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Chapter 17
Lucas
Falling into one of the chairs in the dining room, I reached for my phone, trying to make the next plan in my head. If she had been taken, she hadn’t put up much of a fight. The Leda I knew would have fought for her life, so that meant she was either drugged or…
No, I wasn’t going to think of her as dead. I would know it if she was dead and nothing internally told me to even go down that path right now.
But my hand came up empty. No phone in my pocket. I hurried back up the stairs to the bedroom and flipped on the light, finding Leda’s bag still on the floor. She hadn’t run from me either. A quick check of the bedroom confirmed that my phone was MIA.
Which could only mean that Leda had taken it.
“What did you do,” I growled, tugging at my hair with my hand. What the hell was she doing? My thoughts traced every last bit of our time together before I had crashed, and nothing gave any indication that she was about to run.
Why would she run? I had told her that I needed her, that I wasn’t going to turn her over to her brother. I had even bared my fucking soul to her, for what? For her to do this?
No, there had to be a reason she wasn’t here. Leda wasn’t one to run. I had forced her to leave more than I cared to admit, but she hadn’t been one to run, not since the beginning.
In fact, she was more of the type to go toe to toe with me than to fucking take off.
I slowly turned in the bedroom, desperate to find any indication of what she might be up to and found nothing.
I felt fucking helpless. I couldn’t fix this. I couldn’t just snap my fingers and have her come back immediately so I could both kiss the hell out of her and berate her for whatever half-cocked plan she was cooking up.
And I was going to stick to the belief that she had left voluntarily. I didn’t think that someone snapping her up would bother taking my phone.
A dry laugh left me. Leda had fucked me into oblivion so she could leave. It was a shitty move, but a brilliant one. She knew that she was something I wouldn’t ever be able to turn down.
God, I loved her.
Leaving the bedroom, I moved back down to the restaurant and waited for the Wongs to return.
It was pushing ten when they finally came bustling through the door, Ruhua’s arms laden with plastic bags. “Xiao Lu!” she exclaimed in Cantonese, surprised to see me sitting there in the dark. “What are you doing up?”
“Where have you been?” I countered as I rose from the chair. “It’s too late to be out shopping.”
Ruhua glared at me as she dumped her packages on the table, Baoshan doing the same. “We went to the market but then ran into some friends that invited us to dinner.” She placed her hands on her hips. “I thought you and Leda would enjoy some time alone. Where is she? Did you have another fight with her?”
I choked out a laugh. “Why do you think I’ve fought with her?”
She peered at me. “Because you can be a downright asshole when you want to be.”
All right, she had me there. “She’s gone.” The words came out far more desperate than I wanted them to, but it was the truth. I had run through every fucking scenario in my head for the past hour, from Adrian somehow finding his way into this place to her deciding I wasn’t worth the trouble and leaving. It was a shitty place to be, locked in a constant state of panic, and one that I wasn’t used to.
Sure, I could have just taken to the street and tracked her, but without any means to contact Emil and no weapon, I would be nothing more than a sitting duck waiting to be picked off.
“Gone?” Baoshan echoed, placing his hand on my shoulder. “Impossible. I don’t believe it.”
His touch was comforting. “I woke up and she was gone. My phone is gone. I don’t know why.”
“Here,” Ruhua stated, thrusting her cell phone at me. “Call your man.”
I cleared my throat and did just that, dialing Emil’s number. After five rings, I hung up. “No answer,” I told her, handing it back. That worried me the most. If Emil wasn’t answering, then it must have meant that someone got to him as well.
Had he and Leda both been taken from me to draw me out?
“They are fine,” Baoshan decided, squeezing my shoulder. “They’re tough.”
I blew out a breath, willing my panic to calm the fuck down. I was a Mafia Don. I could figure this out. I could get through this. “They are fine.”
