Page 8 of Scarlet Chains
Her name pounds through my skull with every heartbeat. The image of her pale face burns behind my eyelids. She’s been through hell— the emergency surgery, the infection that nearly killed her, the days in the hospital where I couldn’t even see her. And when she finally came home to the mansion, she was different. Distant. Like she’d built walls I couldn’t see.
Fuck that.
I press harder on the gas, the speedometer climbing past one-twenty. The city blurs into streaks of neon and shadow outside my windows. My chest feels like it’s being crushed in a vise, each breath a struggle against the panic clawing at my throat.
She can’t just leave. Not like this. Not when—
Could she have found out somehow what I did to her father?
The thought slams into me like a sledgehammer to the gut. My hands shake on the wheel for a split second before I force them steady. No. Impossible. My brothers made sure of that. Buried it so deep under bribes and forged documents that nobody would ever know the full truth. They paid the rightpeople, made sure Igor Shiradze’s death looked like suicide, case closed.
No.
I shake my head violently, cutting off that line of thinking before it can poison everything. She doesn’t know. Shecan’tknow.
What’s more likely is the miscarriage. The way she looked when she came back from hospital— pale as death, her body exhausted from fighting for survival while grief ate her alive from the inside. I wasn’t there when they wheeled her into emergency surgery while our child bled out of her. The infection kept me away for days while she suffered alone, and by the time I could finally see her, something in her eyes had died.
Maybe she thinks she’s broken. Maybe she believes she can’t give me what I need, what the contract originally specified. An heir. A child to carry on the Sidorov name.
Stupid woman.
The airport exit sign flashes overhead, and I take the ramp so fast my tires scream against the asphalt. She doesn’t understand— has never understood— that I don’t give a shit about any of that anymore. Not since I held her in my arms and felt something inside my chest that I thought died with my childhood. Something that made me want to be more than just a man with blood on his hands and secrets that could destroy everything.
I wanther. Just her. We can adopt. We can try again. Hell, science is advancing every day— there are treatments, procedures, miracles happening in labs across the world. But none of that matters if she’s not here. None of it means anything without her laugh echoing through the mansion, without her body pressed against mine in the darkness, without her stubborn arguments over breakfast and the way she challenges me like no one else dares.
Then another image crashes through my thoughts like a wrecking ball— Slava. My son. My beautiful, innocent boy with his unknown mother’s eyes and my stubborn chin. The way he looked at me— so trusting, so eager to have hispapain his life.
And now he’s gone too. Not taken, not kidnapped— adopted. By the time I found out he’d survived his mother’s murder, some wealthy Boston couple had already claimed him as their own. Perfect parents with clean money and respectable lives. Everything I could never be.
My son!
The rage that floods through me is so pure, so absolute, that for a moment I can’t see anything but red. If we could only get him back somehow! But the adoption was finalized. Legal and binding. I can’t lose both Slava and Ilona on almost the same goddamn day!
The parking garage appears ahead like a concrete mouth ready to swallow me whole. I grip the wheel tighter, my knuckles white as bone, and press harder on the gas. The engine responds with a growl that matches the sound building in my throat. All I care about is getting to the airport and bringing Ilona home. Nothing else matters. Nothing else exists.
She’s mine.
They’re both mine.
And I don’t let go of what’s mine.
The moment I reach the parking level, I’m already pulling out my phone before the car even stops. My fingers shake— actually fucking shake— as I hit Radimir’s number. The call connects on the first ring.
“Which flight?” I bark into the phone, not bothering with pleasantries. There’s no time for social niceties when my entire world is falling apart.
A pause. Then the familiar sound of Radimir’s fingers flying over his keyboard filters through the line. That sound—usually comforting, the promise of information and solutions— now feels like torture. Every second of silence is another mile between Ilona and me.
“Anything?” I roar, unable to keep the desperation from bleeding through my voice.
“Fuck.” Radimir’s voice is tight with concentration. “I can’t trace her phone anymore. She must have ditched it.”
My heart doesn’t just sink— it plummets through the earth’s core and comes out the other side. She ditched her phone. That means this isn’t some impulsive breakdown. This is planned. Calculated. This is Ilona using that brilliant mind of hers to disappear completely.
Smart woman.
Too fucking smart for her own good.
“Then get a fucking satellite image of the airport!” I demand, slamming my palm against the dashboard. “Search the fucking area!”
