Chapter 21 - Simon
Her father and brothers vanish from the scene before I can even think of sending my security team to detain them. My only thought is to reach the twins. It’s all I can focus on.
Selene and I leap into the car, and I shout orders to my security guards who were waiting outside the restaurant. “Get to Raya! The twins are compromised!”
Selene grips the door handle, her knuckles white, her face even paler, as we speed through the city towards the penthouse.
“They couldn’t have gotten inside?” Selene murmurs. “The security is too good,” she says, talking to herself more than to me.
My phone rings, and I answer it in a second. “What?” I snap.
“Sir, we can’t get hold of the team on duty with the twins.”
“I know, neither can I. How close are you?”
“Five minutes out. The cameras in the whole building are down.”
“Fuck,” I snarl. The Ghost. He can make anything disappear. And now I fear he has my children and is going to make them disappear.
“I’ll be there in three minutes,” I snap, hanging up the phone.
We stop outside the building instead of underground. I ramp the sidewalk, jerking to a stop as we spill from the car before the engine is turned off.
Selene runs straight for the elevator.
I sprint behind her, but I notice the extensive bloodstains on the desk of the security guard who usually sits there. I know in my heart that if I glance behind his desk, his body will be lying on the floor, lifeless. If they got his keys, and if they managed to torture the codes from him…
My stomach knots as I slip into the elevator with Selene. There is blood on one of the metal walls. Polished silver, splashed with red. Selene refuses to look at it or acknowledge it. My jaw is so tightly clench it feels locked.
My phone chimes, and I read a message saying the second security team is downstairs. But where is the team that was watching my children?
The elevator doors slide open into our penthouse. And my heart hits the pit of my soul.
There is a thick trail of blood, the kind you get when you drag a body over white tiles. It leads from the elevator, where the first security guard would have been standing, towards the kitchen.
Selene screams. “Arron, Solenne!” But there is no answer.
I follow the blood in a hurry and find a security guard dead in a larger pool of blood. He was trying to reach his backup walkie-talkie after they attacked him and left him to bleed out.
Selene is already running towards the twins’ rooms, and I scream for her to stop.
What if… she doesn’t need to see that… if Alek…
I run too. The fear is worse than anything I have ever experienced in my life.
We find two more guards, both dead.
“Raya!” I shout into the house.
The silence is deafening.
The twins’ room is a mess. There are toys everywhere. The table and chairs I got them has been kicked over or thrown. There is blood on the blankets. Not a lot, but enough to worry me.
And the twins are nowhere to be seen.
“Raya!” I shout, running from the room, leaving Selene on her knees, sobbing as she clutches Arron’s spaceman toy.
The rest of the penthouse is empty. Three dead security guards, no Raya, no twins.
My other security team bursts through the doors into the living room.
“They’ve taken Raya and the children,” I inform them with a deadly coldness in my voice. “Leave right now and track them. Track anything. Find the video footage. Find my children!”
The men turn and leave just as quickly as they had arrived.
I walk back to the twins’ bedroom and scoop Selene into my arms.
“There’s so much blood,” she murmurs, her body shaking. “We should never have left them; I should never have left them.”
“It’s not their blood. The blood is from the security guards. It’s not theirs.”
“You don’t know that!” she screams at me.
“Selene!” I take her by her shoulders and shake her. “Our children are no use to your father if they are hurt. He needs them to bargain with. He isn’t going to hurt them.”
“You don’t know what he’s capable of.” She collapses against me, and I wrap my arms tightly around her.
***
It’s been twelve hours since our children were taken. We haven’t slept. We haven’t stopped looking. Matvei and his team have been canvassing the city. My other brothers are out there looking, too. Adrian is here with me, going through every security feed we can find from every camera in the city.
A team is in the penthouse doing a clean-up downstairs, and Selene and I are upstairs in the library with Adrian.
“How the fuck did you let this happen?” Matvei’s voice comes from the doorway, and we all spin in fright.
Matvei is furious. “Did you find anything?” I ask, ignoring his question.
“You went to a meetup?” he snaps. “You had a meetup with a massive rival of ours, and you didn’t think to tell any one of your brothers?” he snarls, slamming his fists against the wall.
“You think I don’t fucking know this is a bad situation!” I yell back at him, exhausted and stressed.
“How the fuck did you not tell us?” he snaps, turning to glare at me.
I clench my jaw, close my eyes, and try to breathe. I didn’t tell him because I wanted to protect Selene. I thought I was making the right choice.
“Simon!” he snarls.
“I didn’t want you cornering Selene again, okay. I was trying to protect her,” I snap.
Matvei scoffs and shakes his head. “Well done, man. Because you protected her, and now our sister has been taken.”
“And my children!” I yell at him, my head aching and my neck muscles so tight they might tear.
“Please,” Selene says quietly. “This isn’t helping anything.”
I turn to look at her. Her eyes are swollen and red. Beneath them, there is a shadow so dark it looks like she got punched in the face, but it’s pure exhaustion. Pure worry. Hours of crying.
“I think you need to stay out of it at this point,” Matvei snaps at her.
“Don’t speak to her like that,” I snap back.
“What? What good has she done? She got our sister kidnapped and your children. Tell me what good advice or information she has given us to prevent this!”
I shake my head, furious at my brother, but without the energy to fight him. I need all of my energy to find my family.
I turn my back on Matvei and speak to Adrian. “Did the guys find anything yet?” I ask quietly.
“Nothing. It looks like the Mykros family has made itself disappear.”
“Fuck,” I say under my breath.
I hear Matvei groan.
When I hear footsteps, I turn to see Selene leaving.
I glare at Matvei, and he pushes his hand through his hair. “I’m sorry,” he mutters, embarrassed. “I’m… I’m worried.”
I sigh heavily and shake my head. “So is Selene. Don’t take this out on her. Her father is the one to blame. She is worried sick.”
“I know, man. I… I wasn’t thinking. I’m tired and frustrated. I’m here to help. Ok. Whatever you need. We’re going to find them,” he says.
I step forward and hug him, patting him hard on the back. “We will. We will find them,” I say sternly.
Matvei goes to sit down next to Adrian at our makeshift operations station.
“Ok, what have we got so far?” he asks.
I leave the two of them and head out of the room to find Selene.
I know she is drowning in guilt.
She thinks this is her fault because it’s her family who took our children.
But I think this is my fault because I should never have agreed to the dinner.
I find Selene sitting on the twins’ bed. The room is clean. Reset. The blood is gone, fresh bedding on the bed. But there is a chemical smell of bleach and disinfectant drifting into the room from downstairs, where the big clean-up has been ongoing.
“It smells like death,” she whispers, stroking her fingers over a teddy bear’s face.
“They will be finished soon,” I reassure her, sitting down on the bed next to her.
“What if…” She starts, but stops.
Slip my arm around her waist and pull her closer to me. “This isn’t your fault, Selene. You couldn’t have known what your father had planned,” I say gently.
She laughs bitterly. “You are so, so wrong, Simon. I am the one who knows him better than anyone on the planet. I’ve seen it first-hand.
I’ve seen it for five years. I know exactly what he is capable of, and somehow…
somewhere inside me, I still dared to believe he had a heart.
This is my fault. This is entirely my fault.
” Her tears fall again, and I hold her tighter, pulling her face against my chest.
“It’s only human to hope people can change, princess. You can’t condemn yourself for that.”
“But it cost me my children,” she sobs. “I cost you your children…”
“Don’t say things like that,” I argue.
She tries to pull away from me, and I hold her tighter, refusing to let her do that.
“Simon, please. You should be furious with me. You have every right to hate me. You can’t be here comforting me when I am the reason we are in this mess. I should never have come back. I should never have dragged you into this… I…”
“Stop!” I say sternly.
“Stop trying to pull away from me. Stop trying to put walls between us. Don’t you get it, Selene?
I can’t be without you. I am nothing without you.
Whatever happens now, however we fix this mess—and we will fix this mess—I will not lose you in the process, then I may as well kill myself now because I will not carry on without you.
I can’t do it again, Selene. And I won’t let you do it to me. ”
Her eyes go wide as she stares at me in shock. “Simon… I …”
“I won’t lose you; you hear me?” I stare right into her soul. I mean every word I say. She can see it in my eyes.
Slowly, Selene nods, and her body relaxes, no longer trying to push away from me. I pull her back where she belongs, against my chest, in my arms.
As I stroke my fingers through her soft hair, I kiss her head.
She sighs, tears falling, her heart breaking.
“We are going to get them back,” I say more gently than before. “We are going to get our family back, Selene. I fucking promise you. I will not stop until they are both in our arms. I will not rest. I will tear down every fucking building in this city until I find them…”
She reaches up to touch my face, and the desperate words stop pouring from my lips.
“I know, Simon. I know we will get them back because they have the most amazing father they could ever have wished for. And they have a mother who is willing to die to save them. They will come home. We will find them.”
My heart pulls so tight I have to reach up and place my hand on my chest.
“Willing to die?” I stammer.
“I will do whatever it takes to make sure they don’t grow up with that man,” Selene says calmly.
“No, baby. No. No, you can’t think like that. We will do this together. And in the end, we will all be together,” I tell her, clinging to her.
She sighs softly and nuzzles against me. “We’ll do it together,” she agrees.
It’s been forty-seven hours since they were taken.
I have stolen a few hours of sleep here and there, but my mind is starting to slip, and my thoughts are no longer clear.
Selene finds me sitting on the edge of our bed, having just climbed out of a shower. My head is in my hands as I try to force myself to stand, to get dressed, to go back and start looking through the hours of video footage. We have no leads. We have no clues. We have nothing. Fucking nothing.
“Simon,” she says gently as she sits behind me on the bed. “You need to sleep.”
“I can’t rest until I have them,” I argue, trying to stand up. But she pulls me back down.
“And you are no good to anyone in the state that you’re in.
Adrian is back, and he’s working on the footage.
Matvei and your other brothers are on ground level, asking around in the city.
They are working in shifts, resting in between.
You need to sleep so that you can join them later with a clear head. ”
“Selene, our children…”
She wraps her arms around my neck and climbs onto my lap.
“Sleep, Simon. I am right here. I will wake you up the moment I hear anything. If anything happens at all, I will wake you up. But right now, you look like you’re barely alive, and I can’t bear to see you this way.
Please. When the time comes to make a move, you have to be rested,” she begs.
I nuzzle my face against the curve of her neck and sigh. “A few hours will be good for me,” I finally agree. “Just a few hours.”
Selene pushes me down so that I am lying with my head on the pillow. She pulls the blankets over me and lies down next to me. I close my eyes, and she strokes her fingers over my cheeks. A slow, tender touch that has me drifting away almost instantly.