Chapter 47 Episode 47
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She gives me a sad smile. “Yeah, the dollhouse. So I wanted tostudy to be able to give people that feeling. To make them feelsafe and protected and loved. To make them feel comfortable.But… it didn’t work out.”
“I didn’t have the money,” she says. “I had a scholarship offerwaiting for me if I went for an accounting degree. But the onefor architecture… well, there was a panel of professors whodecided which new applicants would receive the money. And Ididn’t get in.”
She nods, but I can see in her face that there’s something else.Something she isn’t saying.
So when she reaches for the notebook, I pull it back again. “Iwant the whole story, lapochka.”
“It doesn’t even matter,” she mumbles. “It was so long ago. Adead dream.”
I tap the notebook. “It doesn’t seem dead.”
“Well, it is,” she snaps. “One of the professors on the boardwanted me to sleep with him in exchange for the scholarship,
and I refused. So it was over before it even began. It’s fine.”
My chest tightens with rage. “f**k that. It’s not fine at all.”
She tucks her hair behind her ear self-consciously. “It is. I’mover it.”
“Well, I’m not. Who was the man?”
Her eyes widen. “I’m not telling you his name.”
“Because you’ll kill him!” she blurts. “Or… I don’t know. Butit won’t be good. And there’s no point. I got a different degree,a different job. It’s fine.”
“There’s always time to start over.”
“Starting over takes more than time,” she says. “I have Elise tothink about now. I can’t waste my life living in a daydream,pretending that I have a picture-perfect family that lives in apicture-perfect house. I have to live in the real world. And inthe real world, I need money. So in the real world, I’m anaccountant.”
“Is that why you wanted your dad to buy you that dollhouse?So you could pretend it was where you all lived?”
Her hazel eyes are glassy now. Without meaning to, I steppedinto a touchy subject.
She holds out her hand. “You said you’d give it back.”
She steps forward, reaching for the notebook. But just beforeshe can grab it, I yank it away and tear out her latest drawing.
“Hey!” she shouts. “That’s mine!”
“You said you’d give it back.”
I hold out the black notebook. “I said I’d give the notebookback. And I am. But the drawing is mine.”
She’s twitching angrily for a second. Then, with a scowl, Bellesnatches her notebook back and spins on her heel.
“To see if Elise wants breakfast,” she says. “Because I haveresponsibilities, remember? Dependents. I can’t sit aroundplaying house with you all day.”
She grumbles something else I can’t hear, then a door slamsclosed.
I fold the sketch and slide it into my back pocket. My c**k ishard and my hands are trembling.
But just as I turn to head towards the small office off the livingroom, I hear Belle scream.
My heart lurches into my throat. I sprint across the suite andthrow open the door to Elise’s room to find Belle standing nextto the empty bed. Her eyes are wide, all signs of angerreplaced with pure terror.
“Shower, closet, her bed, the balcony.” Belle bites back a sob.“She’s gone. She took her room key, her phone. And her shoesare gone…”
“I’ll call the front desk to see if anyone saw her. It will befine.”
Belle stays in Elise’s room while I step out and call down tothe front desk. Within five minutes, I have all of the securityfootage from the hallway in front of our suite and of theparking garage sitting in my email inbox.
When I pull up the footage on my laptop, Belle is standingover my shoulder. “This is going to take hours,” she moans.“We don’t have time.”
“There’s motion detection,” I tell her. “All I have to do is clickthrough every instance of movement and—”
Onscreen, the door to the suite opens and Elise steps into thehallway. The timestamp shows it’s barely even six AM.
Belle inhales sharply. “She left hours ago. And what’s sheholding?”
“What? What is it?” Belle asks, leaning over my shoulder toget a better look. She smells like vanilla and roses.
“Those are my car keys.”
I switch over to the parking garage footage. I scroll to aroundthe same time on that footage, and sure enough, we see herwalk quickly across the parking garage, unlock my car, andhop inside. A minute later, she reverses jerkily out of the spaceand speeds out of the garage.
“Oh God, oh God. Oh my God!” Belle says, getting angriereach time. Then her face crumples and tears gather in her eyes.“Oh my God. She could be anywhere. She could be on the sideof the road in a ditch. She could be—”
“Perfectly fine,” I finish for her. “She could be safe. She couldbe just a dumb kid who went out for a joyride.”
Belle looks at me, and I can tell she wants to believe me, butit’s hard.
I understand. Elise isn’t even my blood, and I feel…something. Belle loves her so much that it’s hard not to feelprotective of her myself.
I close the laptop and reach for Belle’s hand. “Come on. Let’sgo.”
But she’s already sliding her hand into mine.
“Your car has a tracking device?” I ask, staring down at thephone in my hands and the tiny red dot flickering on thescreen.
He nods in the driver’s seat of the car we’re “borrowing” fromthe hotel’s general manager, who just about fell over himselfin his rush to fork over his keys to Nikolai. “It activates if I saythe car has been stolen. Now, we just have to follow it.”
“Easy enough, since it isn’t moving.” As soon as the words areout of my mouth, my stomach drops. “s**t—the dot isn’tmoving. What if she—”
He peeks over at me out of the corner of his eye. “Do youalways assume the worst is going to happen?”
“It’s habit. I mean, look at my life this last week.”
He says it with zero expectation that I might refuse him.Nikolai asks, Nikolai receives.
“Well,” I begin, “the man I slept with on a plane turned out tobe my company’s biggest client. Then he also turned out to besome kind of mafia don—”
I turn to him. “What?”
“It’s a Bratva,” he says. “Not a mafia.”
I roll my eyes. “Okay, whatever. Then my boss tried to assaultme and I lost my job. Is that enough reason to assume theworst?”
“I think you’re skipping some highlights.”
“Well, the airplane bathroom, for one. Then my office, theprivate plane we took here, the living room last night…”
“You’re disgusting,” I say, even as my face flushes.
I will never admit to him that those were highlights this lastweek. Because it doesn’t matter how earth-shatteringly goodthis man is in bed—my life has been chaos ever since hestepped into it.
I have to focus on Elise right now. She is my priority. She’salways my priority.
I look back down at the phone and curse. “f**k, that was theturn!”
Nikolai slams on the brakes, throwing us both forward in ourseats, and then swings the wheel hard to the left. The tiressqueal and the car groans, but Nikolai makes the turn. As soonas the tires are straightened out, he sits back in his seat as ifnothing happened.
I take a deep breath. “Are you trying to kill us?”
“Did you want me to get to your sister as fast as possible ornot?”
I know he’s right, so I just slouch down in my seat and stare atthe phone. As we get closer to the red dot, my stomach startsto twist into knots.
“If she’s hurt, I’ll never forgive myself,” I say softly.
I expect Nikolai to tell me to stop being such a worrywart, butinstead, he reaches over and wraps his hand around my thigh.It’s more comfort than any words could ever be.
Which in and of itself is far too scary to think about right now.
The road climbs into a steep incline, nothing but the skyvisible ahead of us. But as soon as we’re at the top, headingdownhill again, I look down and see the black spot ofNikolai’s car up ahead.
On the side of the road.
Halfway through a wooden fence.
“Drive, drive,” I gasp, already unbuckling my seatbelt. “Shecrashed. Oh, f**k. What are we going to—Should I callsomeone? What if she’s—What is the number for 911 inIceland?”
Nikolai parks and gets out of the car without another word. Iscramble out after him, my heart lodged in my throat.
Gruesome images flash through my head. Elise injured ordying or… worse. A kind of fear I’ve never experiencedbefore washes over me, and suddenly, I can’t bring myself totake another step.
If she’s—oh God, I can’t even bring myself to say the words.
I stop in the middle of the road, my shoes practically glued tothe pavement. I watch in horror as Nikolai approaches thedriver’s side door and then leans down to look through thewindow.
- Writer
