“We need to call Alessandro,” Olivero said as I backed out of the space.
“I don’t need him.”
“Yes, you do.”
Damn it. Yes, I did.
Olivero made the call and put it on speaker. My father answered on the first ring, knowing Olivero was not the kind of man to call him needlessly.
“What happened?”
“Emily is gone.”
Silence.
Then, “Voluntarily?”
I drove too fast through Boston traffic, one hand clenched around the wheel hard enough that my knuckles hurt.
“No. I got a text from her number. It said she needed space, that it was all too fast, that she was leaving for a while. It isn’t her. It’s wrong. Every word of it is wrong.”
My father did not interrupt me.
A good thing, because if he had tried to soothe me, I might have driven straight through a wall.
“This is the kind of shit Matteo would pull. I swear to God, if?—”
“Don’t do anything stupid.” His voice was calm, clipped, controlled in the way it only ever was when he was already three steps ahead. “Let me speak to Matteo first. I’m fairly sure it isn’t him, but I’ll confirm it. Other than instinct, do you have any reason to think she didn’t write it?”
I threw Olivero an exasperated look.
“No, Dad.” My voice came out sharper than I intended, but I didn’t care. “You’ll have to trust me. She would not leave me like that.”
He exhaled once.
“I believe you.”
“We’ll find out who did this,” he promised. “And then we’ll deal with it.”
I swallowed something hot and violent.
“I’ll kill them all.”
My father was quiet for half a beat.
Then, with maddening composure, “Yes, but not until I get there.”
That should not have helped.
It did.
The next three hours were the longest of my life.
By the time I reached her apartment, I was already past panic and into something colder. More useful. More dangerous. I paced the length of her living room like a man in a cage while Olivero checked the building cameras, Derek tore through her digital trail, and my father updated me in intervals long enough to torture.
Most of her things were gone.
Not all of them.
