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“Don’t,” I snarl. Locksmith falls silent instantly. “Don’t you dare say her name. She’s dead. Buried. Gone. That’s not changing any time soon, so what’s the point in talking about her?”
The silence lingers uncomfortably. “I understand.”
“Keep digging. Keep searching. If anything comes up, call me immediately. Day or night, it doesn’t matter—I’ll pick up.”
I hang up and storm down the road to where my SUV is parked. Aleksandr is leaning against the hood, his face lit up by the orange flames beginning to engulf the house. He gets in when I approach and turns on the ignition. In the distance, I can hear the first faint sounds of an oncoming fire truck.
“Nothing?”
I scowl. “He can’t hide from me forever.”
“He’s banking on the fallout between you and Vittorio to keep him safe a little while longer,” Aleksandr deduces shrewdly. “It’s what I would do.”
“He knew,” I hiss. “He knew. He knew Bee wasn’t pregnant. He was trying to expose us.”
The fire truck breezes past us at the top of the hill. Aleksandr executes a U-turn and drives calmly down the road, away from the Irish rathole behind us. The rest of my men spread out in anonymous, mismatched vehicles of their own, vanishing into the night like we were never even here.
“The day of the—the event…” Aleks ventures, carefully avoiding any mention of the word “wedding,” which has become forbidden terminology in the two weeks since it happened. “… Vittorio was pissed that Bee was taking so long. He stormed into her bridal suite while she was in the bathroom. I caught him in there trying to intimidate Wren. She was convinced that he wasn’t buying her surrogacy story.”
“What did he say to her?”
Aleksandr’s hands tighten on the steering wheel. “I don’t know, brother,” he says gently. “She didn’t take me through the whole conversation. We were seconds from walking down the aisle ourselves. There wasn’t time.”
When he pulls one palm off the wheel, I notice he’s left sweat marks on the leather. You wouldn’t know it from looking at him—not the way you’d know it from one glance at the rage that burns on my face all hours of the day now—but he is suffering, too.
I can’t fault him. I was hard on him the first week after Wren was taken. All I could see—all I cared to see—was that I’d left her in his care and he’d lost her to Cian.
Planning Bee’s funeral at the same time didn’t help. It was two full days of the worst case of déjà vu. Bee’s coffin, light as it was, felt as though it contained two bodies.
Ping.
I glance down at my lockscreen, freezing when I see that it’s yet another unknown number. Aleksandr knows the drill, too, because he glances sideways at me. “Him again?”
I open the picture Cian’s sent me. This makes the fourth in fourteen days. Except this one’s different from the three that preceded it.
For one, Wren’s not asleep. Her back’s not to the camera. She’s on a carpet on the floor with her legs pulled up to her chest and her arms wrapped around them. If I didn’t know better, I wouldn’t be able to tell she’s pregnant; her face certainly doesn’t give her away. Her cheeks are too hollow, skin too pale and sallow, eyes too huge in their sockets.
I do the math in my head before I can stop myself from wandering down that road yet again. She could go into labor at any minute.
The thought that I might not be there with her is bad enough.
The thought of her having our baby while she’s in the custody of Cian fucking O’Gadhra makes my blood burn.
I keep staring at the picture, trying to find some kind of clue in her face, in her surroundings, in the weave of the damn carpet she’s sitting on. But the room is utterly generic. It could be any house in Chicago.
Curling my hand into a fist, I pound it against the dashboard. “She needs medical care. She needs to see a real doctor. She needs… more than that mudak is giving her.”
“What about Locksmith?” Aleksandr asks urgently. “Surely there’s something?—”
“There’s nothing. As far as Locksmith is concerned, Cian is a ghost.”
“Sounds like he doesn’t want a war.”
“It’s a little too late for that.”
Aleksandr’s sigh sets me off. “What?” I demand, whirling in my seat to face him. “If you’ve got something to say, then fucking say it.”
Aleksandr’s jaw clenches. “We have Vittorio to worry about, too, brother,” he reminds me warily. “I understand you need to find Wren, but I don’t want you to be so consumed with getting her back that you forget to watch your own borders.”
