Page 44 of The Sicilian Billionaire's Neglected Wife
Aivan
THE ELEVATOR DOORSare closing.
Silver steel sliding shut on the only thing that’s ever mattered, and I’ve been too fucking stupid to realize it until now.
Time moves wrong in dreams. One second the doors are open. The next they’re halfway closed. No in-between. No chance to run.
Sienah stands in the back corner, bracketed by Eusebio and two of my father’s men. Her face is pale porcelain, those brown eyes that used to look at me with stars now empty as abandoned rooms. She holds herself carefully, like movement might shatter her into pieces too small to put back together.
Our eyes meet for one suspended heartbeat.
The air goes solid.
Then the doors seal shut, and she’s gone.
“No.” The word rips from my throat as I lunge forward, jabbing at the button. Down arrow lights up mockingly. Too late. Always too fucking late when it comes to understanding what matters.
My fist connects with the elevator panel. Pain shoots through my knuckles, sharp and real and welcome.
The stairwell door crashes against the wall as I burst through. Five flights down, taking them three at a time, my Testoni loafers skidding on concrete. My lungs burn but not as much as the panic clawing at my chest.
Mine. She’s mine. They can’t take what’s mine.
Except she isn’t, is she? Not when I’ve spent ten years treating our marriage like a business merger. Not when I filed those fucking papers. Not when I let another woman touch me while my wife watched.
The lobby is empty.
Silent.
Wrong.
Marble and glass and sophisticated emptiness where my whole world should be standing. The security guard barely glances up from his newspaper. Normal Tuesday afternoon in Monaco. No sign that everything has just gone catastrophically wrong.
The air conditioning hums, people walking all around me, the world spinning the way it always has...even when my own world has crashed into an agonizing stop.
Fuck, no.
A sound has finally permeated my shock, the distinctive whump-whump-whump of helicopter blades cutting through sea air, and my blood becomes ice water as I sprint outside just in time to see the family chopper lifting off from the building’s pad. Through the glass bubble, I catch one last glimpse of dark hair, of slim shoulders curving inward like she’s trying to disappear.
My phone is in my hand before conscious thought. Speed dial 1 has always been my trainer. But sometime in the last week of hell, muscle memory has changed that.
But before I can even call her, my own phone rings, and of course, of course...
It’s my wife’s kidnapper calling.
“We do not hurt our own, Aivan.”
And he’s no one else but my own father.
“I know how it looks,” I grit out, watching the helicopter become a speck against the azure sky. My free hand clenches and unclenches, still feeling the phantom weight of her in my arms from all those mornings I carried her back to bed. “But I swear, I never touched another woman—”
“Then that makes it worse.” The temperature in his voice drops another ten degrees. “You broke your wife’s heart for nothing, and that brings even greater shame to our famiglia.”
Shame.
