Chapter 22

Layla

Someone was screaming.

High-pitched, frantic. Unending. Someone was screaming like they were being torn apart alive. Chased by the hounds of hell. Plummeting to their doom. Screaming like the world was ending.

A woman?

Was a woman screaming?

For a moment, my mother’s face swam before my eyes—had she screamed as the car tumbled off the bridge? Had her final moment been one of terror? Had she cried as her life ended?

But her image shredded before my eyes like a torn canvas, and the screaming continued. A dream.

No, not a dream. Not screaming.

It was too high, too loud, too constant.

An alarm? An alarm!

I sat up so fast my head spun. My eyes fluttered in the darkness of the sprawling bedroom. Somewhere in the vast house, an alarm wailed, ripping the silence of the night into infinitely small pieces.

Panic clutched at my chest, turning my breath shallow, making my heart race hard enough to hurt. An alarm.

What was happening? Fire? How did I get out? Where did I go? What should I do?

And Eli—Where was Eli?

My gaze snapped towards the door. I needed to get Eli, get him out, get him safe—

I realized with sharp shock that I wasn’t alone. Someone had entered the room. Someone large and male. Someone was here.

The door behind him stood open to bathe broad shoulders and a narrow waist in an angel’s silhouette of haloed light.

Aldo.

The light crept across his cheekbones to set his eyes aglow as they fell to me. And as his gaze locked on mine, the fear in them nearly stopped my racing heart. The alarm shrieked in the background.

“Aldo?” My voice sounded too high, panicky. “What's going on? Did something happen?”

“It’s okay.” He stepped towards me, and in some weirdly calm part of my brain, I registered that he was barefoot. Clad only in soft pajama bottoms. “Everything's going to be okay.”

It wasn’t the cold, emotionless voice of the masked Mafia king. It was his voice—my Vasco. Soft and warm and comforting and his. And he wasn’t telling me to run or jump out the window to escape a raging fire.

For one instant, I almost let it calm me.

No fire.

But—But there was a gun in his hand. Which meant that alarm wasn’t a fire—A break-in? Robbery?

“Aldo … where is Eli?” I threw the covers off and leapt out of bed, barely registering the cold floor against my bare feet as I beelined for the door. “Tell me what’s going on—”

His large hand around my biceps halted me mid-stride. Halfway between the bed and the door. “Layla.”

That name on his tongue. My name. But I couldn’t let that distract me. “Let me go.”

“There are intruders in the house.” His words stopped me dead, froze me solid. “They were after you.”

“Me.”

Intruders … after you. My mind refused to process the meaning behind those words. Why would intruders break into this house? Why would they come for me? I was nobody.

“Why would they want me?” My voice was still too high. Like a flock of tittering birds. “Why the hell would they want me?”

Aldo shook his head, throwing wavering lines of light and shadow across his face. Accenting all the creases of tension across his brow, along his mouth, in his jaw.

Like worry lines, but why would he be worried?

“I don’t know. But I think … ” The voice was still his, too soft to belong to the mask, the Mafia king. “I think because they know that if they kidnapped you, they could use you. To get to me.”

I almost laughed, but what came out was more a derisive bark. “How the hell would that work?”

His jaw flickered with tension. “They know I’d do anything they wanted to get you back.”

“Yeah, right.” Another bark of derision escaped my throat. That was a dream—for me and for them.

“It would work.” His gaze drifted past me. Eyes out of focus. Voice still so soft, too soft. Vulnerable. Human. “Someone has figured out you’re important to me.”

You’re important to me.

The present tense echoed through my mind. The implied now, still, currently.

But another thought crept in beneath those echoes. If someone thought I was important to him—

“Eli.”

Sudden dread washed over me in an icy wave. Panic drove every thought from my head, drove every sensation from my awareness. Homed my world down to that one pinprick—Eli.

I shoved Aldo’s fingers from my arm.

Ran.

Sprinted.

I was barely aware of darting through the door, of flying down the hall. Of half-crashing into the wall as I careened around the turn onto the main hall. Sprinting again. It didn’t matter.

Nothing mattered.

Only Eli.

And I was too far from him. Was I breathing? Was my heart still beating? Was the world still turning?

I didn’t know.

All I knew was how fucking long this hallway was, the one separating me from Eli. And if there were intruders in his room when I arrived, I’d burn the world down to get him back. It didn’t matter what they did to me. To anyone.

Only Eli mattered.

My footsteps faltered as I drew near the door to his room.

It was open.

Thrown wide.

He’d never have done that. He wasn’t bold and loud like that; he’d have slipped through a crack if he wanted to leave the room. A cold shudder crept down my spine, wracking my shoulders in a violent spasm of fear.

Heart in my throat, I crept to the room. Peered through the opened door.

The bed had been torn apart.

Covers tossed to the ground.

Pillow halfway across the room.

Empty.

I cast about the space, like I might find him hiding under the desk or lurking in the bathroom. But the way the curtains fluttered in the opened window, the way the alarm still blared out across the house, I knew.

I knew, I knew, I knew, in my very bones. Down to my soul.

My son was gone.

“Layla.” Aldo drew up beside me. I hadn’t heard him running after me, hadn’t heard him approach. Hadn’t been aware of anyone else in the world but myself and my target.

Distantly, I was aware that I was gasping for breath, pulling in great shuddering heaves of air. But inside, I felt cold, numb, hollow.

“They took him.” My voice mimicked my inside—empty. Emotionless. “They took him.”

Aldo, I realized, wasn’t listening. He was barking something into his phone, orders. “Well go after them then! … They aren’t to leave the property … I don’t care what you have to do!”

“They took him.” I couldn’t seem to escape those words, that thought. In repeat, a broken record. Doomed to play on repeat until some force of inertia pulled me clear of the groove.

“Layla.” Aldo’s dark gaze filled my vision. Warm hands curled around my shoulders. Anchors. Anchors, holding me steady. Holding me here, on earth. Keeping me from drifting off into space, where I’d maybe never be found again.

They took him.

“Layla. Stay with me.” Aldo’s firm, steady voice pulled me back, like his hands on my arms. Like his dark gaze, still filling my vision. “We’ll get him back.”

Determination burned in those dark, familiar eyes. Like a promise. Aldo’s eyes. Vasco’s eyes. My Vasco’s eyes burned with a promise.

A promise of retribution.

They took him.

We’ll get him back.

It was a promise I believed.