Page 63 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8
“I’ll find it,” I say, leaning in and fishing my hand into his left pocket, where I know he keeps his phone, because he’s left-handed. I’m so close to him, and suddenly, I start shaking. Because he’s here, after two months of me not seeing him, and he was very nearly killed. We might not even be safe. My heart squeezes so hard I think I might die.
He might’ve been killed. Right there in front of me.
I can’t handle that. And so I open his phone up and I call his head of security. “Where are you?” I ask.
“In London, where Mr. Apostolis has asked me to be. Why are you on his phone, Mrs. Apostolis?”
“Someone tried to kill him. And he has no idea who he is.”
“We’ll send an emergency vehicle to the location.”
It goes dead. I have a fair idea of exactly where we’ll go, because I’ve been there before, and I recall him saying it’s a property that is listed in his name, and it even has a panic room.
He said this to me offhandedly, and I laughed, and now I think it was not a joke.
“We need to get down the stairs,” I say.
Thank God he can move on his own two feet, because there’s no way I could carry a man his size down those stairs.
We wait behind the door until the phone lights up, and everything after is a blur. He is rushed to a private medical facility and I’m on edge the whole time. They scan his brain to make sure he isn’t dying. A concussion, but nothing more. I’m given instructions on how to safeguard him, but I want to ask for…for help, for something else. Something more. But I am his wife.
And then his security team says the larger imperative is to get him somewhere safe and private, they trust no one, not even these doctors enough to have them come with us, to have them know the location of where we might go.
We’re instructed to go to the roof of the facility and await a helicopter, which touches down the moment we reach the roof, the rotors causing windstorm that throws my already chaotic heart into disarray.
As we climb up inside, and are whisked off into the Parisian sky, I feel like I’m leaving behind everything again for him. And I don’t know how I keep doing this. Maybe he is lying to me. Maybe this was all an elaborate ruse to get me to come with him.
Maybe I’ve walked into a trap again.
All I know is that in spite of my best efforts, I’m back with Dragos.
I want to weep. For all of the reasons that a person can shed tears. I don’t. Maybe because I’d have to be connected to my body to manage that. Right now, I feel like I’m not just flying above Paris, but above myself.
Were the last few weeks a dream?
Or maybe the last four years were some dire fantasy and I’ll wake up at home in my bed.
The flight itself lasts two hours, and I’m thankful he doesn’t try to touch me. When we land in the snow at his mountaintop home above Geneva, I’m not surprised. This was where I thought we would go.
We spent our honeymoon here, and he told me then it was a secure property that only very few people knew about, and a helicopter is required for access.
It’s a beautiful home, set into the side of the mountain, nearly concealed by the craggy rock around it, the angles of glass designed to allow the house to fade into nature.
It’s beautiful. But that’s not my prevailing thought right now.
I usher him into the house, and the crew flies away. Which means that I’m alone on a mountaintop with Dragos. Who doesn’t know who he is. Probably.
I press a security lock on the wall behind us, like he showed me to do the first time we were here.
He’s looking around, pacing like a caged panther as he regards the parameters of this place. It’s dark outside, but the snow still glows a fearsome white. It’s eerily quiet. So different than the apartment in Paris I was in only a couple of hours before.
I feel like I can’t catch my breath. I’m not sure if I’ve been able to catch my breath for weeks.
I wait. To see if he’s going to pounce on me. To see if he’s going to collapse. I still haven’t decided whether or not I think all of this is a ruse. Or whether it’s really happening.
“Sit down,” I say. In spite of myself. “We need to call a doctor. We need to figure out how to get him up here.”
“Not necessary. I simply won’t sleep.”
