Chapter 32
I’d had a bad feeling ever since I woke up.
Not anger or even depression, like I’d been feeling on and off for days, but a wrongness.
It was low and persistent, like pressure behind the eyes that continued to build into a migraine.
The feeling crawled under my skin and refused to leave me, no matter how much I ignored it.
Something bad had happened. But I didn’t know what. It was hard to tell when everything in my life felt so wrong.
My office was too quiet. The silence grated on my ears.
I sat behind my desk, my chin resting in my hand, my paperwork untouched.
The city stretched beyond the windows in an array of glass and steel, both alive and indifferent.
This was one of the few offices, meant for my property development firm, that reminded me the least of Evangeline, which was why it’d been the one I was working in the most since she’d left.
Normally, I liked the silence up here. It gave me a chance to think. It made men nervous, reminding them who they were standing in front of—the Reaper of the city.
But today, the office just felt empty.
My thoughts were filled with visions of Evangeline.
Eva with snow in her hair, her cheeks flushed from the cold.
Eva smiling as I brought her the largest bouquets of pink flowers I could find with every date.
Eva laughing as my nose nuzzled her neck.
Eva moaning as I thrust into her. Eva. My beautiful, beautiful Eva.
I ground my teeth and shoved my thoughts of her away. Why was I pining for her? She chose Julian, not me.
Because you love her, something soft inside of me whispered. But I pushed that voice away, too.
I picked up my pen and tried to work on some paperwork for the updates to the ballet theater.
Despite my inability to step into the building without my chest tightening at thoughts of our last moments together, I still wanted to update the theater.
It was an investment, and Drakovs didn’t back away from things once they began.
But the theater needed a lot of work. The electrical wiring was old, the plumbing was barely holding itself together, and some of the aesthetics were desperately in need of an update.
I should have been able to finish a lot of the preparation for my crews to begin in the off-season, but instead of being productive, my mind kept replaying Eva’s and my last moments. I couldn’t fucking escape them.
She’d chosen her brother. Chosen safety. Chosen the cage she’d been raised in over the danger of me.
And I didn’t blame her for it. But that didn’t mean that every second without her wasn’t agony. Every one of our precious memories turned sharp and ugly as soon as I recalled the look on her face as Julian pulled her away from me.
Disappointed. Like all the fight in her had left. Like I wasn’t worth it.
I felt… empty. Tight in the chest, like something vital had been scooped out and left me standing upright, running on pure spite and depression at this point.
But I forced myself to keep moving. I was Aleksandr Drakov. The Reaper. I didn’t pine. I didn’t chase women who didn’t want me.
A part of me knew that was a lie. Eva wanted me. Eva was the first girl who wanted me, who I wanted, too. And that was the cruelest part.
A knock sounded at the door, interrupting my lamentations. “Go away,” I ordered.
But Nikolai let himself in anyway, because of course he did. He was like a stubborn dog following a grumpy master.
“You look like shit,” he said mildly, dropping into the chair across from my desk. “Like dead shit, which is impressive considering you usually have this air of a corpse with money, but you’ve somehow made it worse.”
I gritted my jaw. “What do you want?”
“To talk to my favorite cousin, of course.” He studied me for a second, too perceptive for my liking. “You heard from her?”
“No.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? Of course it’s an answer.”
“Not to you. Aleksandr Drakov doesn’t take silences or rejections.”
“He does now,” I mumbled. “There are too many rules, Nikolai. You wouldn’t understand.”
He arched a blond brow. “You think I don’t?”
“No. Because you haven’t followed a damn rule in your life.”
“And you’ve never played a game without changing the rules to win.”
He leaned forward, blue eyes boring a hole into my head. I ignored him, turning back to the view of the city behind me. I couldn’t bear to see anyone right now. They all reminded me of Eva, of the girl I was missing.
“Where’s your phone, Aleksandr?”
I glanced back at the top drawer of my desk, where the device sat, powered off.
I’d thrown it in there earlier when I realized she wasn’t going to call me.
Staring at a blank screen only made the hollow feeling in my chest worse, like every minute I went without hearing from her reminded me that she wasn’t coming back.
I didn’t respond.
He sighed. “Alek—”
But my cousin was interrupted by the harsh ringing of sirens from the city below.
A lot of them.
The sound was distant at first, soon rising to a roar, building and building, their echoes passing through the streets and up to the window of my high-rise.
Something in my chest tightened, the ugly feeling growing.
I looked across the city and found thick, black smoke rising into the air from several blocks away.
A fire, a large one by the looks of it. Red lights were racing to get to it, hoping to prevent a catastrophe.
But by the growing size of the smoke, that wasn’t possible.
Wait.
That fire was downtown. It was near—
“Where is it?” I snapped, and Nikolai froze as I turned back to him, bracing my hands on the desk. “Where the fuck is the fire, Nikolai?”
He frowned, already pulling out his phone, typing a few things before scrolling. Then he went still.
“Where is it?” I snapped, some inner part of me already knowing the answer.
He looked up at me, exhaling a ragged breath. Something uneasy flickered across his face. “The ballet theater.”
The room tilted on its axis, my vision blurring.
No.
No, no, no—
“Multiple alarms. Heavy smoke.” Nikolai’s eyes flicked back to his phone. “There’s an evacuation in progress, but they were in the midst of a busy rehearsal. It sounds like they’re worried a few may be stuck inside.”
“That’s not—” I shook my head. “She’s not there.”
She couldn’t be. After catching us about to go for round two, there was no way Julian Vallen was going to let Eva out of his sight.
My heart slammed so hard it hurt.
The feeling
That fucking feeling.
I ripped open my desk drawer and snatched my phone, my fingers clumsy as I powered it on. The screen lit up, revealing mostly missed calls and messages from Nikolai, but one from Eva, too. And texts. She texted me this morning.
My breath caught as I scrolled through them.
I feel free, Alek… I want to be yours. I choose you. I love you, Alek… I’m going to rehearsal now…
The world narrowed to a single, brutal point, every part of me focused on that one little word.
Rehearsal.
“No,” I breathed, the word tearing out of me like stitches on a wound. “Fuck. No.”
I clicked the call button, my heart pounding in my chest with every long second without an answer. The phone rang and rang and rang, haunting me with the silence in between. Finally, I heard a click, and my body loosened.
Until I heard the words, “Hi, you’ve reached Eva. I can’t come to the phone right now—”
I called her again, but the same thing happened again. And again. And the texts I fired off went unread and unanswered, too.
“No,” I snarled, already running for the door. “Pick up, solnyshka.”
I didn’t remember getting to the car. Didn’t remember Nikolai sliding into the passenger seat, his face as determined as mine.
Didn’t remember starting the car and whipping out of the spot in front of my building.
All I knew was the sound of my own heartbeat drowning out everything else as I tore through the city like a bat out of hell.
My mind could only think of one thing. Her name repeated like a prayer to a god I didn’t fully trust to keep her alive.
Eva.
Eva.
Eva.
Eva.
Eva.
I blew through the streets, ignoring every red light, every vehicle in my way. My fingers were repeatedly pressing the call button by Eva’s name, hoping she would pick up and reassure me that she was already.
But the dark feeling inside of me only grew stronger.
If something happened to her, I would never forgive myself. If I had seen her texts, I would have rushed over to the theater. I could have gotten her out myself. But I was sulking, too convinced that I had lost the girl that somehow managed to sneak past every one of my walls.
I could smell the smoke from three blocks away. Black. Thick. Wrong.
It covered the air like a blanket, making it impossible to see. I skidded the car to a stop and rolled down the window, coughing through the ash.
Sirens screamed, and police officers directed the crowd away from the burning building. In the distance, firefighters scrambled to the theater, which loomed ahead, its beautiful old stone blackened, bleeding smoke into the sky.
I growled under my breath before parking the car and ordering Nikolai to take care of it. I couldn’t fucking sit still while waiting for the news on whether Eva made it out okay. I had to be there amongst the chaos. I couldn’t rest until I knew she was in my arms again.
I sprinted to the front of the building and found a large group of ballerinas in sparkling costumes huddled together, their faces covered with soot. I scanned the group, praying that I found my petite girl among them. But she wasn’t there.
No.
No.
Where the fuck was she?
A hand wrapped around my wrist, and I turned, knowing I was wearing a murderous expression, only to find a sobbing Mia in front of me.
Mascara ran down the front of her cheeks, and her bun was disheveled.
The fury that someone was stopping me slowly leeched out as my hope restarted.
Maybe Mia knew where Eva was. Maybe she was coming to bring me to her.
And then she opened her mouth, and the hope inside me died.
“A-Alek,” she sobbed. “It’s Eva. No one knows where she is. She was on the stage with Raphael, and he said they got separated. You have to f-find her. I-I know you will.”
Everything in me snapped to attention. She was still inside the fucking theater.
“Where is she?” I all but roared, my inner beast clawing, fighting for control. It’s a suffocating feeling, this need to get to her.
Mia pointed at the burning building.
I turned, about to run up the stairs inside, when I saw him.
Julian Vallen stepped out of his car, his face white with both fury and terror. Chocolate eyes, the same color as Eva’s, locked onto me.
“You,” he roared, crossing the distance in seconds. He grabbed me by the collar and slammed me back against one of the stone columns. “You did this. You sick fuck. You tried to hurt her—”
“Get the fuck off of me,” I said, shoving him off me so hard that he stumbled, eyes widening.
I didn’t want to hear the rest of his anger. My eyes were too focused on the entrance, on the smoke pouring out the doors. That’s where Eva was.
My light. My life. My love.
My solnyshka.
My feet were moving before my mind was. I ran past the firefighters, past their erected barriers. I ran past the fear clawing up my throat and the cold terror in my bones that threatened to outweigh the stifling heat.
“You’re not getting away from me that easily, Evangeline,” I hissed under my breath, letting just enough of the monster bleed through my facade. “You cannot fucking escape me. If you die, I will follow right after you.”
And then I ran into the flames.