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The guilt hits me--that Angel and I had suggested the date, that we were so negligent as to give her the opportunity to leave. But I clench my jaw. “Angel’s right. She was depressed these past few days, all because of your stupid punishment with the closet. That’s why she left.”
“If you’d left her in there for even a full day, she would have forgotten all notions of ever walking out on us,” Victor says sharply. Then he groans and pinches the bridge of his nose. “And maybe if you hadn’t drugged her so often. This is fucking abysmal.”
“If we’d left her in there a full day, she’d have been broken,” Angel snarls. “She was already bordering on useless as it was. Saint and I didn’t want a doll. If we did, we’d get an inflatable one.”
I nod in agreement. “We didn’t agree with you that it was the best way to deal with her. We could’ve tried something else instead of your psychological bullshit.”
“You enjoyed how sweet she was after her stint in the trunk,” Victor says. “But it doesn’t matter. She’s gone. Good job, both of you. Now leave me alone, I have the worst fucking headache.”
“Stop trying to make it seem like it was our fault,” I say fiercely. “You need to take some fucking blame too, Victor.”
“Blame me, I don’t care.” Victor reaches into his pocket again, then makes an annoyed sound. “And go deal with my missing phone issue. That’s an immediate security concern.”
“Fine,” I snap, turning for the door. “C’mon, Angel. Let’s go deal with his stupid phone and see if we can figure out where she went so we can get her back.”
Angel glares at Victor. “You said we were eating out of Lucia’s hands? Well, I’d rather eat out of hers than yours, Corvi. So get your fucking head out of your ass, or I might decide I’m better off on my own.”
Then he stalks out of the room, slamming the door shut.
I stare at the door in annoyance. He could have waited for me to follow.
“Well?” Victor says. “Are you going to do your job or not?”
It’s my turn to glower at Victor. “Yes, I’m going to do my fucking job. Since you couldn’t even hang on to your phone and opened us up to a security risk,Iwill go deal with it while you sit here and whine about your head hurting.” I storm off to the door, and it’s my turn to slam it behind me. Just because his head hurts. Just because it’ll make it hurt more.
I glance down the hallway, trying to see if I can spot Angel, but he’s long gone.
I feel strangely alone.
Whatever. I go to my room, intending to track Victor’s fucking phone, when my eyes land on my closet.
Maybe Victor was lying about the drugs. I go to my safe, about to enter the code, when I stop, staring at the keypad. If I had a fingerprinting kit, I could check for her prints… but I don’t have the kit, and I don’t have a set of hers to compare with, anyway. I open the safe door and stare at the contents inside.
There are a few of my passports and other fake IDs. The necklace Victor had given me for my eighteenth birthday, its chain broken. And the bottles of drugs. I don’t think Lucia would have used the chloroform or rohypnol, so I examine the bottle of sedatives. I haven’t used them that often, but my chest squeezes when I notice one of the bottles on its side. I’m pretty sure I left them all lined up. Although they could have fallen over when I closed the safe, right?
I pick up the fallen bottle--trazodone--and open it, staring at the contents. The bottle is still mostly full, so I have no way of knowing if any pills are missing. Despite what Lucia thinks, I don’t go around roofie-ing every pretty girl I meet.
“Victor’s lying,” I say out loud, closing the bottle again and putting everything back in the safe.
I go to my desk and power everything on, pulling up the familiar tracking programs. It’s easy enough to find out that Victor’s phone was at the mansion all day… and disappeared right before our date.
That doesn’t mean anything, I tell myself, but I know Victor well enough to know he’d never turn off his phone willingly. The likelihood of something having happened to the phone is high.
Fuck. Even if it wasn’t Lucia who took the phone, this is bad. Worse if it was somebody else. I open up my security apps and start damage control. Removing the phone from Victor’s accounts, making sure anybody who does turn it on again won’t be able to access anything. The sim card is a prepaid, but I make sure to decouple all accounts that I can.
I guess they’ll find Victor’s photos of his yacht. No way to delete those remotely, since I always make sure our files stay local and don’t make it to the cloud.
The work is tedious, and it’s brainless enough that I have time to stew over what happened. Angelo and Victor are wrong. Lucia wouldn’t have left us.
She wouldn’t have leftme.
I keep repeating that, over and over, but it doesn’t stop my eyes from starting to prickle with tears.
I hate that I’d rather she be suffering at the hands of Bellini or Pavone or the Armenians than to have run away, but I can’t deal with the possibility that she betrayed us all like this.
I take a deep breath, trying to fight back the tears, and start sending out messages to our contacts.
Someone has to know where she is, and I’m not going to stop until I find out.
