Page 78 of My Sunfall

Chapter Fifty

Chiara

I check the clock again and frown. He’s been gone for hours, and I have no idea where he is and when he is coming back. The house feels too big without him. I pace between the kitchen and the living room, trying not to check my phone every thirty seconds like some pathetic lovesick teenager.

He’s busy, he doesn’t owe you anything, my mind reasons. It must be business.

Except… lately he’s been disappearing more and more, coming home in the dead of night, and leaving earlier than he used to. And yet, every time he’s near, he makes me feel like I’m the only person he sees. And worse, the only person who matters to him.

A stupid, humiliating thought keeps forcing its way into my brain no matter how many times I shove it down—what if he’s done? What if he’s lost interest?

I don’t want to care. I shouldn’t care. But my stomach has been tied in knots all goddamn evening.

Lorenzo’s voice slithers into my mind, poisonous and persistent. ”A leopard never changes its spots.“

What if he’s seeing someone? Suddenly, the walls are closing in as my throat constricts and bile creeps up my throat, but I try to breathe through it.

I jump when my phone buzzes. My heart lurches in my chest and I’m swiping the message on my phone before my mind can catch up.

And I freeze.

It’s not a message, but a picture. A car in deep green—"It’s called Forest Green, cara mia”—lies crumpled and overturned in the middle of the road. Lucas’ Aston Martin. There’s glass everywhere, smoke is curling up from the wreck.

“No,” I whisper brokenly. “No, no, no!”

A second photo appears before I can even breathe.

My blood runs cold.

Lucas. He’s slumped on a chair, hands obviously tied behind his back. His head is hanging over his chest but I can see blood smears running down his temple and jaw onto his shirt.

“It’s not real,” I whisper brokenly. “It can’t—”

My phone vibrates again, this time with an incoming text.

We have something that belongs to you. If you want to see him alive, you’ll do exactly as we say—

My lungs seize and my vision blurs so much that I can’t read the rest of the instructions.

Someone took him, my mind screams. He’s hurt.

* * * *

The address they sent me leads to the Boston docks. Wind whips across the empty loading bays, rattling chains and making the ships groan like dying animals. My headlights cut through the darkness, the beam sweeping over a massive cargo ship moored to the far end of the pier.

This has to be it. My fingers tremble on the wheel, but I force myself to breathe. Every instinct screams to run, but I can’t turn back. I cut the engine and climb out of the car.

A man steps out of the shadows, a gun strapped visibly at his waist. He jerks his chin.

“Inside. Crew cabin.”

My legs feel like jelly, but I move forward, up the gangway, into the ship’s cavernous depths. The inside is dim and eerily silent except for the occasional groans and clanks of the metal and the splashing of the waves against the hull. My steps and my breaths sound too loud in this silence as terror makes my gut churn. I am utterly alone and vulnerable.

”We are monitoring your phone. If you tell anyone we’ll know, and your husband dies.”

The inside feels like a maze, at every turn I stop to look for the sign leading to the crew’s cabin. My heart slams against my ribs as I walk deeper and deeper into the belly of the ship. Until I stand in front of a door. The man guarding it pulls the heavy steel panel open and I step inside. My heart hammers wildly against my ribcage when a second guard slams the door shut behind me and stations himself at my back, cutting off the only way out. I turn toward what looks to be a dimly lit office and take a slow step forward.

Then I see him.