CHAPTER 13

Sophia's POV

Dominic's face when he came back up to the roof told me everything before he said a word.

He had been gone twenty minutes. Long enough to make calls, pull information, start rebuilding whatever strategy the Carter revelation required. I had expected him to come back with a plan and a timeline and that particular cold efficiency he wore like a second suit.

Instead he came back looking like a man who had just been hit somewhere he didn't know he could be hit.

"Remy is gone," he said.

Damien went completely still beside me.

"What do you mean gone," I said.

"His room is empty. Phone on the bed. Car still in the garage." Dominic's voice was controlled but only just. "Zane found blood on the floor. Not a lot. But it's there."

Nobody spoke for a moment.

The city hummed below us indifferent and enormous and I stood between these two brothers and felt the weight of what had just been said settle over the roof like something physical.

"How long," Damien said.

"Two hours. Maybe three." Dominic looked at his brother. "While we were up here."

While we were up here talking about Carter and texts and Monaco holding companies someone had come inside these walls and taken Remy and none of us had known.

"The note," Damien said. Because of course Damien already knew there would be a note.

Dominic looked at him. "Bring us the girl. You get him back."

I felt both of them look at me at the same time.

I looked at the city and took one slow breath and let the fear move through me and out the other side because fear wasn't useful right now and Remy needed useful.

"Okay," I said.

"Sophia" Damien started.

"I said okay," I said. "Not okay I'll go. Okay I understand the situation and now we figure out what to do about it." I turned to Dominic. "Who has him. Carter."

"Almost certainly," Dominic said. "Or someone Carter is working with."

"Where is Carter now."

"Zane is locating him."

"Then we wait for Zane." I looked at Damien. He was looking at me with that expression that had been building for days, the one he kept pulling back before it fully formed. Tonight he wasn't pulling it back. "Stop looking at me like that."

"Like what," he said quietly.

"Like you're trying to decide something."

"I already decided," he said.

Dominic made a sound that might have been the beginning of something to say and then didn't say it which from Dominic was practically a speech.

"Go downstairs," Damien said to his brother. Not unkind. Just certain. "Give me ten minutes."

Dominic looked between us. The calculating eyes doing what they always did, reading everything, filing everything, deciding what mattered right now and what was a later problem.

He went downstairs.

And then it was just us and the city and the cold and something that had been building since a kitchen at midnight and a glass of whiskey and a man who hadn't gotten the brotherly memo.

"You're scared," Damien said.

"Yes," I said. No point pretending otherwise.

"For Remy or for yourself."

"For Remy," I said. "I don't have enough left to be scared for myself."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he reached out and pulled me toward him the way he did things, without announcement, without asking, just decided and certain, and I went because I had stopped having reasons not to somewhere between the roof and the dining table and the filing and all the small moments that had built something neither of us had named yet.

His arms came around me and I pressed my face against his chest and felt his heartbeat, faster than his face ever showed, and stood there in the cold air with the city below us and a brother missing and a war that kept opening new rooms.

"I need to tell you something," he said into my hair.

"Tell me," I said.

"Since the kitchen," he said. "The first night. Everything since then." He paused. "It wasn't strategy. None of it."

I pulled back enough to look up at him.

He looked down at me and his face was completely open in a way I had only seen in pieces before. The wall not down exactly but the door in it finally all the way open.

"I know," I said softly.

He kissed me.

Not the gala kiss. Nothing like that. That one had been for a room. This was for no one at all, slow and deliberate and certain, his hand against my face like something he had decided and wasn't going to rush.

I kissed him back and felt something that had been pulled tight for days finally release and thought that fear and tenderness were a strange combination but a very human one.

When we pulled back he kept his forehead against mine.

"Whatever comes next," he said quietly. "You're not going into it alone."

"Neither are you," I said.

He looked at me for a moment longer.

Then my phone buzzed on the railing.

We both looked at it.

Unknown number.

I picked it up and read it and felt the warmth between us drain away completely and immediately.

I handed it to Damien without speaking.

He read it.

His face closed like a door slamming.

The message was six words and a photograph.

Trade yourself for him by midnight.

And the photograph was Remy. Unconscious. Zip tied to a chair with today's newspaper on his lap so we knew it was tonight and it was real.

But it wasn't the photograph that made my blood go cold.

It was what was visible through the window behind Remy in the image.

A building I recognised immediately.

Because I had lived in it for three years.

The Vale mansion.