Chapter 5

 (Pov Leandro)

"Where is Nadia?"

Those were the only words in my head right now. Not what Tessa had done, or the woman in the sheets, the headache, none of it. Just that one question, turning over and over again on my head.

"Where is she, Tessa?"

Tessa set her coffee cup down and folded her arms. "Leandro, you need to calm down before you… "

"Answer my question Tessa." I yelled. "Well, I don't know where your little maid is." She spoke with so much contempt in her voice and she watched my face when she said it, checking for my reaction. 

"Look Lean, frankly, that's not the conversation we should be having right now. What we should be talking about is…"

"We are not talking about anything." I picked my phone up off the dresser. The screen had eleven missed calls from my assistant, my cousin Rafael and two unknown numbers. I ignored all of them and wore my shoes.

"We are done talking." "Leandro." She spoke. 

"If you walk out of this room and make a scene, the photos from last night will be the least of your problems. I have documentation. I have…."

"Use it," I said as I turned and looked at her directly for what I intended to be the last time in this conversation. 

"Go ahead and use every single piece of it. I genuinely do not care, Tessa and not today."

I picked up my jacket from the floor as she stepped forward. 

"She's gone, Leandro, and hatever you think the two of you had, my mother spoke to yours this morning. She's been dismissed and fired, and she's not…. "*

I walked past her and out the door as I shoved her out of my way.

The hotel corridor was long, carpeted and empty at this hour. I walked fast, with the jacket in my hand, my shirt untucked and my phone already at my ear. I called Nadia's number as I hit the elevator button. It rang four times and went to voicemail.

I hung up and called again, it went into voicemail and again, the same thing.

The elevator opened as I stepped in, pressed the ground floor and watched the doors close and stood there with my phone gripped in my hand and trying to think clearly. 

She'd been dismissed. How?

That was what Tessa said. My mother had already sacked her than I'd anticipated, which meant this had been coordinated and planned. The dismissal, the hotel room, all of it timed together so that by the time I woke up the damage was already done.

But little would Nadia know that I was drugged. 

The elevator doors opened into the lobby. I walked through it without stopping as I pushed through the front door into the morning air and raised my hand for a cab without slowing my pace.

I had to get to her.  That was the only thing that mattered. 

I knew Nadia and how she concludes on things. If she had been thrown out of that house this morning then that would be another thing.

While my thoughts were still going wild. A cab pulled up and I got in.

"Take me to the airport," I said.

---

The driver took forty minutes on the driveway and I spent all forty of them on my phone. 

I called Nadia more than eight times. I called her business number, which I had memorized weeks ago, there was no answer. I tried Rafael and asked him to run down her address. I tried to remember if she'd ever mentioned a friend, a neighbor, anyone I could reach through instead of directly.

But unfortunately, nothing. By the time the cab pulled up to the departures terminal my head was completely unstabled.

It was only Nadia. I paid the driver and got out.

I didn't think about bodyguards. Though, I hadn't called any, since I left the hotel, which was not something that ever happened because I had not moved through a public space unaccompanied since I was seventeen years old. 

But I wasn't thinking about that right now. The only thing I was hungry for is to get to her first. I walked through the automatic doors into the terminal.

:

Then, I felt someone was tracing me from behind, “De Monterlair” Someone said my name out loud, loud enough that heads turned towards me.

Then, there were camera flashes.

I stopped walking, but unfortunately for me, that was the mistake, stopping.

Because the moment I stopped, the space around me stopped being a public terminal and became something else as cameras raised, voices overlapping, and hands on me.

"Leandro, is it true you slept with your family's maid?"

"Mr. De Montclair, one photo, just one please…" "Leandro! Over here… "

They closed in from every side to a point I couldn't count the numbers of people around me, because they were moving and pressing and the terminal was loud and the flashes were going off in clusters now, and immediately, someone grabbed my arm.

My chest seized, and the air in my lungs stopped moving as I stood there in the middle of that crowd as I almost got suffocated.

“Get off! Get it off me. Get it…”

"Sir… sir, are you…? "Another hand grabbed one on my shoulder. Securities tried to control the crowd but they couldn't.

The crowd was still pressing, with voices layered on top of each other into one continuous noise that had no individual words in it anymore. A phone knocked against my shoulder from one side. Someone's elbow caught my ribs from the other. I couldn't hold it anymore. Then suddenly, I fell down in the midst of the crowd as I hit one knee on the terminal floor and put one hand out to catch myself and crouched there in the middle of the crowd while the cameras kept firing and the noise kept building and I could not breathe anymore.

“Nadia?”

Her name moved crossed my mind one single time.

By then, the security team got through the crowd and the voices started receding while they shouted, “Stand back, give him space, everybody back out.”

And the hands that had been trying to pull me upright, dragged me up and I let them move me out of the crowd.

The terminal lights went very bright and then they went out.