Page 145 of Mile High Ruin

Attachment makes people vulnerable.

The uncomfortable part is realizing that I’m no longer certain she was talking only about Vadim.

24

VADIM

By the fifth day, I’ve learned that Sloane is very good at disappearing without technically going anywhere.

She still eats in the house, still walks through the gardens, still spends time with Camille and occasionally Anya, but whenever I enter a room she seems to have just left it, and whenever I ask someone where she is, the answer is vague enough to make me wonder whether the entire household has quietly agreed to help her avoid me.

At first, I let her. There are more important things to handle, or at least that’s what I tell myself while Anton works through airport records, Marek traces the staffing chain, and Iosef keeps digging into the altered payment that should never have been released from one of my companies.

We are closer to understanding how someone used Sloane than we were several days ago, but not close enough.

Hale’s involvement complicates everything because a dead man can’t explain why he accessed the surveillance system, whether he planted the tracker himself, or whether somebody simply paid him to erase the evidence after another person did it. The payment into Sloane’s account looks increasingly deliberate, but nobody has managed to identify the person who changed the payroll amount without relying on stolen credentials. Every answer produces two more questions.

And through all of it, Sloane stays away from me.

By late afternoon, that becomes unacceptable. I check the library first because I have seen her reading there twice, then the small sitting room near the west hall where Camille spends most of her time. Neither of them is there.

The kitchen is empty except for two members of staff.

The rear garden has Anya’s toys scattered near the terrace but no Sloane.

I find my steps getting more and more urgent.

That’s when I realize the reaction is disproportionate. She can’t simply walk off the estate without someone seeing her. There are guards at every gate. Cameras cover the property. She is safe.

Still, when I reach the eastern corridor and find another empty room, something unpleasant tightens beneath my ribs. I take out my phone.

Anton answers immediately.

“Where is Sloane?” I ask.

There’s a pause.

“I assumed she was with you.”

“She is not.”

“I can check the cameras.”

“Do it.”

I end the call before he can respond. For the next several minutes, I search the house myself, annoyed with the growing sense of urgency because there is no rational reason for it. She hasn’t been abducted. Nobody has breached the property. If anything had happened, security would already have called.

Then I step through the glass doors near the rear drawing room and finally see her. She’s standing alone at the far edge of the terrace, leaning against the stone balustrade with both hands wrapped around a mug.

The relief is immediate enough that I resent it.

I slow down before she notices me.

The view beyond her is one of the reasons I kept this property after rebuilding the house. The land falls away gently from the gardens, revealing vineyards farther down the slope and the distant outskirts of Chișinău beneath the late-afternoon light. The sky is beginning to turn gold near the horizon, and the air smells faintly of grass and damp earth after rain earlier in the day.

Sloane hears me before I reach her. She looks over her shoulder. Whatever expression appears on her face vanishes quickly. “You found me.”

“I was looking.”