9. Max #2
“She seemed excited about it.” The lie tastes like acid. “I just wanted to make sure she arrived safely.”
“She called me this morning. Said the place is perfect for focusing. No distractions.”
“Good. That’s good.” I keep my voice even, casual. “How did she sound?”
“Tired. But you know Cat when she’s writing. She forgets to sleep, forgets to eat.” A pause. “Is everything alright between you two?”
“Why do you ask?”
“She’s been… distant lately. Even before this trip. I assumed it was the book, but-”
“Every marriage has rough stretches,” I say. “We’re working through one of the quieter ones.”
“Quieter.” He doesn’t sound convinced. “Right.”
“If she calls you again, tell her I’d like to hear from her. When she has time.”
“I’ll pass that along.”
“Thank you, Enzo.”
“Take care of yourself, Moretti. And take care of my sister.”
He hangs up.
I set the phone down carefully, resisting the urge to hurl it across the room.
Week 3
The reports pile up on my desk. Sightings that turn out to be nothing. Leads that go nowhere. A woman matching her description at a motel in Pennsylvania who turned out to be a college student with brown hair.
Brown hair.
Cat has brown hair. Had brown hair. Does she still?
I don’t even know what my wife looks like anymore.
At night, when the house is quiet and the search has stalled and there’s nothing left to do but wait, I lock myself in my room and pull out the paperbacks from the bottom drawer of my dresser.
Lena Amara. Bestselling romance author. Face unknown, identity protected, wildly popular among readers who have no idea they’re consuming fiction written by a mafia princess.
I figured it out during her second book.
The don in the story takes his coffee the way I take mine, black, two sugars, in a cup he inherited from his grandfather.
He buries his father with the same Sicilian prayers I learned as a child, handles succession with the same grim determination I’d always assumed I’d bring to it.
She wrote those details into her second book, published months into our marriage, but she must have drafted them earlier, weaving in things she’d observed during those first weeks together.
It could have been coincidence. But then I watched her, during those warm months when we were actually building something. The way she disappeared for hours with her laptop. The protective curl of her body when she wrote, like she was shielding something precious.
I never told her I knew. I figured she’d share when she was ready.
Now I read her books like scripture, hunting for clues.
In her fourth novel, the heroine disappears. Runs from a man who betrayed her, hides in a small town in Maine, reinvents herself completely. My men have been to that town three times.
She’s not there.
She’s better than her own books.
Week 5
Nico finds me at 2 a.m., sitting in the dark of my study with an empty whiskey glass and her ring pressed against my lips.
“You need to sleep.”
“I need to find my wife.”
“You can’t find her if you’re dead from exhaustion.” He sits across from me, uninvited. “The search is still running. The men know what to do. Killing yourself won’t help.”
“She’s out there somewhere thinking I tried to have her killed.”
“I know.”
“She’s alone, Nico. She’s alone and scared and she thinks her husband is a monster.”
“Then we find her and you explain.”
“What if we don’t find her?” The question comes out raw, broken. “What if she’s better at hiding than we are at seeking? What if she’s gone forever and she spends the rest of her life believing-”
“We’ll find her.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No.” He’s quiet for a moment. “But I know you. You’re not going to stop. You’re going to burn down the entire eastern seaboard if that’s what it takes.”
“And if that’s not enough?”
“Then you’ll burn down the western one too.”
The corner of my mouth lifts, which is as close as I’ve come in weeks.
“The coup,” I say. “Sergio’s faction. Where are we?”
“Still gathering intel. Bruno’s been tracking their communications. We’ve identified most of the players, but we’re not ready to move yet.”
“Good. Keep it that way.” I set down the glass. “I don’t want to deal with a civil war until I have my wife back.”
“And if Sergio moves first?”
“Then we respond. But she comes first. She always comes first.”
Nico nods and leaves me alone.
I go upstairs and pull the books out of the drawer again. My room is dark and silent.
I’m sitting on the edge of my bed, her ring clutched in my fist, her books scattered around me like offerings to a god who isn’t listening.
My father used to say that power was the ability to protect what you love. I believed him. I built my entire strategy around it, contain the threat, isolate the target, eliminate the danger before it reaches the people who matter.
I forgot that protection isn’t the same as love. That keeping someone safe isn’t the same as making them feel wanted.
I forgot that she couldn’t read my mind.
If you ever come after my life again.
She thinks I’m the threat. She thinks I’m the danger she needed to escape.
And the worst part, the part that keeps me awake at 3 a.m. with whiskey on my tongue and her ring against my chest, is that I understand why.
I gave her every reason to believe exactly that.
I stand up, cross to the window, stare out at the city lights.
“I’m going to find you,” I say out loud, to the empty room, to the night, to the woman who’s out there somewhere carrying the weight of a betrayal I never committed. “I’m going to find you, and I’m going to tell you everything. The coup, the theater, why I did what I did.”
The words feel inadequate. Incomplete.
“Even if you never come back. Even if you hate me forever. You don’t get to live the rest of your life thinking you weren’t loved.” My voice breaks on the last word. “Not again. Never again.”
The ring is warm now, heated by my skin, pressed against my heart like a promise.
“I’ll find you, Cat. I swear to God, I’ll find you.”