His Mafia Prince -
Chapter 266: Maybe it’s My Fault
Chapter 266: Maybe it’s My Fault
It takes a few minutes before I call out to Sasha again. "Baby, did you get lost?" I shout, amused, but there’s no response. "Sasha?" I try again. Nothing. I turn to the tour guide. "You need to get those lights on now," I tell him. "If my husband has been hurt, I am going to sue your ass, and your
company’s ass, and this whole damn country’s ass into oblivion."
"It will be best if we stay here," the tour guide assures me, as though he just didn’t hear me threaten legal action. "The lights will come back on any moment, signore."
"If you think I’m gonna—" I start, but with several loud thunks, the lights come back on. The tour guide, who can see my furious face more clearly now, takes a step back.
I turn my attention to where I last saw Sasha, calling out for him again. I’m starting to worry that he tripped over something in the dark, maybe knocked himself unconscious. The last thing he needs is to get hurt again—and if I make him go to the hospital, which I will, he’s going to be really mad. "Sasha!" I try again, jogging up the stairs on the other side.
He was definitely on this side. Wasn’t he?
I look over to the other side, but I know he was here. He was right here...
My stomach goes cold and I turn around and around, trying to catch sight of him, calling out his name.
"Please, signore!" the tour guide pants at me. He’s heaving himself up the stairs to join me. "Please, stop screaming. You are worrying the others in the group."
"Fuck the others in the group," I say, and shake off the restraining hand on my arm. "Sasha!"
"Perhaps this is his idea of a joke," the guide snaps.
I turn on him. "Or perhaps he’s lying fucking unconscious somewhere. Start looking." I start to run up and down the steps, trying to look behind any raised areas, and the guide begins to walk up and down as well, along with a few other tourists still in the Colosseum. Most of them left when the lights came on again, and none of the ones who stayed even seem to know who we’re looking for; I hear one English woman explaining to her husband that my child is hiding from me. At least they’re looking, I guess.
But it’s no use. Sasha is gone.
For a second I wonder if it is a prank. If Sasha is waiting outside the Colosseum for me with a grin on his face. Baby bird, I could hear you shrieking all the way out here.
No. He would never do that. But maybe it’s a test—maybe he’s waiting to see what I’d do if he suddenly disappeared, and I had to take care of myself?
I picture him just about snapping La Contessa’s neck with one hand when he grabbed her at St. Peter’s Square. No way. He’s in no mood for games and no mood for testing me, not outside a very controlled environment.
I take a few deep breaths and try to think.
"Perhaps," the tour guide says nervously, "we should call the—"
"No. No police. No law enforcement." I back away from the guide. "I’ll— I’ll go check outside. Maybe you’re right, and he’s pulling some prank." I turn to leave, then turn back. "Don’t mention this to anyone," I say in a low, cold voice, trying to channel my inner Sasha.
It seems to work. The guide gives a frantic shake of the head, and I make my way out of the Colosseum, alone.
Sasha is not outside. I didn’t expect him to be, but I hoped for it. I’m trying to keep my panic at bay by imaging how goddamn mad I’m going to be when I find him. "So fucking mad," I mutter under my breath as I walk quickly away from the Colosseum.
I’m trying to be smart.
Waiting around under one of the foremost national monuments like a deer in the headlights is just going to get me killed—if my worst fears have come true, and Sasha has been taken away from me by the Irish, or by a rival Family, or law enforcement, or a million other choices.
Taken, or worse...
No. He can’t be dead. I stamp that thought right out. Sasha Adonis is fucking indestructible; that’s all there is to it. And so it’s my job right now to find him, wherever he is.
I walk blindly, trying to pretend to myself that I’m throwing any shadows off my tail, but the truth is I’m not acting rationally. I’m just panicking, trying to find a dark corner to hide away in so I can think.
When the shitty old phone that Sasha insisted I swapped to tonight buzzes with a text message, I just about jump out of my skin. I fumble it out of my pocket, praying to any deity that might be out there that the text is from Sasha, wondering where the hell I am, telling me he’s waiting at the Colosseum for me and to get my butt back there.
The text says it’s from Sasha, but it’s not telling me to get back to the Colosseum.
It’s telling me that some unnamed "We" has my husband, and if I want to see him alive and in one piece, I’ll respond right fucking now and tell them I understand.
It takes me a while to get my shaky fingers to react, but before I do, another text comes through very quickly.
Instructions to come at 0600 tomorrow. You will exchange yourself for our prisoner. Reply I UNDERSTAND.
I resist the urge to write back I’M GOING TO KILL EVERY LAST ONE OF YOU MOTHERFUCKERS, and instead I type, I WANT PROOF OF LIFE.
All I get back is another:
Reply I UNDERSTAND.
I stumble into an alley and throw up all my filleti di baccalà in a neat puddle on the sidewalk. Afterward, I wipe my mouth and try to stop shaking. "He’s alive," I mutter to myself, because that’s all that matters. He’s alive, but there seems to be more than one Irish agent involved in this, because they used the plural: our prisoner. Not my prisoner.
My phone buzzes again.
Reply I UNDERSTAND.
I text these assholes that I FUCKING UNDERSTAND, and then I turn off my phone just in case they’re tracing me somehow. I’m starting to think again. Cold rage is overtaking my fear.
I take a chance and dart back to a main street to flag a passing taxi, praying it’s not some Irish guy in disguise. I tell him to take me to St. Peter’s; no point letting anyone know where I’m staying who doesn’t need to know. The driver has no interest in chat, thank God, so during the ride, I go through my options.
The Irish—because it has to be them, right?—has my husband. They want me in exchange for him.
I don’t know where Sasha is. He might be near the Colosseum, or he might not.
I could call Miles Caspar when I get back to the hotel. But what use would he be, really, four thousand miles away? What’s he going to do, call up his buddies in Rome, get a ragtag team of ne’er-do-wells together to rescue the Boss while I sit on my ass on a divan and eat grapes while I wait?
No. Fucking. Way.
Besides, I don’t have any idea at all where Sasha might be in this whole damn city, and unless I can give Miles a place to start looking—
I’ve been fiddling with my wedding ring, screwing it around on my finger as though it’s a lucky charm, and then it hits me. It hits me so hard that I let out a strangled laugh and the taxi driver looks at me in the rear-view, wondering if I’m trying to make conversation.
I look quickly out the window, squeezing my eyes shut, my heart beating rapidly.
Our wedding rings. Of course. Sasha would have thought of this much sooner. The tracker in my wedding ring has saved me before, led him right to me.
And it goes both ways. Sasha has a tracker embedded in his ring, too.
I throw a handful of euros at the driver when he pulls up at the destination, and ignore his surprised, happy, "Grazie!" as I fling open the door. I take off at a run, but with much more purpose now. I get to the hotel and go straight to the stairs, because the elevator is going to take too long. I unlock the door to our supreme suite and hesitate, just for a moment, because what if there’s someone in there waiting for me?
But if they knew where we were staying, they could’ve just come there, rather than pulling off the considerably more Irish cult feat of kidnapping a Mob Boss from the Colosseum. Because there are a lot of cameras there, and a lot of guards, which means they must have paid someone off—
several someones...
I march through the room and into the bedroom, and start rooting around in my bag for my usual smartphone, swearing and raging under my breath. How in the hell Sasha didn’t see them coming in the Colosseum, or feel them, with that weird-ass sixth sense he gets...
And then I understand.
He was so busy worrying about me when those lights went out that he wasn’t worrying about himself.
I bend double, anxiety hitting me right in the gut, grabbing at myself until the fear and guilt passes over. My fault. My fault. It beats a tattoo in my brain.
"Get it together," I hiss at myself. "Maybe it is your fault, but you have a chance to fix it." I think about Sasha telling me he needed to know I had his back, to know he could depend on me in a tight situation, and I grind my teeth together and take a few more deep breaths.
And then I keep looking through my bag for my phone.
When I finally find it, turn it on, and log into the app that tracks his wedding ring, my heart almost stops. He’s close. So close, that for a terrible moment I wonder if he left his ring here for some reason, but then I zoom in and see he’s in-the-vicinity close, but still a few blocks away.
I think for another minute, and then I find Teddy in my contacts, my thumb hovering over the "Call" button. Is this the smartest play? What would Sasha do?
Sasha would rip Rome apart to find me. But he’d be clever about it, too. And the thing is, if the Irish has been tracking us through Rome, if they’ve been able to pick us up wherever we go except the hotel—and that’s a big if, but I go with it—that means they only have access to specific information about us. And while I didn’t tell Sasha about my plans for tonight, I did tell two people.
I told Gloria , in a chatty email mostly about our encounter with La Contessa, that we were going to the Colosseum for a night tour.
And I texted Miles, too, as the head of Triple Triad security, so he’d know where the Boss was tonight and why he wasn’t answering his main phone if anything went down back home.
There’s no way Miles has betrayed us. I won’t believe that, not in a million years. But there’s no way La Contessa has betrayed us, either. Not Gloria . Maybe she mentioned something to La Contessa, though, if she heard La Contessa side of our meeting this morning? But if La Contessa wanted to betray us, to foil what she saw as our dastardly plans, why give us the pendant ?
My phone has gone dark under my thumb, I’ve hesitated for so long. I put it down and dig out Sasha’s phone from his bag, which is much easier to find, because Sasha is organized. And then, from Sasha’s phone, I text.
I need a friend.
Miles’s response comes only moments later, a contact card with a Roman address, a password, and then a follow-up text. Everything OK Boss?
All good, I text back. No point tipping our enemies off that I have plans pre- 0600 if they are monitoring our communication somehow...or if, despite how much I don’t believe it, Miles’s suddenly turned rat. Either way, the Irish could hardly believe I’d turn up tomorrow unarmed.
What they won’t expect is for me to take matters into my own hands. Not Tyler Adonis, the playboy husband of Don Sasha Adonis who can’t protect himself, who needs a whole Mob Family to keep him safe, who hides in his husband’s shadow.
I give a grim, slow smile.
Oh, these fuckers might think they know me. But they’re about to find out how wrong they are.
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