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She’d even gotten used to Georgiy and Officer Patronnetti.
Her old life felt a universe away, and she increasingly felt herself slipping into Roman’s world. It wasn’t the cold plunge of being kidnapped by his father’s men, kept prisoner in the grain terminal.
This was way more dangerous, like slipping into a warm bath.
Jeopardyplayed on the TV above the bed, a ritual she and Roman had developed during the five days since he’d woken up in the hospital. They raced to beat each other to the punch, because even lying in a hospital bed with a bullet hole perilously close to his heart, Roman couldn’t help himself and Ruby had always had a competitive nature.
Max had been discharged two days before and had gone to get them some real food, and just as important, some real coffee.
Somewhere in the hospital, Igor still lay recovering. Erik hadn’t returned to see Roman. Ruby didn’t know what had been said between the brothers, but he’d been pensive in the hours after Erik’s visit, and Ruby hoped they’d reached some kind of truce.
She didn’t know what was going on with the bratva but she knew Roman didn’t need another enemy.
“In Genesis chapter four, the Lord set a mark upon this brother, “‘Lest any finding him should kill him,’” the host ofJeopardyintoned on the TV.
“Who was Cain,” Roman said, beating her to the punch.
Dammit.
She thought of Olivia, wondered where her daughter was, if she was safe. Ruby’s father had hired a detective — a former cop — to try and find them, but Ruby wasn’t hopeful. Adam was a police officer. He knew more than most about what it took to remain hidden, about how to avoid being found by someone like him.
“Where do you go?” Roman asked her from his hospital bed.
She looked up and blinked. She’d been spacing out, thinking about Olivia instead of answering the questions onJeopardy.
“Nowhere,” she said.
“Don’t lie to me, Ruby.” He said it gently, but there was something steely under his words, something that sent a shiver of excitement up her spine.
It had been happening more over the past couple of days: Roman looking at her with hungry eyes, even pulling her into his bed when the nurses weren’t around, the familiar lust roaring to life inside her even though he was still recovering and her daughter was missing and she definitely shouldn’t be thinking about sex.
“I was thinking about Olivia,” she said, because it was the closest she dared to get to the truth with Roman still recovering. “I’m always thinking about Olivia.”
“How is she?” Roman asked.
He asked the question almost every day, and every day she said the same thing: fine. But this time she hesitated a beat too long, her guard down with theJeopardyquestions unspooling in the background, the need to protect Roman from anything stressful less urgent now that he was on his way to recovery.
“She’s fine.”
He sat up straighter, his gaze sharp on her face. “I’ll ask you again, Ruby. How is Olivia?”
Ruby swallowed, her mind whirling as she tried to think of the best way to tell him that Olivia and Adam were missing, that she’d kept it from him for the past five days in the interest of his recovery.
She took a deep breath. “I don’t actually know.”
He reached for the remote next to his bed and turned off the TV. The room was plunged into a sudden and dramatic silence. “What do you mean youdon’t know? Adam hasn’t been letting you speak to her?”
“He’s gone.” The words teared her apart on their way out of her mouth. “They’re both gone.”
Roman’s expression went still. “Definegone.”
“Adam stopped answering his phone after the shooting at the cemetery. My dad and Brooke went to his apartment to check on Olivia and the super said they’d left a couple days before, that it looked like they were taking a trip.” It played out in her head as she recounted it to Roman — the dread that had seeped through her stomach like a stain, the panic when her dad called to tell her about the super. “I called Deon and he said Adam has taken leave.”
“How long?” Roman asked. “How long did he tell them he’d be gone?”
She swallowed, not wanting to say it out loud. Not wanting to make it real. “Indefinitely.”
There was a split second when she thought it would be okay. That Roman’s instinct to fight — always to fight — would be curbed by his near-fatal injury.
