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Duarte felt his body freeze for a moment before he tapped a few buttons on the phone to open an encrypted server. His team of private investigators and ex-law-enforcement operatives had been hard at work in the past week, since he’d set the course for his revenge. They’d already recovered and collated every photograph and video of him from the past year, trying to create a map of his movements. Judging by the most recent files added, they’d uncovered a wealth of photographs taken at a political event he had attended directly before his kidnapping.
He scanned through the countless images, one after the other, seeing that a trio of pictures at the end had been flagged for his attention. The photographs showed him standing away from the main podium area, towards the back of the large event hall. Something thrummed to life in his gut as he clicked through the files until finally a glimpse of long red hair made him freeze.
It was her. Cristo, he’d finally found her.
Of all his tortured dreams as he’d recovered on the island, those of the beautiful redhead had plagued him the most. When he’d first come out of a medically induced coma, the only clear memory he’d had was of her holding him as he bled out. He hadn’t been sure if it was his imagination that had conjured such a vivid picture or if it was truly a memory he’d managed to retain.
She’d kept him warm with her body around his, her hand holding his own as she’d spoken his name so softly. Her bright silver eyes had been filled with tears, and the scent of lavender had cocooned him as she’d tried to stem the blood-flow.
‘Duarte...please don’t die,’ she’d sobbed, before cursing in colourful Portuguese.
Her words had been like a mantra in his mind.
‘You need to stay alive for both of us.’
That voice in his mind had kept him going throughout his intense recovery process. And now he couldn’t shake off the feeling that she was...important, somehow. That she was real. But, despite all the people that Angelus Fiero had tracked down and arrested in the last two months, there had been no mention of a woman anywhere near that shipping yard.
But now, looking at the photo on his phone screen...
One look at her face and he knew it was her. He knew she was real, not a dream. She had been his very own angel that night. She had saved his life with her bare hands, but she had left before anyone saw her.
Why?
He ignored the countless theories his mind produced, knowing none of them painted her as having nothing to hide. He would think about that later. For now, this woman was possibly the only link to what had happened that night and he needed to find her.
He looked up, noticing that they had arrived at a small private airfield outside London. His pilot, Martha, stood on the Tarmac to greet him, along with the small crew of one of the Velamar fleet of private jets.
Duarte smoothed a hand over his jaw as he tried not to think of his sister’s words, begging him to forget his ordeal, to let the police continue to handle it while he focused on getting back to his normal life. Now, after seeing the woman’s face, knowing she was real, he felt as if he was finally doing something that mattered. The cogs in his brain were turning, giving him purpose.
But was he just tracking her down to find out what she knew, or was it something more?
He brushed off the thought and dialled a number on his phone, hearing the rasping voice of his chief investigator as he answered the call and began griping about the various data protection laws standing in the way of facial recognition and searching for the mystery woman. Duarte growled back that he didn’t care what he had to pay or what had to be done. He added that if his team had eyes on her by the time he landed in Rio their fees would be doubled.
The other man swiftly changed his tune.
‘You will wait for my arrival before you make a move. Nobody is to approach her or bring her in—understand?’ Duarte felt anticipation build within him as he growled the warning. ‘She’s mine.’
Nora Becket
t took one last look at the empty space of her tiny apartment and felt the weight of uncertainty descend, choking the air from her throat.
She wouldn’t cry. She’d done enough of that in the last six and a half months to last her a lifetime. Crying was for people who could afford that weakness, she thought miserably as she opened her phone one last time and looked at the list of missed calls and unopened voicemails. The name on the screen read ‘Papai’. Such an innocent word to cause such a violent reaction in her gut.
She placed the phone in one of the boxes, knowing she couldn’t take it with her. As far as she was concerned she had no father. Not any more.
She’d thought she was almost free of his reach...
She’d thought she still had time...
Her powerful father had been in hiding somewhere outside of Brazil for months, and Nora had taken the time to finish her studies at university, cramming in as many repeat classes as she could to try to undo some of the damage of the last year.
She’d barely managed to scrape through her final exams when the first messages had begun to arrive. She had no idea if she would even be allowed to graduate with her patchy attendance record, but sadly, that was the least of her worries right now. She had to get out of Rio.
The open boxes on the floor overflowed with books on engineering and environmental studies. They were the only possessions she owned other than her small case of clothing, but they were too heavy to take with her. She’d already done far too much today, bending down and scrubbing the place all morning so she could get her meagre deposit back.
As though agreeing with the thought, her lower back throbbed painfully.
As she descended the five flights of stairs to the street below she cradled the enormous swell of her stomach, taking care not to go too fast for fear she might jostle the precious cargo nestled within.
