Taken
MAIKA WAS AT CAMPUS when it happened.
Orion was with her, as always, standing outside the lecture hall like a monument to personal security. Maika had been subdued these past few days. Orion had been pretending not to notice, which was his own form of kindness.
She came out of the building with her bag over one shoulder, squinting at her phone. Her professor had asked about her paper, and she'd smiled, said "it's coming along great," and then spent the entire lecture staring at her notebook not writing a single word because she was thinking about Mykos.
She was always thinking about Mykos now. Or rather, she was always doing her best not to think about him and failing at it every single time, too.
The course of true love never did run smooth.
The line from A Midsummer Night's Dream had been floating through her head all day, and she wanted to laugh at the irony, because Shakespeare had written it as comedy—two pairs of young lovers getting tangled up in fairy magic—but there was nothing funny about Maika's version.
In her version, there were no fairies. No magic.
Just a husband who had looked at her like she was boring and walked away.
The ways she used to cope no longer worked, and she could no longer compartmentalize her life the way she used to.
She had always been able to open a book and disappear into someone else's words.
But now, when she tried to read, every love story reminded her of what she didn't have, and every tragedy reminded her of what she was afraid she did have.
Life had always been hard, but she had never let it affect her studies. There were things that always made her cry, but she had never lost hope.
Now, though...
Maika had gotten a B-minus on her last essay. A B-minus. And for a paper on Shakespeare at that! That, to her, was the sign that her life had hit rock bottom, and it was because her mind was drowning in despair that she didn't notice it while Orion, who had always been so vigilant...
He, too, wasn't able to escape what was ordained.
And so at the very second that Orion had accidentally dropped his phone and he had bent down to pick it up...
It was the very same second that Maika was blind to her surroundings, her thoughts clouded by despair...
And in a blink, she was gone.
By the time Orion straightened, it was done.
An unmarked van. Side door already open.
A group of men who knew what to do—they had clearly been watching, waiting for the one moment when her guard's attention would break.
One of them grabbed her from behind, a hand clamping over her mouth before she could scream.
Another wrenched her bag off her shoulder.
A third pressed a cloth to her face, and the smell was chemical and sweet, and the world started to blur.
She tried to fight. She kicked, tried to bite the hand over her mouth, but her limbs were already going heavy and wrong, and the last thing she saw before the van door slid shut was the sky—blue, ordinary, the same sky that had been there that morning when she'd walked to class thinking about nothing more important than her B-minus.
All it took was one second...for the unwanted wife of Mykos Ravensworth to be abducted.
THE ROOM WAS COLD.
Dark, concrete, a chair, zip ties on her wrists. Her mouth hurt where someone had hit her. Her wrist was bruised from the grab. One side of her face throbbed.
She was shaking so hard her teeth chattered, and yet...it was in the midst of terror and darkness that Maika learned to hope again.
This time, she didn't stop herself from thinking of Mykos.
This time, she didn't just allow herself to think of her husband.
This time, she embraced her memories of him.
Not the Mykos who found her boring and walked out on her...
But the Mykos she married, the Mykos who made love to her and wrote notes to her...
The Mykos who had spent an entire week building Maika's Corner before she even knew his name.
The Mykos whose fingers traced words on her shoulder while she fell asleep.
The Mykos who had pulled her into his lap in his study at midnight and held on like she was the only thing keeping him afloat.
And it made her laugh and cry at the same time even though she knew that made her a lunatic.
She just couldn't help it.
She laughed and cried because she knew this was God answering her prayer.
God allowing her to be abducted because somehow...this was exactly what had to happen, for her to wake up and remember that the heart was deceitful above all else, and it wasn't just her heart that could be fooled...but Mykos's, too.
And that was why...
People sometimes ended up believing what wasn't true—
(Her heart was breaking, and it bored him!)
And people also ended up saying things that they didn't really mean—
(We both know you're the kind of idiot who'll keep loving me anyway even if I don't love you back.)
MYKOS RECEIVED ORION'S call while he was at his desk. In his office. Doing his best not to think of his wife instead of working.
That would matter to him for the rest of his life. He would remember that while he had been doing his best to forget his wife, she was being abducted.
"They took her away."
Mykos found himself rising to his feet upon hearing this.
"The Eliopoulos."
He stared at his surroundings, but all he could see was her. Her face the night she'd told him she loved him. Her face at the foot of the stairs, waiting for him in the dark, asking what did I do?
And he had walked past her.
"I'm sorry."
Orion's voice broke on the apology, and Mykos had never heard Orion's voice break, not in fifteen years, not through violence, crisis, loss. Orion did not break.
But Orion had just lost the one person Mykos had tasked him to protect above all others, and the weight of that failure was in every syllable.
And somehow, even when everything inside of him seemed to turn into ice, Mykos heard himself say, "We have protocols for this. Get moving."
His tone was flat. His words, a command that served a purpose. But the moment Mykos hung up was the moment it hit him—
His wife.
His Maika.
The girl whose heart he had stomped into pieces.
She was in danger.
Because of him.
And just like that, he was crashing to his knees as everything became clear.
He should forget his own wife.
Love is a lie.
His life was under his control.
Those were all the things he had gotten wrong.
Because the truth was...
He had thought himself better than his own father but he was not.
He was just as helpless as any man.
He had thought his own pride and strength had gotten him to where he was.
But that, too, was a lie.
The reason he had been empty and restless all these years...
The reason he had always felt like there was a monster about to break free from within him...
It was all because he had been trying to do everything on his own when he didn't have to.
So, please God.
The words of his first prayer somehow came easily.
Save her.
Help me save her.
WHAT FOLLOWED AFTER that, logic would find challenging to explain.
The world would think it was simply a series of miraculous coincidences, but they would only be partly right.
Because coincidences weren't real.
God was the very antithesis of coincidences. But instead, He was why miracles existed, and so when Mykos also began to move...
There was a calmness in him that didn't come from being a cold-blooded killer.
Instead, it came from a peace that surpassed all understanding.
And whereas Mykos's protocols had once failed to protect his wife from being abducted...
This time, because Mykos knew it was no longer him who was in control but God...
This time, all the other protocols worked.
The trackers they had secretly embedded in every pair of his wife's shoes pinpointed a location within minutes. A warehouse on the outskirts of the city, owned by a shell company that Orion's team traced back to the Eliopoulos family in three calls.
The favors they had painstakingly collected over the years were now called in. Contacts in law enforcement who owed Mykos for the men he had delivered to them. Officials who knew the Ravensworth name and what it meant when that name made a request. None of them hesitated.
And in an almost ridiculously short amount of time...
They had the blueprints of the very property Eliopoulos had taken her. A two-story warehouse with a basement level. One access road. Four exterior cameras that Orion's team disabled remotely.
They knew exactly how many men were there. Seven. Armed, but not organized. These were hired hands, not soldiers. They had been paid to grab a girl and hold her, but they hadn't been paid enough to die for her.
And this time...
Just like how he delivered the wrongdoers from his world...
The authorities were the ones who charged in.
Tactical units through the front and side entrances, simultaneous breach, the way it had been done a hundred times before in this city.
Except this time, the man who had made the call was standing outside the perimeter, and he was not patient, and he was not calm, and the peace that had carried him this far was now being tested by every second his wife remained inside that building.
And it was over in minutes.
Orion was the first one at his side when the all-clear came. "She's alive, sir. Basement level. They're bringing her up."
All Mykos had to do was walk into the room where they held his wife captive...
He found her gagged and bound to a chair. Her blond hair was tangled, her wrists raw from the zip ties, and there was a bruise forming on her cheek that made something inside his chest crack wide open.
She started to cry the moment she saw him, and the moment she was free, she threw herself into his arms...
Like she had already forgiven him.
Like he had never broken her heart in the first place.
And when he cupped her face with hands that just wouldn't stop shaking—
What he saw in her eyes had his chest tightening painfully, and all he could say was—
"I'm sorry it took me so long," he said hoarsely.
"You didn't take long at all," she said with a shaken laugh. "I watch true crime shows all the time. I know I still have hope because it hasn't been 72 hours—"
"Not that."
Maika was confused. "Then what—"
"I'm sorry it took me so long to realize I love you."
Did he just say—
Did she just hear—
"S-Say that again," she choked out.
"I love you, matia—"
For the first time ever, it was Maika who didn't let him finish speaking, with her lips covering his in a teary kiss.