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A 6-foot-tall security guard towers between me and the rest of the world.
23
Salvatore
The call comes late. Almost midnight. Vera, of all people. I didn’t think she would still have my number, but maybe she kept it for the express purpose of giving me bad news. I know it’s bad when even she verges on panicking.
No one has seen Contessa in about 12 hours.
I am forty minutes from the house when the call comes in. I make the drive in twenty.
I tear through every room, throwing open doors and closets, upending furniture. The girl is playing with me again. She has to be. She’s punishing me for leaving her, that’s all. But I’ll find her. I will find her.
Time crawls by without her, with no sign. I run out of places to look—so I start the search again.
From scratch. I missed something. A room. A closet. The back of all the cars in the garage.
She’s curled up somewhere, sleeping, dreaming her vindictive little dreams about getting back at me, waiting for me to come put her in her place under me—
Marcel catches me on my way downstairs, his expression hollow.
“Noctus found this at the wall,” he says, holding onto a woman’s slip-on shoe. “Is it one of hers?”
I wouldn’t know. I never paid attention to what Ava brought back or what Tessa bought for herself.
It was just whatever she wanted. Whatever she wanted. How could it still not be enough?
I brush past him, locked onto the desperate certainty that she is here.
“I don’t understand,” Marcel says, trailing me. “You locked her in her room, didn’t you?”
I ignore him. Tessa didn’t need to be in her room. We were past that. She wouldn’t have left.
Anyone I would have worried about being a threat to her was with me out in the city. She’s here.
She has to be here; we’re just not looking hard enough.
“Sal,” Marcel urges, as I go through the sunroom again, retracing steps. I feel manic. The slightest thing out of place is like a clue, a hint, some kind of universal sign. Maybe the garden.
Maybe she went back there, like the first time—
I head outside again, where I have already been.
“Sal!” Marcel grabs me by the shoulder, ripping me around to face him, the damning evidence still in hand. “Was she or was she not in her room?”
“No,” I finally snap at him, pushing his hands off me.
He looks at me as though I’ve lost my damn mind.
“…Why not?”
Because I trusted her.
“Where the fuck would she go?” I say instead, refusing to face the truth. “How would she leave?
There are patrols walking this property day and night now! Everyone is too fucking paranoid or too fucking traumatized for sleep! So how the fuck does a grown woman just disappear under those conditions? Past two check points! Watch towers! Patrols! She’s here, she’s just—”
“She’s not here. Sal,” he grabs me when I try to head back outside for a second time.
