Page 8 of Unbound

I prayed that rescue wasn’t what would need to happen, but I had to compartmentalize Holly right now until we knew more. Ifnot, I’d wind up in the loony bin. And the loony bin, which might not be a bad idea for me, wasn’t an option because Kruna still existed and if they found out, the entire Ferrano family would be in danger. I was now lucky enough to be part of that family. I would never, ever want to put any of them in danger.

He wanted to take me to Italy and Iceland for our honeymoon. Dare wanted me to meet his mother and he wanted me to meet his Icelandic family, too.

I knew that despite my need to tuck her away somewhere safe in the back of my mind, Holly would creep into my thoughts until we found out what’d happened. It would take major effort to stop myself from obsessing.

I said a silent prayer that Mr. Frost and the others at Kruna had kept their promise to me and let her go and that she’d somehow made it to Charlie and Betsy.

I tried to ignore the nagging voice that told me that they were liars, that they were sick and sadistic human traffickers who would sell a gorgeous platinum blonde-haired blue-eyed teenaged beauty’s virginity with nobody left but an addict of a mother to worry about her to the highest bidder.

I talked to Lisa before we left for our honeymoon and she told me I was doing the right thing. I needed to live right here and right now. She told me to trust my husband when he said he’d find out about Holly.

“These guys, they have connections,” Lisa said. “Tom spent years building a network of people he could go to for any type of problem. Dario will find out what happened to her. It might not be good news, you have to be braced for that, but you’ll get answers.”

She was doing well, on the road to healing. She impressed me. I decided to be motivated by how together she seemed. She told me that the retreat she’d gone on had helped. She’d had counseling. She’d talked about what’d happened to her. Sheknew it was dangerous but felt she had no choice but to do it. So that she could move forward.

“I owe it to the people behind. You know? The ones still there, still trying to make it through every day.”

“The ones working on their A to B plan.”

Lisa inquired, “A to B?”

I explained my initial plan and told her that she’d inspired it.

And then I told her my story, how I’d found myself at Kruna. It wasn’t easy to tell that story. I felt like any moment they could burst in and take us back. But she was incredibly supportive.

“I saw him,” she said after I was finished telling my tale.

“Saw who?”

“Jason Frost.”

“At Kruna?” I asked.

“Of course at Kruna, he’d practically lived there before I left for the U.S. I’ve had the pleasure, if you get my drift. I mean at the retreat. I saw him in passing in a hallway when I was first being deposed. I guess they had him at the same facility. He’s might still be in protective custody there.”

I shuddered at the memory of Jason, at how messed up things were at the horse barn when we’d talked before guys from Interpol swooped in and took him. When Dare found out about the task force and Zack’s ulterior motives.

Thank God Jason hadn’t been able to purchase me after Donavan Frost died.

Stan Smith got ahold of me a couple days after our wedding to tell me that the Kruna partner summit had been rescheduled and it was happening in a few weeks, leaving us a little time to take the extended honeymoon I wanted to take. I would’ve saidno; I would’ve sent Stan. I fuckin’ wanted to sayno. But, the bullshit with Zack and that task force wouldn’t make that easy.

Zack said they needed me to go gather more information for them. They wanted me to take my wife. I’d promised her they’d never hurt her again and the very concept of setting foot on that property would hurt her. It made me fuckin’ sick, the thought of making her lie her head there.

It also made me wanna go with all the fire power I could gather, even if it took every last dime I had, so I could get in there and just take the fuckers down.

She needed time to heal from all she’d been through. She should be able to do that, knowing that as my wife that shit would never touch her again.

She should be able to focus on trying to get pregnant. That was all she seemed to want right now, as evidenced by her wedding gift to me (removing her IUD), and what I wanted most was to honeymoon with her, take her on a vacation, give her reasons to smile, not to mention continuing to work hard on the baby-making.

But, she also had to face the fact that her sister was missing, and I knew she’d torment herself with that knowledge unless I took the lead and was strong for her. So, that’s what I would do.

She tried to paint on a smile for me. I decided I’d give us a short honeymoon to help her have something else to focus on, and then when we got back, we’d talk about Kruna. See where things were at with Holly, unless it was good news, because Angel needed blissful ignorance where Holly was concerned right now.

Zack told Tommy and I, on a conference call, that leads were now pointing more and more towards Alessandro Romero, but he wasn’t 100% sure yet, where she’d been sent after that. This was her last suspected location.

This did not sit well. Based on Zack’s initial intel, Tommy had first called his cartel contact, the one who helped Tommy take down Juan Carlos Castillo, because it looked like he’d gotten Holly and that she’d gone to a brothel that was partly owned by a sick fuck named Delgado, one of the Kruna partners.

When we got that initial intel from Zack, it was promising because if she was still alive, there was a good chance they would help us get her back. The cartel leader and his top men had a relationship with my brother, and if Holly was alive, they’d help us move mountains to broker a deal so that whoever had her would sell her back to us. And they’d do it behind a mask to stop Delgado from finding out. Or, if we were at risk of being made by Delgado, we’d find a way to take him out.

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