Page 15 of Stolen Hearts

“I need a minute.” Without another word, he turned and strode away. The animal inside him wanted to find a place to hide and lick his wounds—or drown them at the bottom of a bottle.

He rushed directly to the security office. Thank Christ, the house was still and silent, the office empty. Slamming the door behind him didn’t alleviate a damn bit of his frustration. He hurried to the desk and yanked the computer toward him.

Denver threw himself into searching for any and all information on Rhae. A black hole of searches led to nowhere. No mention of her. No photos. No baby announcements—goddamn, his hearthurt—and no smiling family portraits.

Just…nothing.

His jaw creaked with strain as he leaned back in the chair, rubbing his hands over his face.

Rhae had vanished off the face of the earth.

Eighteen months. Eighteen months he’d been looking for her, and never found a trace. Not in the usual databases, not in the deep-web crawlers he tapped into. And he knew how to find ghosts.

Every avenue, he came up empty-handed. It wasn’t possible.

Not unless she wanted it that way. Not unless she knew how to disappear.

He knew the signs. He’d done it himself more times than he could count. Scrubbed records. Buried digital footprints. Created walls so high not even the government’s best could scale them. That was what she’d done. Either she had paid someone to do the job for her, or she had performed a hell of a lot of research and managed to pull it off herself. Either way, Rhae had covered her tracks, and she’d done it damn well.

His chest ached at the realization. She’d erased herself…and Navy.

Or had she?

He launched forward and set his fingers to the keys, furiously tapping out the searches and pathways that would—hopefully—end in a birth certificate.

During their time together, they avoided real talk that would reveal anything about themselves. He couldn’t be compromised, and she was afraid she’d lose her job for being with a patient, even if she was no longer treating him.

But he knew her hometown where she grew up. He remembered it because he remembered everything she ever said. But the location stuck out for how ironically close it was to the Blackout Charlie base.

It made sense that a single woman who was pregnant would go home where she felt safe to have her baby. But he couldn’t recall her ever speaking of her family. Neither of them did.

When he located a hospital in her hometown, he worked on hacking the system. This wasn’t a skill he used often. In fact, he was happy to teach his fellow brother-in-arms in Blackout all that he knew and hand off the baton.

Within minutes, he had a screen full of births in the hospital records. After a swift scan, he landed on four babies born with the last name of Rivers, but nothing on Rhae or Navy.

If that’s even the baby’s last name.

Again, that dark stab of jealousy struck, making his fingers twitch into fists.

Feeling like it was time to move on, he located a second smaller hospital outside the city limits. Nothing there either.

He shoved back in the chair, glaring at the screen. The baby could have been born in any city in any part of the world. It was like trying to locate that proverbial needle in the haystack.

“Dammit!” He was no quitter.

Maybe he didn’t do a deep enough dive in the system. Knowing that Rhae managed to wipe herself out of the public eye led him to believe she did the same with her child.

Fuck, she has a child.

He ground his molars until his jaw popped and barreled on in his search. When he came up against a firewall, he paused only long enough to ensure his activity couldn’t be traced before pushing on.

Suddenly, he was staring at sealed files. Then…

He was staring at Navy’s birth certificate.

An animalistic noise rumbled in his chest.

And there was no father’s name.

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