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I wasn’t paying attention. I was too busy trying to settle Daniel back down for a rest. He was tired after eating and crying, and the commotion around him was freaking him out. Kevin was talking to the police and they were reassuring him they were doing everything in their power, but I couldn’t stick around.
The guilt was eating me alive, and I couldn't breathe.
The police dispersed and Kevin went to sit at the table. He was staring out over the ocean, in an empty trance as Daniel slept upstairs. I backtracked into my room and opened my laptop, trying to find anything I could to distract myself. I pounded out page after page, losing myself in my dreams and my memories and the scenes I could still conjure.
And as I pounded out another quarter of the book, tears silently dripped down my cheeks and fell to their death on my keyboard.
CHAPTER 19
KEVIN
Thirty-six hours.
It had been thirty-six hours since Sydney had gone missing.
Thirty-six hours since I’d buried my face in her hair. Thirty-six hours since I’d brushed my fingers down her back, since she’d crawled up onto my lap or begged me to watch a movie or got upset with me because I had to work.
How I wished I could hear one of her temper tantrums now.
I sat in the living room, encapsulated in the tattered ruins of my Caribbean home. I hadn’t showered. I hadn’t shaved. I hadn’t even changed my clothes. All I could think about was that note, the ransom money some grimy son of a bitch was demanding in exchange for my daughter. I was beside myself. Arguing with myself. Chastising myself. And most of all, blaming myself. This was karma. Retribution was coming for me. For treating Brooke the way I had all those years ago, and for not working hard enough to keep their mother around. Thi
s was payback for prioritizing work over them. Lunch meetings over swimming. Late nights over movie nights.
This was karma.
And it had taken my daughter away from me.
This wasn’t Brooke’s fault. She took her eyes off the house while to assure Daniel’s safety in the ocean after he’d gotten out too far. Daniel was rebelling for attention because I had substituted Brooke’s presence for mine so I could work, and in the process, my daughter had been taken.
Because I wasn't paying attention.
Because I wasn’t being a good father.
I watched Brooke walk around the house, dragging her feet as she swept. She was mindlessly tending to the remaining mess the children had made with the nanny the other night; the night I’d tried to show Brooke I had chosen her. But in the process of trying to fix things with her, I’d made things worse with my children.
This was my punishment.
Brooke had no blame in this. She was protecting my son, saving him from the current that was pulling him away from shore. That son of a bitch had been in my own damn house.
I pulled at the tendrils of my hair until they tore from my scalp. I didn’t know what else to do. The police were dragging their feet, and no one had any answers for me. All that stood in the way of getting my daughter back was one hundred million dollars.
One hundred million dollars everyone was advising me not to pay.
My daughter was worth twice that. Three times that. Hell, she was worth the whole fucking company: billions and billions of dollars, and still billions more. I’d liquidate the entire fucking thing if it meant getting her back.
I kept replaying my conversation with Brooke over and over in my head when she thought she was being followed that day at the museum, staring out at that man standing in the ocean. I thought she was being overprotective. Paranoid even. A bit of an overkill on the babysitting job. No one could touch me. Or so I thought. I was Kevin Fucking Spencer, the multi-billionaire security technology mogul who had changed the fucking industry for good. No one could touch me.
Or so I had thought.
The guilt was maddening. Had I listened to Brooke instead of brushing off her concerns, maybe things wouldn’t have turned out this way.
I couldn’t sit in my house a second longer. I had to get out and do something. Pushing myself up from the couch, I swung the door open, stepped outside, then closed it behind me. The police were scouring the entire island, driving around with their lights flashing while people combed the beaches. I took a cab to the center of the town and began calling out Sydney’s name. Looking around for anything I could use to take back to the police.
I walked around the island for hours, side by side with the police and others trying to help me. I contacted my own security team; I had them looking into Gianni, digging into that bastard’s past to figure out if he had anything to do with this.
In the back of my mind, I could still see the darkness filling his eyes that day. How his demeanor changed from begging to threatening. All because I wouldn’t look at the bastard’s fucking numbers again.
My phone rang, and I stopped in my tracks. Yanking it out of my pocket, I looked down at the name and saw that Owen was calling. I stepped away and stood there with the hot Caribbean sun beating down on my back. Sweat was streaming down my body as I put the phone to my ear.
