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Alle Kapitel von THE COST OF SAVING HIM : Kapitel 91 – Kapitel 100

101 Kapitel

ALMOST ESCAPED

Nadia's POVI heard the door open and a man came in. Not young, a little bit old, dressed well in the way that suggested he was used to dressing well and had never given it much thought. He looked around the room briefly and then looked at me, and his expression carried the specific calm of someone who had walked into rooms like this before and found them unremarkable.I looked back at him from the chair."You were shouting," he said."Yes," I said."You were disturbing because I had a visitor""A visitor?", I asked and I decided to scream. "Help!, I'm being tied down". "Stop", he ordered me immediately. "No." I held his gaze. "Tell me why I'm here and then I'll consider it."He looked at me for a moment, something moving briefly in his expression that I couldn't read. "You'll know soon enough.""I'd like to know now," I said. "I'd like to know who you are, who took me, and what exactly you want from me, because I've been in this chair since I woke up and nobody has said a single u

KANE''S FATHER

Nadia's POVTwo days.It had been two days and nobody had come for me and nobody had told me anything and the room had become something I knew too well — every crack in the wall, every angle of the light at different hours, the exact sound the lock made when someone was about to open it versus when someone was just passing by in the corridor.I'd stopped pounding on the door after the first day. Not because I'd given up but because pounding wasn't productive and I needed to be productive.So I looked at the room instead.Really looked. The way you looked at something when you were trying to use it rather than just be stuck in it. The furniture was old but not neglected — someone had maintained this room, had cared about it at some point. There was a wardrobe against the far wall that I hadn't opened yet and I went to it now and pulled it open.Clothes. Old ones, folded. A jacket that belonged to someone considerably larger than me. Shoes that hadn't been worn in years by the look of t

THE TRUTH

Nadia's POV"Are you ready to listen now?"He came in without knocking, which I was beginning to understand was simply how he moved through spaces he considered his, and sat in the chair by the door with the ease of someone who had decided this conversation was happening on his terms and was waiting for me to accept that.I was sitting on the bed. I'd been sitting on the bed for the better part of an hour since he'd left, turning the question over — *are you Kane's father* — and the way he'd walked out without answering, which was its own kind of answer."That depends," I said. "On whether what you're saying is worth listening to."He looked at me. "It is.""Then talk," I said.He folded his hands in his lap and looked at the window for a moment, the way people looked at something neutral when they were organizing what they were about to say, and then he looked back at me."Kane was exceptional," he said. Not warmly. Just factually, the way someone stated something they'd observed ove

"BE CAREFUL OF YOUR OWN SON..?"

Kane's POVMarcus came through the door and looked at the state of the study — the maps, the papers, the men moving in and out — and then looked at Kane."Tell me what happened," he said.Kane looked at him. "You haven't seen her? Since the gala?""No." Marcus sat down. "Kane. Tell me what happened."Kane looked at the window. "We were in the private bar room. Just the two of us." He kept his voice level, factual, the way he talked about things when the alternative was something he didn't have time for. "I got called to a meeting. Senior staff, internal, the message came through the hotel system." He paused. "When I got there they told me it had been cancelled. Nobody knew who called it."Marcus looked at him. "And when you went back—""She was gone." Kane looked at the desk. "Security footage confirmed it. The moment I left that bar room, the door opened. Two men went in. They were in there less than three minutes." He held Marcus's gaze. "They planned it around the meeting. Someone

HE WENT HIMSELF

Kane's POVHis father's house looked exactly the same as it always had.Kane stood outside it for a moment before going in, looking at the gates, the garden, the windows — all of it exactly as he remembered, maintained with the specific care of someone who believed that environments reflected character and had strong opinions about both.He went in without calling ahead.The staff let him through because they always had, because whatever had been dissolved on paper, the muscle memory of this house hadn't caught up with the documents yet, and Kane walked through the entrance and found his father in the sitting room with a book and an expression that shifted the moment he looked up and saw who had walked in."Kane." He set the book down slowly. "What brings you here."Kane looked around the room. Then the hallway. Then back at his father. "Where were you after the gala?"His father looked at him. "I came home.""Straight home.""Yes.""Why so quickly," Kane said. "The celebration wasn't

HE WAITED

Kane's POVHe drove around the block twice before parking.Not in front of the house — far enough that the car wasn't visible from the gate, close enough that the house was. He cut the engine and sat and looked at the building through the windshield and said nothing.Lev said nothing either, which was correct.The third floor window had a light behind it. Same light that had been there when Kane had walked out. It hadn't moved, hadn't changed, just sitting there in the upper right corner of the building, steady and yellow and telling him everything his father had been careful not to say."He'll move her," Kane said.Lev looked at the house. "Tonight?""If he thinks I'm convinced he'll wait," Kane said. "If he thinks I'm not—" he paused — "tonight.""So we move first.""We move carefully," Kane said. "Moving too fast gives him time to get her out before we're inside." He looked at the building. "We wait."Lev nodded and looked at the house and they sat in the quiet of the car while the

TAKEN ELSEWHERE

Nadia's POVI heard them coming before the door opened.Not the usual footsteps — those I'd learned, catalogued, filed away over two days until I could tell the difference between the man who brought food and the man who checked the lock and the older man who walked like someone who had never been in a hurry in his life. These were different. Faster. More of them.I sat up.The door opened and two men came in and one of them looked at me and said, "Get up. We're leaving."I looked at them. "Where are we going.""Get up," he said again.I got up slowly, because getting up slowly was the only form of control I had left, and I looked around the room — the wardrobe, the box I'd put back, the photographs I'd handled too many times in the past two days — and then one of them came forward with a blindfold and I stepped back immediately."No," I said."It's not a choice," he said."Everything is a choice," I said. "I'd like to know where you're taking me before you cover my eyes."He looked a

NO SIGN OF HIM

Nadia's POV"Where am I?" I asked.Nobody answered.The man who had guided me from the car to the entrance had already stepped back, and the two who had brought me inside were doing what everyone in this world seemed trained to do — stand and say absolutely nothing useful. I looked at them and they looked past me and the door behind them was already closed.I looked at the room.Different from the last one. Smaller, plainer, no wardrobe with a box of old photographs on the shelf, no personal anything — just walls and a bed and a window and a monitor on my ankle that had followed me from the last house like something I'd accidentally adopted. The kind of room that existed to hold someone rather than house them, and I'd been in enough rooms like this recently to know the difference immediately."Can someone tell me where I am?" I said, louder this time.One of the men looked at me briefly. Then away."Okay," I said. "Fine. None of you talk. That's fine. That's completely normal."I went

THERE TO SAVE HER

Kane's POVThe moment the gate opened he was already moving.He'd kept the distance deliberate — far enough that the headlights weren't a problem, close enough that losing the car wasn't an option. Lev drove without being told how, matching the pace instinctively, and Kane watched the car ahead move through the streets with the careful speed of people who thought they were being smart about it.They weren't being smart about it. They were being careful, which was different, and careful without knowing you were being followed was just performance.Left out of the gate. Right. Straight for longer than Kane had expected — which told him the second location wasn't close, which told him his father had planned for exactly this possibility, which told him the cat had been a contingency rather than a mistake.His father didn't make mistakes.He made contingencies.The car ahead slowed and turned through a gate that opened before it reached it — expected, which meant they'd called ahead, which

BOTH POV'S

Kane's POVThe wall was four meters of old stone and the gap in the camera coverage was exactly where his man had said it was, and they were over it and inside the perimeter in under two minutes. Kane moved through the garden low and fast and his men moved with him and nobody spoke because there was nothing to say that hadn't already been said in the car.The east entrance was a side door — service access, old lock, the kind that hadn't been updated because nobody had thought to update it because nobody had expected someone to come through it who knew it existed. Kane had it open in forty seconds and they were inside.The ground floor was dim and quiet. Staff quarters on the left, storage on the right, a corridor running straight ahead toward the main house. Kane moved right without hesitating — the main staircase was on the east side of the building, he remembered that, had walked up it twice years ago and the memory sat in his legs more than his head, which was the most reliable kin

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