Page 121 of Punish Me, Daddy

I was going to marry the love of my life today.

The light from the tall windows slanted in across the dark polished floor, hitting the edge of the decanter someone had brought in earlier, a gift from an old contact in St. Petersburg. I hadn’t touched it. Too much noise in my head. Too much weight in my chest. She was just two floors above me, maybe thirty yards away, maybe less. And still, it wasn’t close enough.

I wanted her in my arms, and in my bed.

I slid the first cufflink through the hole, then the second. My fingers moved with the kind of calm I’d built over a lifetime of needing to be still when I wanted to explode. The silence pressed against me like a held breath.

Then my phone buzzed.

Once.

Then again.

Then a third time.

I pulled the phone from my pocket, thumb already unlocking the screen. There was a text from Ivan. I expected a logistics update, a timing shift, maybe a press team panic or a warning about an uninvited guest. Something normal. Something I could control.

I saw a series of texts that made everything in my chest go still.

Ivan: She’s not in the bridal suite. One of the florists took her out to ‘approve a boutonniere.’

We just checked the footage.

She didn’t come back.

For a moment, the words didn’t register. They just sat there on the screen, blunt and clinical. The cufflink slipped from my fingers and clinked against the floor, rolling under the table. I didn’t move to retrieve it.

I didn’t think. I didn’t speak. I just walked out of the room. Into the hallway. Past the security positioned at my door who rose as soon as they saw me, one with a phone to his ear, the other already reaching for his earpiece.

“Sir—”

I didn’t hear the rest.

There was only silence.

That specific kind of silence I knew too well. The kind that was so deep, it sounded like rushing water in your ears. The kind I’d felt once, when the call came through from Moscow telling me my parents’ car had exploded and my mother was blown into pieces too small to bury.

That kind of silence.

Only this time, it wasn’t the woman who raised me, it was the woman I was going to marry.

My bride.

Mywife.

She was gone.

When I stepped into the security corridor, the door slammed back against the wall, and I saw Ivan first, already mid-conversation, tablet in one hand, the other pressed to his headset as he scanned footage frame by frame. Maxim was beside him, arms crossed, his face like stone, unmoving. Sergei was standing next to them, suited, well-armed, and silent. Aleksei paced near the monitors, jacket half-on, mouth a grim line.

I didn’t stop walking until I was in the center of the room.

“Tell me how this happened,” I said, voice flat. No heat, just cold steel.

Ivan answered me immediately. His fingers moved, swiping across the footage as he narrated.

“Camera two on the bridal suite hallway was cut from the inside. Whoever did it knew what they were doing, timed it perfectly,slipped into the vendor queue during a staff rotation. No flags on initial entry, but we caught her again on the east garden cam. It’s a low angle, but wide enough. An unregistered florist. She walked Sloane out the side doors. Sloane followed.”

I didn’t breathe. My heart thundered behind my ribs and my pulse was loud in my ears.

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