“Katie!”
I roar her name as I bang on the door, praying that, this time, I’m going to hear her speak back to me. But once again, I’m greeted only by silence—and the growing dread that something terrible has happened to her.
“She’s not here,” Emil calls up to me, out of breath as he races up the stairs. “I just checked around the back of the apartment. There’s nothing. But it looks like there’s a window broken up there on this floor…”
My heart sinks. I should have known that something like this was going to happen. As soon as those guys rolled up on me like that, it should have been obvious that she was going to be pulled into all of this. I grit my teeth and slam my shoulder into the door a few times. I can’t wait for someone to open it. If I have to take it off its hinges, so be it.
I can feel the hinges starting to buckle beneath my onslaught, and finally, the door crashes open, falling to the ground and allowing me to step inside. I dive in and look around, still calling out for her, though I know it’s no use.
“She’s not here,” Emil repeats as he follows me inside. His voice is taut—I know he’s thrown by all of this, even if we did manage to make light work of the men who were attacking us earlier. He doesn’t want to face up to the fact that we’re in the middle of something really bad here, but with Katie gone, I know it’s only going to get worse.
I rush through to Polly’s room and breathe a sigh of relief when I see that she’s in the crib—she’s bawling, but at least she’s here. I lean down and pick her up, pulling her against me, doing my best to soothe her, though I have little idea of what I’m doing.
A few moments later, Emil appears in the doorway and shakes his head slightly.
“There’s nobody here,” he confirms. “But the bedroom window is broken, the one that leads out to the fire escape. Someone must have come up here, taken her…”
“Shit,” I mutter, panic gripping my chest. Where have they taken her? And why? What do they want with her? If there’s one thing I’m sure of in all of this, it’s that none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been on the scene. This is only going down the way it is because of me, and that means I have to be the one to get her out of it.
“Is that…?” Emil asks, his eyes falling to the kid in my arms. I realize, for the first time, that he has never laid eyes on her before.
“Yeah, this is Polly,” I reply. It’s not exactly how I intended for my brother to meet my little girl, but I guess you don’t always get to choose how these things are going to play out.
“Hey, Polly,” Emil remarks, taking a step toward her. There’s a smear of blood on his cheek from where one of our attackers tried to grab for him before they fled, and I wonder what she must think of him right now. When it comes to the way I hoped she would meet her uncle, this is pretty far from it.
“I’m going to call up my apartment manager, tell him to get a nursery set up,” I continue, as I hold Polly in my arms. She has started to calm down slightly now, though I’m sure it’s going to be a long time before she fully comes back down to earth. After seeing what happened to her mother, I guess it’s only natural that she would be in full-blown panic mode. She’s just a baby, after all, and she’s not prepared for anything that comes with this.
“A nursery?” Emil replies, knitting his brows together. “You’re going to move her in with you—”
“I don’t see what choice I have, Emil,” I shoot back angrily. “What, you want me to just leave her here? Pretend like I’ve never even met her? My own daughter, when I know her mother isn’t there to look after her?”
He shifts from one foot to the other. He has the decency, at least, to look a little embarrassed.
“You said you weren’t going to get involved with them,” he reminds me bluntly, lifting his gaze to meet mine. “What the fuck happened to that?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does,” he counters, pissed. “If we’re going to get through this mess, then we need to be honest with each other. And I need to know when you’re running around with some—”
“Running around?” I exclaim. “She’s the mother of my child, Emil! It’s not like she’s just some random—”
I stop myself before I go on, glancing down at Polly. I know she’s hardly old enough to understand me yet, but that doesn’t mean I want to speak about women in any derogatory way in front of her.
“It’s not like the other women I’ve been with,” I continue, lowering my voice. “We have something. Something real. And I’m not just going to turn my back and walk away from that without finding out if—”
“And now she’s been kidnapped,” he reminds me. “Now she’s in trouble, and you have to get her out of it, because you’re the one who got her into it. Remember?”
“And I will,” I protest. “Whatever it takes to get her out of there, I’ll do it. I just need to get Polly somewhere safe, get her locked down, and then I’ll get Katie out.”
“You don’t think that’s what they want?” he explodes. “The Magliones are obviously the ones behind this, Luca, and you’re about to walk straight into their trap!”
I clench my jaw. I hate to admit it, but he’s right. They’re expecting me to come looking for Katie. They want me to forget all of my good sense and go after her, and they’re going to trap me into something I can’t even fathom right now as soon as they get the chance.
“That doesn’t mean I’m just going to sit back and do nothing!”
“I’m not asking you to do that,” Emil replies, stalking toward me, his face hot with anger. “I’m asking you to think twice about this. I don’t care that some girl has got in trouble—”
“Don’t talk about her like that,” I snarl. I know he’s not the one I should be aiming my anger at right now, but I can’t hold it in. The thought of them coming here and taking her, taking Katie from me, abandoning this baby to the apartment all alone—it’s so fucking sick and twisted, I hardly even know where to start.
“Listen to me,” Emil urges me, grasping my arm tight. “I’m not going to let something happen to you. You hear me?”
His voice is laced with a protectiveness that brings me back down to earth. I know he’s trying to do the right thing—he’s trying to make sure I don’t go and get myself killed running out on some mission of mercy to get Katie back, and he’s right.
“Yeah, I know,” I reply, managing a small smile. “Dad would kill you.”
He chuckles slightly, the sound breaking the tension between us.
“Yeah,” he mutters. “Something like that.”
He pushes a hand through his hair and lets out a long breath, and then steps forward, taking Polly from me.
“Call your apartment manager,” he instructs me. “We’ll get Polly settled in. Then I’ll send out all my contacts in the city to figure out what’s going on here. One of them will have seen something, I’m sure of it, and when we have our lead, we can go from there.”
I nod. “Okay,” I murmur, reaching for my phone. I head through to the bedroom so I can gather myself for a moment before I take the call. It strikes me that I don’t even know if we can feed Polly right now. Is there formula in the house? Did Katie pump and leave breast milk in the fridge? I suddenly feel so useless, as though there isn’t a damn thing in the world I can do right.
And the thought is only compounded when I see the broken window in front of me, gazing out onto the street below. I go over to it and peer out to the ground below—it’s a narrow staircase, and I can’t imagine it was easy for her to get down in such a panic. Did they threaten Polly too? Were they going to take both of them, and Katie offered herself up? I can see her doing something so recklessly brave, not allowing them to so much as lay a finger on her daughter, even if it cost her everything in return…
Anger grips me again. I should have been here. I shouldn’t have left for work. I shouldn’t have been so arrogant to think that my coming here wouldn’t cause any kind of problems, because I’m supposed to be smarter than that. I’m supposed to have a good head on my shoulders, but I was so caught up in the fantasy of living this little family life with her that I forgot, and it might have cost me everything.
I wish I could go back in time, to when I woke up next to her—but this time, I wouldn’t leave the bed. I would call in sick to work and tell them that there’s no way I could come in today, and I would spend the afternoon with Katie and Polly. I would leave the rest of the world behind for a while, and I could make believe that it’s just the three of us in the world…
But I didn’t do that. No, I got to my feet and left, and now Katie is gone. My head is a mess with the possibilities of everything the Magliones might be doing to her. Hurting her is a given, but in what way? I know they’re involved in sex trafficking—as far as I’m concerned, their main base is in my home city, but they might have outliers out here too. They could be planning to sell her off to one of them, make it so nobody will ever find her—and even if they do, she would never be the same again.
My hand is shaking as I dial up my apartment manager’s number. I know he’s going to be surprised to hear me make a demand like this, but he knows to jump when he is told. He’s worked with plenty of people like my father, making sure we have a safe place to turn to when the going gets tough, and he provides everything we ask for, no matter how ridiculous it might seem.
“Of course,” he mutters, once I’ve finished telling him everything I need. “I’ll have it set up by the end of the day. Is there anything else…?”
He lets the words hang in the air pointedly, as though he’s leaving the door open for me to tell him exactly how the hell I came to be the guardian to an infant baby. I ignore it. I’m not going to give him any more than he needs to know. If he’s smart, he’ll keep his mouth shut instead of blabbing to someone—but then, he does know my father. And perhaps he’ll think that my dad has a right to know what I’m doing with a child…
I brush the thought aside and say goodbye, and stride back out to join Emil and Polly—he’s rooting through the fridge, his mouth set in a hard line, as she cries in his arms. I lift her into mine, and she settles slightly, looking up at me with a worried expression on her face.
“It’s going to be okay,” I murmur to her. I know she can’t understand me, but I think I need to hear those words as much as she does.
We head over to Emil’s place first, and I grab her some formula on the way—I don’t know what she needs, but I know I have to provide for her. I try my best to feed her, but she’s fussy, clearly upset at how much things have changed, how far she is from the familiarity of her mother’s arms right now.
Emil watches me as I feed her, and I can tell he has a million questions on his mind. But one, over all the rest, eventually comes out of his mouth.
“Looks like you really care about her,” he murmurs, and I glance up at him, surprised.
“You thought I wouldn’t…?”
He shakes his head. “No, it’s not that,” he replies. “It’s just…I never saw you having kids. Not before me, anyway.”
“You thought I wouldn’t be a good father?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I just didn’t think of you as a father at all,” he admits. And just like that, those words hang there, and it strikes me how far I’ve come from everything I thought I knew up until this point.
A few months ago, I was working for my father, patching up wounds and taking care of our men without a second thought—picking up girls on the weekend, enjoying my life, with no worries in the world. Now, we’re on the run to another city to avoid a threat to our family, I have a daughter, and the woman who brought her into this world has been kidnapped by our enemies, who are planning to do God only knows what to her.
“Neither did I,” I confess. It’s the truth, no point in trying to hide it. I’m not anyone’s idea of a father—there’s no part of my life that would fit a child. And yet, when I hold Polly in my arms, it’s hard to believe I could be anywhere else in the world right now.
“What are you going to do when you go back to the city?” he wonders aloud.
I sigh heavily. “Look, I don’t know,” I reply. “I just need to get through the here and now, and we can talk about everything else later, okay?”
He nods, though I can tell he’s not entirely convinced. “Sure.”
I fall silent again for a moment, but then I let out a small snort of amusement.
“What do you think Dad’s going to say when he finds out?” I ask him, shooting a look at him out of the corner of my eye.
He groans and rubs a hand over his face. “I have no fucking idea.”
“Hey, language.”
“She’s not old enough to understand it yet. And besides, you cursed in front of her too…”
“I’ve got to keep standards for my daughter, Emil.”
He grins, and then, as though he has remembered just what we’re going through, it fades just as fast.
“What the hell are we going to do now?” he asks me.
I stare down at Polly in my arms, wishing I had an answer—wishing I had anything other than silence to offer him in return right now.
But I know one thing for sure—I’m not going to back down until I have Katie back in my arms, where she belongs. Whatever the Magliones think they have against us, they have no idea what kind of hell I’m going to rain down on their heads for what they have done.
And I am looking forward to showing them exactly how much I mean that.
