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Without Remedy
Luca
If Willow thinks I’mgoing to just sit back and let her run, then she’s got another thing coming. I’ve spent more than a year hunting down Willow Lynch, perfecting my craft. Have I ever given up?
No. I watched and worked and waited. I used every resource at my disposal; I learned how to outthink and outsmart her. I learned how to set obstacles and traps in her way, how to sniff her out and run her down.
I’ve chased her down before—I can do it again. I’ll find her and drag her kicking and screaming back to me and force her to hate me properly, hate me in person, hate me in the flesh.
“Woodrow, listen up.”
It’s been three days since Willow left. The shock of her cowardly escape is slowly fading, and now, I’m ready for war.My office has been cleaned, my equipment repaired, and I sit at my desk with fresh determination. Woodrow, tablet in hand, watches me with a mixture of relief and apprehension.
“Forget about the club, forget about Novus. My father’s people will handle it.Iwill handle it. I need you to focus on one thing and one thing alone. Finding Willow.”
“Sir,” Woodrow says in a hopeless tone.
“You and Nadine. I want you both on this. Activate everything we’ve got. Surveillance footage, financial transactions, and communications. Check all her usual spots, anywhere she might have gone for refuge. Her flat in Greenleigh, the bar, her London caches, all the regular places we picked up on the tracker. I want her phone tracked, her credit cards, all of them, even the ones she hasn’t used in years. Withdrawals, purchases. Have our cybersecurity people hack facial recognition networks, city cameras, private CCTV, anything. Whatever it takes.”
Woodrow’s professionalism overpowers his disapproval, and he begins taking notes, too busy to protest.
“If she’s still in London, she’ll probably try to leave and make a run for it. She won’t risk staying here with the contract hanging over her head. She’ll run like the shameless coward she is. I want transportation hubs monitored. Airports, train stations—bus fucking terminals if we have to. I want her movements flaggedimmediately. Coordinate with authorities to halt her departure if necessary.”
“What about…” Woodrow slides me a glance. “Adiplomaticapproach?”
“Diplomatic approach?” I almost laugh out loud. “We’re too far gone for diplomacy, Woodrow. Willow Lynch has declared war on us, and we’re going to respond accordingly. Every atom of power I have, I will use to find her.”
Woodrow doesn’t say anything for a long while, tapping away at his tablet, and then he stops and looks up. “Mr Fletcher-Lowe. Why her?”
“Because she’smine.”
“I know. But whyher?”
My heart sinks. I think of Willow’s smirk when she bound me to her hotel bed and cut me that first night. Her face, pale and shining with sweat when Cerberus butchered her leg; her eyes, gleaming poison, when she slapped me across the face in the fencing room.
Willow’s thousand-and-one insults and the crimson of her mouth every time I’ve kissed it. Willow’s blows and laughter and her violence and the noise and chaos of her, and the sheer astounding pleasure of her.
“Because she sees me for what I am and refuses to flinch.” I laugh, almost in disbelief. “No one else could hold up a mirror so unforgivingly true. I see myself in her, and all I want to do is sharpen the blade of me to better strike the blade of her. She might be poison, Ned, but if she is, then she is both the poison and the antidote.”
Woodrow watches me for a long time, eyes boring deep into mine. I don’t know exactly what he’s looking for—I know he’s going to do what I’ve asked regardless because he’s, above all things, a true professional. But whatever he’s looking for, maybe he finds it. He straightens his back, stiffens his shoulders.
“Alright, sir,” he says. “Let’s find your delinquent girlfriend.”
We do everything wecan to find her. Pull out every stop, leverage the full force of my power and wealth.
All of it to no avail.
Willow is gone. Like a nightmarish vision, she’s disappeared into thin air, her absence blaring loud and agonising in my life. The house is a constant reminder of it: her baking ingredients in my cupboard, her posters on my walls, her Japanese comic books strewn over my furniture.
Her clothes are still stuffed in the wardrobes and drawers of my guest bedroom, boots and heels lying around, necklaces and earrings dangling over the tops of the lampshades. Even my room is still infected with her presence, the scrap of the red dress I cut in half that first Valentine’s Day, her mud-stained angel wings, her perfume on my pillows.
I can’t bear seeing all her things in my home; I can’t bear getting rid of them.
I cherish a fantasy of dragging Willow back to me, wrapped in chains and padlocking her to my very fucking heart, and destroying all her stuff in front of her, just to spite her.
But to wrap Willow in chains, I must first find her.
When I’ve exhausted everyrecourse, when I’m out of time and ideas, the day before the article comes out, like the dropping of an atomic bomb on my life, I do the final thing I can think of doing.
