahead, that elegant brownstone on the Upper East Side that Ursula speaks of with such reverence. I barely remember to park before I’m out of the car, pounding on the door, not caring who hears.
Dayana opens it. Her face is pale, her eyes wide.
“Matteo. Get inside. Now.”
She pulls me through the door just as her phone starts screaming.
Not ringing. Screaming. An alarm I’ve never heard before, shrill and urgent, and suddenly every phone in the house is making the same sound. Isla appears on the stairs. Lucia emerges from a side room. Catarina and Odette come running from somewhere deeper in the house.
“It’s Ursula.” Dayana is staring at her phone, her face going whiter by the second. “The emergency signal. She pressed it three times.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means she’s in danger.” Dayana turns her phone so I can see. A map, a blinking red dot out past the harbor mouth, the last place her phone pinged before it went dark. “It means she’s on a boat heading out to sea.”
“Bennett.” The name comes out like a curse. “Bennett and Renata. They took her.”
“The signal gave us her position and a heading before it cut out.” Isla is already pulling on her coat. “We can track her. We can call the Coast Guard.”
“Do it.” I’m already moving toward the door. “Call everyone. Call the police. Call the goddamn Navy if you have to. I’m going after her.”
“Matteo, wait.” Dayana catches my arm. “You can’t just drive out to sea. You need a boat.”
“Then I’ll find one.”
“I know a captain.” Catarina is typing furiously on her phone. “Fishing boat out of Red Hook. He owes me a favor. A big one. I’ll tell him to be ready.”
“Give me the address.”
She rattles it off and I’m gone, back in my car, back on the streets, back in the blur of speed and fear and desperate, clawing hope.
The last place her signal pinged glows frozen on the map, a point past the harbor mouth that hasn’t moved since her phone went dark, and I drive toward it like my life depends on it.
Because it does.
Ursula is my life now. I didn’t ask for it, didn’t plan for it, but somewhere between the insults and the alliance and the night in the lighthouse, she became everything.
The thought of her on that boat with Bennett, with the man who put his hand on her throat and smiled about it, makes me want to tear the world apart.
The fishing boat is small and weathered, a working vessel that’s seen better days. The captain is a grizzled man in his sixties with sun-leathered skin and skeptical eyes.
“You Salazar?”
“I’m Salazar.”
“Catarina says you need to chase a yacht.” He squints at me. “That’s a good way to get killed.”
“Name your price.”
“It’s not about the money.”
“Then what is it about?”
He studies me for a long moment. Whatever he sees in my face must convince him, because he nods slowly.
“Get on board. We leave in two minutes.”
I’ve never been on a boat like this. My yachts are sleek and modern, all polished wood and clean lines. This is a working vessel, smelling of fish and diesel, the deck wet with spray and scattered with equipment I can’t identify.
None of it matters.
We pull away from the dock, and the captain opens the throttle, and we chase that heading out into the gray expanse of the Atlantic.
“She your woman?” the captain asks after a while.
“Yes.”
“The one on the yacht that’s got her. He dangerous?”
“Yes.”
“You planning to do something stupid when we catch them?”
“Probably.”
He grunts. Reaches into a storage bin and pulls out a battered baseball bat. Hands it to me.
“Just in case.”
I take it. The weight feels good in my hand, solid and real.
The yacht appears on the horizon, a white shape against the gray water, and it’s wrong somehow, listing, trailing a thin dark smear of something across the swells behind it.
Smoke, maybe, or spilled fuel. It’s crawling.
A boat like that should be halfway to open ocean by now, should have left this wheezing fishing trawler in its wake an hour ago, and instead we’re closing on it like it’s anchored.
“That’s not right,” the captain mutters, watching it. “Boat like that don’t move like that. Something’s broke on her.”
Something’s broke on her. Or someone broke it.
Ursula. My ferocious, impossible woman. She crippled the thing from the inside.
“We’re gaining,” I say. “Get me alongside.”
“Get ready.” The captain adjusts our course. “We’re going to come up alongside. You jump when I tell you.”
“And then?”
“And then I call the Coast Guard and get the hell out of the way.” He looks at me, and there’s something like respect in his eyes. “Good luck, kid.”
The yacht looms larger as we approach. I can see figures on deck now. Two of them. Renata with her dark hair whipping in the wind. And Bennett, pacing like a caged animal.
I don’t see Ursula.
“Now!”
I let go of the bat and jump.
The rail of the yacht catches me in the stomach, knocking the wind out of me, but I hold on. I drag myself over, drop to the deck, and come face to face with Bennett Rothwell.
He looks worse than I’ve ever seen him. Wild-eyed. Unshaven. His suit is wrinkled and stained and his face wears a look I’ve never seen before, desperation and madness both.
“Salazar.” He spits the name like a curse. “I should have known.”
“Where is she?”
“Below deck. Locked in a cabin.” His face twists.
“If I’m losing everything, she doesn’t get to keep anything either.
Not the ships, not you, not the life she thinks she’s already won.
And she took a fire axe to my engine room and cut her own hand half off doing it.
Your ice queen has lost her mind, Salazar. She sabotaged her own escape.”
“She didn’t sabotage her escape.” Something fierce and proud moves through the fear in my chest. “She made sure you couldn’t run. She was never trying to get away. She was buying time for me to get here.”
“You’re insane. You know that, right? Kidnapping is a federal crime. You’re throwing away everything.”
“I already lost everything!” His voice cracks. “My routes. My reputation. My wife. All because of you. Because you couldn’t keep your hands off what was mine.”
“She was never yours. You just held the paperwork.”
He swings.
I see it coming. I’ve been waiting for this punch for over a decade, through every dinner party where he looked at her like she was furniture, every gala where he talked over her and dismissed her opinions, every moment he made her feel frozen because it was easier than letting her feel anything at all.
I duck.
His fist whistles past my ear. I come up swinging, and my knuckles connect with his jaw, and the shock of it sings all the way to my shoulder.
He staggers back. Touches his lip. Looks at the blood on his fingers.
“You’re going to regret that.”
“I’ve been regretting not doing it for over a decade.”
He charges.
We go down in a tangle of limbs and fury, rolling across the deck, throwing punches wherever we can land them.
He’s stronger than I expected, fueled by rage and desperation, and he gets a few good hits in.
My lip splits. My ribs ache. But I’ve been fighting my whole life, fighting for survival, fighting for success, fighting for everything I have, and Bennett Rothwell has never had to fight for anything.
I pin him to the deck. Get my hands around his collar. Pull him up just enough to slam him back down.
“This is for every year you wasted her.” I hit him again. “This is for every time you made her feel small.” Again. “This is for the alley.” Again. “This is for putting your hands on her.” Again. “This is for thinking you could take her from me.”
Renata screams somewhere behind us. I don’t care. All I care about is the man beneath me, the man who hurt the woman I love, the man who thought he could break her and face no consequences.
Sirens.
Red and blue lights on the horizon. The Coast Guard, finally, their white boats cutting through the gray water like cavalry.
Bennett sees them too. His face changes. The madness shifts to fear.
“No.” He shoves me off, scrambles to his feet. “No, no, no.”
He runs for the rail.
“Bennett, don’t...”
He doesn’t listen. He throws himself over the side, hits the water with a splash, and starts swimming. Away from the yacht. Away from the approaching boats. Away from the consequences that have finally caught up to him.
I lean over the rail, watching him thrash through the waves.
And then he starts screaming.