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Julian

“There was no sign of him being there. Not recently, at least,” Zeke explains over the phone.

“He must have anticipated that Elena would tell me about it.” I lean back in the leather office chair. “Keep looking. He can’t hide from us forever. If I have to, I’ll draw him out of hiding.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll find him. In fact, you’ll have him by the end of the week,” he promises me.

“I’ll be looking forward to our next conversation then,” I say before hanging up the phone. I have to say, I’m impressed by his confidence. Let’s just hope he can actually deliver. I want Romero dead and gone. I want him out of Elena’s life. In my eyes, she will never be safe so long as he’s breathing.

Closing the laptop, I push up from the chair. It’s almost dinner time, and I don’t want to leave my wife waiting. My wife. It is fucked up how much I am enjoying this whole marriage thing. When I chose to marry Elena, I never anticipated caring for her, wanting her as deeply as I do. In ways, she’s changed me, made me see things in a different light. She brings a goodness to my soul that I thought would never return.

As soon as I step out of my office, a feeling of unease overcomes me. I can’t explain why or what or how, all I know is that the small hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. My heart rate picks up, and my breathing becomes uneven.

Fear creeps its way up my spine and settles over my skin like a thin sheen of sweat. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been scared in my life.

Something is off.

The house is completely quiet, too quiet. The silence is deafening.

Frantically, I start moving, racing through the house like a chicken with my head cut off, checking every room. She said she was going to go walking around the house.

“Elena!” I yell into the empty space, but silence still surrounds me. I keep moving until I’ve checked every room upstairs and find myself rushing downstairs. I’m seconds from calling in the guards when I come around the corner leading into the kitchen and come to an abrupt halt.

My feet and heart stop at the same time as I take in Clyde, one of my guards, dead on the kitchen floor. He’s faced down, with a knife stuck in his back, a puddle of blood surrounding him like a black blob of ink against the white tile.

No, no, no. It’s like I’m living a recurring nightmare. This can’t be real. No one knows we’re here. No one could have known.

“Elena!” I scream again, hoping for a different outcome now. Hoping she will walk around the corner and into my arms but the seconds tick by, and she never comes walking into the kitchen.

I’m so shocked that for a moment, I forget about her tracker. Pulling out my phone, my fingers slip over the buttons as I type in the code to unlock it as fast as I can. Navigating to open the app to find her is a pain as the simmering rage inside of me beats to get out. It feels like an eternity until the location loads.

Then it finally pings, and the map lights up the screen, a red moving dot pinpointing her exact location.

Anger floods my veins, rushing through my body like a tidal wave hitting the shore. She is out on the ocean, heading toward the mainland. Someone fucking kidnapped her. Someone took her, and I didn’t even realize it.

They took her right out from under my nose, killed one of my men, and escaped the island with her. Failure. I’m a fucking failure. I failed to protect her all over again. Instantly, a million terrible images enter my mind.

Someone else’s hands on Elena, hurting her, causing her pain, violating her… killing her. The anger becomes almost unbearable like a knife being plunged into my chest over and over again, and I use it as fuel as I rush outside and toward the boathouse.NôvelD(ram)a.ôrg owns this content.

My feet pound against the sand, and I almost fall a thousand times as the ocean breeze whips against my face and through my hair. The muscles in my legs burn as I push myself to run faster than I ever have before.

As I get closer to the boathouse, hidden deep in the small patch of trees and tall grass, I can see the door swinging open, and the dreadful feeling in my gut only expands outward. When I get to it, my worst fears come true.

The sand beneath my feet gives way, and I fall to my knees.

The emergency boat is gone.

Elena is gone.

My wife is gone.