Her soul, fled.
Her blondhair?—
My heart stuttered, almost restarting from the jolt.
Blond.
The phone screen blackened as it turned off.
Blond.
It was a fake.
They’d deep-faked the picture, taking images from our wedding video and the pictures at the Omnia.
They hadn’t noticed that Lexi had dyed her hair a rich, lustrous brown that Sunday afternoon before the cotillion, as I’d nuzzled just that morning in bed, as I’d kissed a lock of it before she’d walked inside Juliet’s House.
The picture was a fake.
An AI-generated deep fake.
They had her or they didn’t, but this picture of a dead woman was a lie.
Lexi might still be alive.
And I would spend every cent I had, every minute of my life, call in every favor, blackmail everyone I knew with their most vile secrets, and tear the world apart until I found her.
I scrambled to my feet and tore down the stairs.
CHAPTER 28
violent ends
LEXI
Inside Juliet’s House, the staircases were wooden switchback steps connecting rectangular holes in the stone floors.
As the three security guys and I clomped up the stairs, I saw them standing on the second floor.
Aymeric had ascended the narrow staircase before me, alert, but watching was his job. Looking for the attackers was his job description for eight to twelve hours all day, every day. No one can fruitlessly search for something that long and maintain a high level of vigilance, especially since we were in the comparatively safe environment of a closed museum at eight in the morning with empty streets outside.
Aymeric had blinked at the wrong time, and he raised his small baton a second too late.
When he’d seen the other men, squat goons like boulders of light grey granite veined with pink scars, he’d turned back to me and hissed,“Run!”
But four more hit men swarmed up the staircase behind my bodyguards, and they kettled us on the wooden-railed steps surrounded by medieval stone.
Knives, daggers, stilettos.
Silent steel raked skin, pierced flesh, poured blood.
Aymeric defeated the two men who’d been waiting for us above with a few quick blows of the stick and a switchblade he’d plucked from his belt.
Whether they were dead or unconscious, neither of us stopped to check. Blood spewed from the throat of one man like a gallon of milk chugging onto the floor.
Aymeric shoved me aside as he attacked down the stairs, flying and falling with weapons glinting, and I ranup.
The third-floor windows were barred, but one set of bars was loose. A wooden parapet enclosed with safety wire ran underneath the windows to keep anyone from jumping.
