Page 67 of Stolen Mafia Vows
“Open,” he growls.
It’s the voice I heard before talking with Olivia Dragon… Drag… I must remember the name. What did she call him? Isla? Ilya? But my head is pounding again, and I feel his thick sausage fingers in my mouth, and I gag.
“Fuck!” I must bite him because his finger scrapes against my teeth, then he’s holding a bottle of water to my lips, and I swallow because my mouth is dry.
I realize too late that he put pills in my mouth…
“Stop,” I mutter. “What did you…”
I don’t finish. The chemical smell is back, and the darkness is welcome for once.
14
EOGHAN
My resolve tolet her go in accordance with her wishes lasts for approximately two minutes and forty-five seconds. I’m still on the roadside, leaning on the driver’s door of the 4x4 watching the rain create a hazy wall in the distance, my wet clothes sticking to me, when I realize what a jerk I’ve been. I just let the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, the best thing that ever happened to me, drive out of my life without putting up a fight.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
I’m about to climb into the car when the imprint of the wedding ring hitting my shoulder sears like a red-hot brand. The gold band has been in our family for three generations, but I’m not going to waste time hunting for it in the long grass. I’ll find a way to make it up to Gran.
But someone must be looking down on me from above. As I scan the verge, a half-hearted attempt to spot the ring before I drive off, I catch a glint of gold caught between some knee-high reeds. I lunge at the reeds, skidding to a halt in a puddlethat instantly saturates my feet inside my sneakers, but I don’t even feel the rain anymore.
I reach into the grass and pluck the ring from its hiding spot, raising it to my lips while saying a silent prayer of thanks.
It’s an omen. I’m going to find Emily, and I’ll spend the rest of my life proving that my love for her is not part of some fucking takeover bid that I wanted no part of to begin with. I’ll treat her like a princess. No, I’ll treat her like the queen she is. And if her family doesn’t like it… Well, it will be their loss.
I’ll go wherever Emily wants to go.
I’ll live in a shack on the beach if it makes her happy.
But I won’t live with this anger at myself for a moment longer.
I start the engine, crank the fans up to full blast to prevent my saturated clothes from steaming up the windows, and I drive.
She wouldn’t have gone back to the cottage. So, the obvious destination would be either the ferry port or the airport, and knowing Emily, I’m hedging my bet that she’s willing to catch the first flight out of Dublin to anywhere in the world that isn’t here.
I drive like a maniac, scanning both sides of the road for a car that looks like mine. At the speed I’m driving, I could easily shave an hour off the journey time to the airport, but I remember that Emily isn’t confident driving on this side of the road, and neither is she familiar with the route. She might not be thinking straight, but she wouldn’t drive recklessly, and I was only a few minutes behind her, so I’d have overtaken her if she was heading this way.
So, why haven’t I seen her?
At the next intersection I carry out a U-turn and head back to where we started via villages that we passed through on our road trips. Would she check into a hotel under an alias? In her state of confusion and disappointment it’s possible but unlikely, so I check the GPS and try to work out which route it would’ve shown her.
When I eventually locate the simplest journey, I skid around the corner at the next intersection and pick up the GPS’s directions less than a minute later. My heart is thudding. She must be here somewhere. She must be.
My heart almost crashes through my rib cage when I spot my car parked up on the side of a country lane, head beams transforming the puddles into shimmering gold pools. She’s still here. Whatever her reason for stopping the car and waiting around, it means that part of her isn’t ready to leave Ireland yet, and I have to believe that this also means that she isn’t ready to leave me.
But my relief is short-lived when I realize, the closer I get, that Emily isn’t sitting behind the wheel. Everything inside me seems to slow down. I park the 4x4 bumper-to-bumper with my abandoned car and climb out, my legs like sacks of sand.
My gut is churning. Something about this scenario is so off-kilter that I almost collapse onto my knees when I open the unlocked driver’s door and find the vehicle empty, because an empty vehicle means that Emily is still alive.
The keys are in the center console.
There’s no sign of Emily’s purse or phone.
First impression is that she chose a quiet lane in which to abandon the car and walk away without giving a fuck what happened to it. But there are several things wrong with thistheory. Firstly, we’re in the middle of fucking nowhere, and Emily would’ve had no clue where she was going.
Secondly, she’s angry with the world. If she wanted to retaliate, she’d have used her family’s wealth and connections to fly first class to the most expensive destination in the world, bathe in champagne, and suck caviar from lobster claws while purchasing the entire next season collection from Dior. She wouldn’t be hiking around the Galway countryside in the rain with no destination in mind.
