“What?” I snap.
“Nothing.”
I’m going to let it go. It’s what a leader does, and that’s who I am now. I can’t let him get under my skin. I have to be above that. No matter how much I want to shoot him sometimes.
The sight of the familiar development is a relief after more than an hour on the road and ten hours spent staking out Alvarez. But it isn’t a shower or my bed at the forefront of my mind. It’s her. I hate how much I long to be with her now. After all these hours, I want nothing more than to touch her. To smell her—she’s a far cry from old cheeseburger wrappers. If things were different, I would crawl into bed beside her and order her not to get up, even if it was time to get her day started. I would hold her and forget everything else because that’s the sort of relief she would provide. It’s what I need more than anything to forget for a little while.
It takes conscious effort to keep from rushing out of the car and into the house. Prince takes the car, determined to spend too much money on an overpriced coffee that isn’t nearly as good as anything we could get back home. I leave him to it, focused on one thing only.
“Sir.” I nod in recognition of the guard on the door. His name escapes me—I’ve only worked with these men since arriving in Miami, and sometimes their faces blend.
“Everything under control here?” It seems to be. The house is quiet, as I would expect it to be at only seven o’clock in the morning.
“It is, sir. It was a quiet night.” I’m grateful for that, grateful for the chance to be a mere human for once, to climb the stairs with my heart hammering in anticipation of seeing my wife after a long night. Right or wrong, she’s the one I want to come home to. She’s the one whose touch lingers in my memory, who makes me yearn. She’s the only woman I’ve ever yearned for.
Yet when I open her bedroom door, I find the bed empty. She’s been in it, though—the blankets are thrown back, the pillows arranged in such a way that I can tell she was sitting up at some point. Reading, I imagine. Did she have a sleepless night, too? I won’t bother entertaining the idea of her missing me.
Instantly, my thoughts go to the baby. I dart across the hall, my heart in my throat, expecting to find her in the bathroom. Sick or worse. Yet that room is empty, as well. I place a hand over my chest, breathing hard.
The rest of the upstairs is empty. I search it anyway, going through my room, the closet even. Nothing. My irritation grows as I jog down the stairs. Several of the men are in the kitchen, where it looks like one of them delivered breakfast for the rest. They ignore their half-eaten sandwiches upon my entrance. “Where is Mrs. De Luca?” I ask, scanning the group.
All I get in return is a bunch of blank stares.
“Well?” I prompt. And now they’re looking at each other as dread forms in my chest. “Dammit, where the fuck is she?” When no one answers beyond wordless stammering, I head to my study and open my laptop. My hands are almost shaking, thanks to the rage burning a hole in me.
I manage to pull up the security footage and start clicking through the different feeds until I reach the front door. Dammit, I should never have taken the system off 24/7 monitoring—I would have been alerted to any movement outside the house via text and could have logged into the system from my phone to monitor things. There I was, assuming a group of men could handle that for me.
I scroll back through the footage until I reach the point where Prince and I left for surveillance. With the speed turned up to its maximum setting, I hover in front of the screen, watching. Waiting.
And at around two thirty, I see her. I stop the replay, turn the speed down to its normal setting, then go back to watch her sneaking out of the house. She’s carrying her backpack over one shoulder and a large duffel in the other hand. She doesn’t hesitate either, heading straight down the walkway, then nearly jogging down the driveway until she reaches the sidewalk. That’s the last I can see of her, thanks to the angle of the camera.
Motherfucker. She’s gone, and no one even noticed she left. No one stopped her. They must have all been asleep.
“What the hell is going on?” Prince saunters into my study, a cardboard cup in each hand. “I thought I’d bring you back something, but it looks like a funeral in the kitchen.”
“It will be one soon enough. I need you to gather up the guys who were here around two-thirty this morning. Whoever had that shift, I want them in front of me in the garage immediately.” Either he knows better than to ask why, or he doesn’t need to. There’s only one reason for me to make such a demand.
She fucking left. She left! And there I was, practically falling over myself with eagerness to see her. She wasn’t here. She hasn’t been here for hours. And anything could have happened.
While these sons of bitches slept.
Within fifteen minutes, I’m face-to-face with half a dozen men, all of whom look as though they were pulled from sleep. “I would’ve thought you got plenty of sleep last night while you were supposed to be on the job,” I muse. My trigger finger is itching to be used, but I have the men line up first. They’re nervous, shuffling their feet, eyes darting around the garage. Losers, all of them, brought in when it was clear we needed to beef up security, thanks to Alvarez. Look where they got me.
I walk slowly up and down the line without saying a word, heightening the fear and tension when what I need more than anything is to put my hands on her again to prove to myself my child is well. I’ll find a way to make her wish she hadn’t stepped foot off the property.
First, this.
I come to a stop at the end of the line, facing a man who was bleary-eyed when he first appeared but is now alert with fear. “Where is Mrs. De Luca?” I ask in a flat voice, staring at him.
He moistens his lips with the tip of his tongue. “I…”
“Speak up. Where is she?”
His brow furrows. He knows the answer and knows I won’t like it. Finally, he mans up. “I thought she was in bed. If not, I don’t know when she got past me, and I’m sorry.”
“I appreciate your candor.” In the next breath, I put a bullet in his head. He drops to the floor.
“Your turn.” I move on to the next man, who looks like he wishes he were anywhere else. He can’t stop looking at the corpse beside him. “Where is Mrs. De Luca?”