She laughs bitterly. “You are so, so wrong, Simon. I am the one who knows him better than anyone on the planet. I’ve seen it first-hand. I’ve seen it for five years. I know exactly what he is capable of, and somehow… somewhere inside me, I still dared to believe he had a heart.This is my fault. This is entirely my fault.” Her tears fall again, and I hold her tighter, pulling her face against my chest.
“It’s only human to hope people can change, princess. You can’t condemn yourself for that.”
“But it cost me my children,” she sobs. “I cost you your children…”
“Don’t say things like that,” I argue.
She tries to pull away from me, and I hold her tighter, refusing to let her do that.
“Simon, please. You should be furious with me. You have every right to hate me. You can’t be here comforting me when I am the reason we are in this mess. I should never have come back. I should never have dragged you into this… I…”
“Stop!” I say sternly.
“Stop trying to pull away from me. Stop trying to put walls between us. Don’t you get it, Selene? I can’t be without you. I am nothing without you. Whatever happens now, however we fix this mess—and we will fix this mess—I willnotlose you in the process, then I may as well kill myself now because I will not carry on without you. I can’t do it again, Selene. And I won’t let you do it to me.”
Her eyes go wide as she stares at me in shock. “Simon… I …”
“I won’t lose you; you hear me?” I stare right into her soul. I mean every word I say. She can see it in my eyes.
Slowly, Selene nods, and her body relaxes, no longer trying to push away from me. I pull her back where she belongs, against my chest, in my arms.
As I stroke my fingers through her soft hair, I kiss her head.
She sighs, tears falling, her heart breaking.
“We are going to get them back,” I say more gently than before. “We are going to get our family back, Selene. I fucking promise you. I will not stop until they are both in our arms. I will not rest. I will tear down every fucking building in this city until I find them…”
She reaches up to touch my face, and the desperate words stop pouring from my lips.
“I know, Simon. I know we will get them back because they have the most amazing father they could ever have wished for. And they have a mother who is willing to die to save them. They will come home. We will find them.”
My heart pulls so tight I have to reach up and place my hand on my chest.
“Willing to die?” I stammer.
“I will do whatever it takes to make sure they don’t grow up with that man,” Selene says calmly.
“No, baby. No. No, you can’t think like that. We will do this together. And in the end, we will all be together,” I tell her, clinging to her.
She sighs softly and nuzzles against me. “We’ll do it together,” she agrees.
It’s been forty-seven hours since they were taken.
I have stolen a few hours of sleep here and there, but my mind is starting to slip, and my thoughts are no longer clear.
Selene finds me sitting on the edge of our bed, having just climbed out of a shower. My head is in my hands as I try to force myself to stand, to get dressed, to go back and start looking through the hours of video footage. We have no leads. We have no clues. We have nothing. Fuckingnothing.
“Simon,” she says gently as she sits behind me on the bed. “You need to sleep.”
“I can’t rest until I have them,” I argue, trying to stand up. But she pulls me back down.
“And you are no good to anyone in the state that you’re in. Adrian is back, and he’s working on the footage. Matvei and your other brothers are on ground level, asking around in the city. They are working in shifts, resting in between. You need to sleep so that you can join them later with a clear head.”
“Selene, our children…”
She wraps her arms around my neck and climbs onto my lap. “Sleep, Simon. I am right here. I will wake you up the moment I hear anything. If anything happens at all, I will wake you up. But right now, you look like you’re barely alive, and I can’t bear to see you this way. Please. When the time comes to make a move, you have to be rested,” she begs.
I nuzzle my face against the curve of her neck and sigh. “A few hours will be good for me,” I finally agree. “Just a few hours.”
