It takes me just over five minutes to find it, and I throw myself into the driver’s side as I try to acquaint myself with the interior of the vehicle.
Because it’s a foreign sports car, it’s needlessly complicated, featuring technology that serves no purpose other than to impress idiots and make the car damn-near unusable.
I want to scream as I change the language to Latvian by accident, but I don’t need the car to talk to me in order for it to drive.
I just need it to move.
Taking a deep breath, I follow the prompts until the car turns on, scaring me shitless as the engine bellows at me.
The garage doors open automatically as I drive up to them, still feeling awkward and uncoordinated enough to almost smash the front of the car into the wall first.
When the doors open fully, I emerge slowly, taking in my surroundings and checking one last time for Adas before I speed away.
27
ADAS
We just managed to miss the second storm by an hour, which gave us enough time to pack everything away into another new location. If we keep having these fucking storms, I’ll be spending more on concealing product than I’ll be making selling it. Oh fucking well, I guess.
When I get home, rain has just started to hit the windows as I walk into the foyer. Last I saw River, she was in our bed relaxing, so there’s a high chance she’s in there sleeping.
I go in to check on her, but she isn’t there.
While I think it’s a little weird, she’s usually out on the patio or in the garden, so she should just be coming inside if she’s about to get down poured on.
I glance outside, both at the patio and then the garden, and she’s not at either location.
She has nowhere to go. At least she doesn’t think she does. So, where the hell is she?
I see Leo puttering around the house, bored as hell, without any gardening to do because of the rain.
“Hey Leo, have you seen River at all?”I ask in Russian.
“What? I did see her some time ago. She had been walking! It’s a miracle!”he exclaims. “I have never seen someone walk when they were in a wheelchair!”
I struggle to remain friendly. He’s a good man, but he’s so old that he catches on so, so slowly. Everything is a miracle to him.
Searching the rest of the house, I notice that my office door has been left open. If she’s in there, I’ll have to come up with a thousand ways to punish her before I find one that suits the crime. She knows better than to trespass like that.
I can’t begin to understand what would possess her to break into my office like that. Even if I had left it unlocked, that’s my right as a man in my own home. I shouldn’t have to lock up every time I leave the house. River isn’t a child. She should understand basic boundaries.
Everything looks to be the way I had left it before I went to the meeting, but something doesn’t feel right about the atmosphere. The papers on my desk, sprawled all over, seem to be just a bit too orderly in their patterning. It looks like she had picked them up, sorted through them, and tried to mess them up again without making it look convincing enough.
No bother, they’re just medical bills.
What sends my blood cold through my veins is seeing the filing drawer cracked open, just enough to indicate that someone had been inside it. I never, ever leave that drawer open solely to protect the contents inside.
I fall to my knees as I begin to madly fish around in the drawer for the file that Erik had put together on River’s true identity.
It’s gone, not a single paper left behind.
She knows.
I begin to panic internally. What would she do if she started to remember things about her former life? What would she even tell the police if she chose to contact them?
Ironically, the thought of her going to the police puts me at ease a bit. Her story would sound completely insane.
“Yes, officer, I was kidnapped from a hospital after an accident that left me paralyzed from the hips down, despite being able to walk now. A rich Russian mafia master locked me in his ivory tower and convinced me that I was his wife. We spent two weeks in Mexico hunting his arch-enemy.”