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I FELL ASLEEP THAT night with her wrapped in my arms, and I watched as she dozed off before I let myself rest.
I wanted to make sure that she got some sleep – I had a feeling she would try to stay up, try to go back to see her father if I didn’t keep an eye on her, and I knew that she needed to rest up this evening. And besides – there was something so sweet and so perfect about having her here in my bed, her hair spread out over my pillow, the comfort of her presence everything that I needed it to be.
It had been a chaotic few weeks, that was for sure, but knowing she was back here where she belonged was making me feel a whole hell of a lot better. It had taken me far too long to convince her that this was where she belonged, but honestly, I figured it was always going to be tough for her to accept she was better off with me – she wanted to stay with her father, wanted to take care of him, but at last seemed to have come to terms with the fact that she wasn’t going to be able to give him better care than he was receiving at the hands of my family doctor.
I had wanted her here a long time ago, but I would take what I could get – she was here now, and that was all that mattered. As her breathing smoothed out and she started to doze off beside me, I lifted my head to look at her. I wasn’t going to ask her to leave anytime soon. I needed her here, with me, where I could keep an eye on her, it was just what made sense. It might not have been easy for her to understand that I truly did feel so strongly about her, but it was the truth, and there was no way I would let anything get in the way of it.
Mauro might have thought it was too soon for me to go falling in love, but I had never done things by halves. When I was sure about something, about someone, then I was certain, and I was sure about her. I had been from the moment we had met. Sure that I felt something there, something solid, something worth chasing. Just from the way she looked at me, I had been able to feel it.
And now, here she was, proving me right. This was where we had always been meant to end up together. This was where she needed to stay. I knew that there was still a whole lot that we had to work through before we got to the end, once and for all, but for now – for now, I would take it. I would take her being here with me as the win that it was, and I would fall asleep knowing that she was where she belonged.
But when I woke the next morning and found her missing, I felt a jolt of terror rush through my system. Where the hell was she?
I lifted my head from the pillow and looked around, trying to soothe myself before I launched into full-on panic mode. It was just the tension of the last few days that had me worried, I knew that she hadn’t gone anywhere. I listened for the shower, assuming that she had gone to clean herself up or something, but there was silence where there should have been the sound of running water.
I sat up properly, the covers falling away from me. The spot next to me was cold, as I reached over to check on it. She hadn’t been there for a while. Maybe she had woken early, decided to take a walk or something. Go get some breakfast? My mind was spinning as I tried to piece it all together, and came up with a straight nothing. Shit, shit, shit...
I rose out of bed and went to grab some clothes, promising myself that I would find her. She wouldn’t have gone far. She had seemed so comfortable here last night, and I knew that she wouldn’t have made a break for it just like that, just because she’d woken up somewhere new and thought she should be with her father.
How had she managed to get out of here without me noticing, though? That was what I really wanted to know, more than anything. It was bugging me. Had I really been sleeping soundly, soundly enough that I hadn’t noticed her getting up and making a break for it? I wished I had woken a little sooner, so that I could have soothed her, assured her that she had nothing to worry about. She would be beating herself up about not being there for her father, I was sure of it, but I needed her to understand that she had nothing to be so down on herself for – she had just done what she could, what she thought she had to, and now she was here with me and she didn’t have a thing to worry about.
I paced around the bedroom, headed into the bathroom, looking for any small sign that she might be somewhere in this apartment, but I found nothing. Dread was starting to sneak up the back of my spine – what if Kozlov had managed to break in here and snatch her away? I hadn’t prepped security to let them know that I’d be staying with a guest this evening, and Kozlov could have sent some people down to overpower the doorman and sneak in and take her...
No. I wasn’t even going to entertain it as a thought. I knew I had nothing to worry about, I was just overthinking because of everything that had happened. Worst she would have done is taken off to see her father without telling me, and I hoped that someone would have some information on where she had made it to. I was certain that she just wanted to be by her father’s side right now, even though she should have been resting down here.
The apartment was empty, almost unsettlingly so. Silence seemed to flood my senses, and I tried to bring myself back down to Earth. I needed to control my panic. I knew she wouldn’t have gone far, especially not without telling me. She knew that she wasn’t safe out there without my protection, and she wasn’t stupid enough to just go wandering off at random because she’d had some notion that it would make sense...
“Andreas.”
A voice cut through the stress in my head, and I jumped – glancing over, I saw Mauro standing in the kitchen, sipping on a cup of coffee.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I demanded. I was already nervy, and to see him there when I didn’t expect it wasn’t exactly helping me.
“I need to talk to you,” he explained, and I could tell that this must have had something to do with Nadia. I joined him in the kitchen, careful, slow – I didn’t want to give too much away. Mauro still had a whole lot of opinions about Nadia and I, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to hear the ins and outs of what he thought about us right now.
“About what?” I demanded.
“Nadia.”
I stared at him. What the hell did he know about Nadia that I didn’t? What had she told him that she felt like she couldn’t share with me? I felt like I was losing it. Just the night before, we had been wrapped up in each other’s arms, so close and so tight that it felt like nothing would pull us apart. And now...
“She’s gone, Andreas.”
My stomach dropped.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I snarled, covering up my fear with anger.
“She’s gone, and that’s the way she wants it.”
“What did you do to her?” I demanded. I needed to find her. I didn’t know what the fuck Mauro thought he was pulling, talking to me like this, but I wasn’t going to let him get away with it. I knew he had his issues, had his bad attitude about the whole situation between me and Nadia, but that didn’t mean he got to just decide when to get rid of her.
“I didn’t do anything to her,” he replied, his voice even, careful. He knew I was on the brink of blowing up, and he wanted to make absolutely sure that he came out of this in one piece. If there was one thing, one thing I couldn’t stand, it was being talked to like I was stupid – talked to like I had to be handled in some way. Mauro was meant to be one of the people I could trust in this crazy world, and now, he was telling me that the woman I loved was gone?
“She reached out to me,” he explained. “And she told me that she needed my help. Help getting out of here.”
“You’re lying,” I snarled. He had never approved of the two of us together, and now he was doing what he could to pull us apart – if he thought I was going to buy that for a fucking second, he had another thing coming. I knew that he was angry at me, but this was beyond the pale. I would never forgive him if he had done something to her, something to hurt her – she had come to me to find safety, and if my own right-hand man had hurt her...
“Andreas, I know it’s hard for you to understand, but you have to listen to me,” Mauro told me. It was clear he wasn’t going to allow me to speak to him like that, especially not when he had already closed off the possibility of her coming back. All my anger, all aimed at him, wouldn’t be enough to bring her back, but that didn’t diminish the fury coursing through my system.
“She called me and she asked me to get her out of here,” he explained. “She’s gone. And she doesn’t want you to know where. She left you a note, though, if you want to see it.”
My head was spinning. No. It couldn’t be true. But I – would Mauro lie to me? After everything that had happened, would he lie to me? I sank back against the counter, trying to keep myself from falling to the ground right then and there.
Mauro reached into his pocket, not taking his eyes off of me, as though worried that I was going to lash out and do something I couldn’t take back. I wasn’t sure I even had the strength for that anymore. Without her here, it felt like everything had been drained from me, everything stripped, the world in greyscale. I needed her. I thought I’d managed to find her. And now...
Mauro held out a small scrap of paper to me, and I took it from him. Her absence was already burning a hole in my chest, and I had no idea how to navigate it – how to get out the other side, how to bring her back here, with me, where she belonged. I knew she was scared, but did she really have to run? Did she really have to go so far from me? Did she really think that I wouldn’t be able to protect her, that she would be better off by herself in this crazy world? Even after what had happened with Kozlov?
I looked down at the note. I could feel the blood rushing through my veins, and I did everything I could to ignore it. The words scrawled there looked hurried, panicked.
“I’m sorry, I can’t do this,” it read. “I love you. If you love me, you’ll leave me to what I have to do. Nadia.”
I crumpled the note up in my hand and stormed out of the kitchen at once. No way was I going to deal with this right now. No way had she just really walked out on me, after everything we had been through, after everything we had endured together – no way.
My head was spinning and my heart was aching just thinking about her being so far from me. She couldn’t have done this to me, there was no way – there was no way that she would hurt me like this. She couldn’t have shared what we had last night and then just... walked out on me. Left, like it was the simplest thing in the world.
Was that what last night had been to her? A goodbye? Had she known she was going to leave, even as she had fallen asleep in my arms? My chest ached just thinking about it, my body crying out for the closeness of her touch once more. I needed her. Needed her back here, needed her close to me again, and knew, deep down inside, that she was gone. Whether I wanted to admit it or not, she was gone, and there was no way in fucking hell that I was going to be able to bring her back...
At least, that’s what she wanted me to think. But if she really believed I was going to let her go without a fight, then she had another thing coming, a whole host of other things, actually. I wasn’t going to let her walk out of my life, not when the connection we’d shared had been so profound, not when I knew that she had no clue what she was walking out into. There was a whole world out there that wanted to hurt her, and I had been the only thing between her and that harm coming to pass.
I grabbed my phone and pulled up her number, shooting off a few texts before I made my first call. I wanted to hear her say it to me. I wanted to hear the words from her mouth, no matter how difficult they might have been for me to take in.
If she really meant it, if she really wanted me out of her life, then she could say it right to my face – she could tell me that she wanted me gone, that she needed me to stay as far from her and her father as possible. But until I heard it from her, I wasn’t going to believe that she meant it.
And I was going to keep searching for her with everything I had.
