Chapter 1 #4
I did what he asked, moved millions into his bank account, and still, he hasn’t brought her back.
My house has become a war room, with nearly fifteen people crowded into the living room: hackers, private investigators, and members of my personal security team.
On the other side of my phone, Deputy Garron and his tactical liaison are patched into the search, receiving every file we uncover, every camera angle from a hundred locations.
The police are moving with us, but chain of command and procedure are slowing everything down, and I cannot afford to waste another second.
The footage from her receiving a call, which we have now traced to Mara’s house, then the sight of her rushing outside, stopping once to call me, which, breaks my heart, because the one time she needed me, I had no signal since I was trying to kill Cole in his house, where he was nowhere to be found because he was preying on my… On my…
I shake my head, looking blankly at the wooden floors.
Ella fractured my DNA on a molecular level, sinking into my soul to a point of no return, and it is my duty to use all my skills to get her out of this, which means turning my brain off–the emotional part at least–and focusing.
Focusing on tracking her down. All of this is a situation, and I was born to handle crises, avert them, target the main issue, and deal with it.
And when something does not go as planned, I reroute, change the axis of my compass, and find a way out with the best minds available.
I have twenty men in the field actively looking for her, while I make calls left and right, working with the best hackers and PIs in the state, people I flew in on my private jet to find her since we lost track of her ever since she…
since she got into that truck. It was twelve days ago, and I haven’t been able to sleep ever since.
I drove to the place where we found her phone, a sketchy area where no woman would be safe, day or night.
My heart did not beat when I found it, holding in my hand the last evidence of her presence.
I did not taste her lips again, as I do every time I remember her scent, and I did not imagine how terrified she must have been, how desperate to get to her , since Mara had led her into thinking she had to go there to say her last goodbyes.
I cannot think of how she rushed there knowing I had told her to stay home.
I cannot imagine her tears, her inability to scream for help.
I cannot, because my body has plunged into a deafening calmness.
Let’s say, a second state of consciousness I have never experienced before.
A drop of water keeps falling from the faucet in the kitchen behind the living room.
Brenton, my PI, scratches his knees, and Alfie, a young hacker from the West Coast, is chewing on a piece of plastic pen as he tries to decode the cameras that stopped recording her path the second she entered the car.
Cole organized it like music on paper, every single detail down to its last bit.
Meticulously ripping my guts apart, limb by limb.
“We’re in,” Alfie says, his hood hiding half of his young face.
The kid must be eighteen, and still, Brenton vouched for him.
“It wasn’t easy, but look.” He points at it, eyes locked on the screen, as I circle behind the sofa where he is sunken in.
“They forgot to encode one camera, a twenty-minute ride from where we lost them. The guy who did it was good because they secured the whole area within a thirty-kilometer radius and got sloppy around this one.” He clicks on it, the camera filming the corner of a street.
Pressing the acceleration button, we see, around three o’clock, the same car passing by for two seconds—our first major clue ever since she vanished.
“Stop it,” I order, leaning in above his shoulder. Filming her from her side of the car, head down, glued to the door, hair covering her face, her hand scratching her elbow. Alive. Moving. “And then we lose them again,” Alfie adds.
“East side of town, sir,” Brenton adds, his tweed jacket removed, his blue tie tight above a gingham brown-and-orange shirt.
“I don’t recall them having any business here.
No buildings or shops. It’s a dying neighborhood, most companies have moved into the city center,” he explains.
“Low rents, cheap grocery stores, small drug traffic, nothing alarming. A few cars burned down there a month ago to protest the closing of a plastic-packaging plant.”
“The perfect hiding spot,” I let out. “Matt, where are we on thermal cameras?”
“I’m looking,” he mutters, focused on his laptop. “I’m almost done scanning the perimeter with the drone.” The room holds its breath for a minute as I wait for Matt to confirm my intuition.
“Shit,” he lets out as everyone looks up at him, sitting on the opposite sofa from Alfie.
“Looks like we’ve been looking at the wrong place.
It’s a glow-stick party underneath.” He gapes, running a palm over his chin.
“I can’t… Shit, Tristan, there’s human activity underground.
A fucking lot. It’s not precise enough yet, but shit, there are humans underneath. I’d say at least fifty.”
She is there. Under. Trapped. I’m sure of it, just like I’m sure her heart is still beating.
Words get stuck in my throat, unable to order anything more.
The glowing yellow, orange, red lights absorb my attention.
Some are moving, others are not. In a few minutes, we will have a better idea of who is who and the average number of people under there.
If it is as big as a neighborhood, then Ella is most likely not the only one held there.
Which seems like a delicate task, since she is the only one I am interested in freeing.
This is a dark world, and whoever got under there will have to find their way out by themselves.
No. The thought stops me cold. That is what I would have said before Ella, before she looked at me like there was still something worth saving beneath all the polished brutality.
Before she made me see that power is not only meant to own, conquer, and punish, but also to protect.
If there are other people down there, prisoners, victims, then we get them out too. The police can handle the rest.
“Why are some of them glowing less?” I ask.
“Levels. There are levels to this thing, four, five perhaps,” Matt points out.
Given how important Ella is to me, Cole must have hidden her in the safest place.
She is most likely at the bottom, where he assumes no one will look for her.
Joke’s on him. I intend to find her even in death.
Might as well do it now in hell, for practice.
I would find her even if she were hidden across the world.
There is no limit to the wrath I would deploy to get to her.
“From what I saw when I was deployed, each time we got hostages out from places like these, floors have guards, perhaps here,” Matt says, pointing at glowing figures spaced equally, “and they move occasionally. The others are prisoners, especially since, and we’ll confirm this in the next minute, they won’t go outside of a certain perimeter.
Alf, can you map this out over the next twenty minutes so we can start identifying patterns? ”
“Sure.”
“Here,” Matt points, “must be a meeting room or Cole’s. It’s further from the others because he needs easy access to the outside.”
“How could we enter and extract her without them knowing?” I ask Matt.
“Digging?” Brenton offers.
“I doubt we could tunnel our way in without them noticing.” Matt winces. “We can always enter by the front door, but it will be bloody as hell and with much more risk.”
“Or one of us could pass as a cellmate and get inside?” Paxos, one of Matt’s men, suggests, arms crossed, standing near the sofa.
“Nah, they know who’s in there, trust me.
If something’s off, they’ll know,” Matt warns him.
“Tristan, what do you say? Either way, it’s going to be risky as hell, but we’ll make it work.
What do you want to do?” I cross my arms, unflinching, unmoving, my face frozen into the mechanical emotional setting of a robot.
My princess is being summed up by a glow light on a camera screen, like she is some random person caught there when she should be here, in our home, safe and sound and not, and not…
“A second,” I mutter, rushing, hands clenching along my body as I disappear up the stairs and into the adjoining bathroom next to my bedroom.
Where Ella was days ago. Pacing like a madman in the small space with my black Oxford and suit, despite having removed my jacket and pulled my sleeves above my forearms, my hands find the edge of the sink as I drop my head low.
Under my ribs, an orchestra breaks apart, every ruined note carrying her name.
Thump.
Ella is held in a facility five floors below.
Thump.
She is alone and scared, and this is all my doing.
Thump.
I fucked up. I thought I was fixing things, but I left her alone to fend for herself, and she got taken.