Keeping his bride

Nicholas

IT’S EITHER LATE or early as fuck when loud banging on my bedroom door wakes me out of a dead sleep. My first instinct is that something happened to Lina, so I jump out of bed and rush to the door. When I open it, I expect to see her, fresh from a nightmare or some other problem she needs me to help her with. But instead, Renato is standing there. His eyes are wide with fear, and he looks like he’s barely holding it together as he tells me, “They’re gone. He took them.”

My brain is working on overdrive, trying to decipher what exactly he’s telling me. My hands grip his shoulders, and I shake him, forcing him to focus on me. “What? Who are you talking about, Renato? Who’s gone?” I demand in a rush, my questions running into each other.

“Aria and Selina are gone. Constantine has them,” he grits out.

I stare at him in disbelief, my hands slowly dropping from his shoulders. “No,” I tell him, shaking my head adamantly. This must be some type of living fucking nightmare that I can’t wake up from. “No, you’re wrong.” Hurrying down the hallway, I stop at Lina’s room. I burst through the door, expecting to see her sleeping, but her bed is empty, not even showing signs that it’s even been slept in tonight. “No,” I gasp around the large lump forming in my throat. “How did this even happen?” I would have known if there was an attack on the house. I would have been alerted by sirens and alarms.

“Aria thought it would be a good idea for them to sneak out in the middle of the night and go to a club.”

My hands curl into fists at my sides. “What the fuck?” I scream. Before I can even second-guess my actions, I drive my hand through the nearest wall. My knuckles scream in agony as chunks of drywall and paint chips fall to the floor when I withdraw my hand from the fist-sized hole.

“I can’t believe Aria did something so stupid,” Renato says, shaking his head. “We have to get them back. Who knows what the fuck is happening to them right now? They could be…” He doesn’t finish that sentence, and I don’t even want him to.

“Have you told anyone else yet?” I ask in a rush, cradling my cracked and bleeding knuckles.

“No. I went straight to you when they smashed Aria’s cell phone.”

I wince. We don’t even have a way of tracking them now. “We need to wake up my father and Aldo. Aldo will be able to track them through cameras in the city. The sooner we find out where they’re going, the better.”

“Constantine did say one thing before the call ended. He said, ‘we’re going on a little boat ride.'”

Fuck.

If Constantine disappears on a yacht somewhere out in the middle of the ocean with the girls, there’s no telling when we’ll ever see them again…if ever.

“Let’s go,” I say urgently, running down the hall with Renato quick on my heels.

I pound on my parents’ bedroom door. My dad answers it a few seconds later. His eyes are full of sleep, but his body is on high alert, muscles taut under his white tank. “What’s wrong, Nico?” he asks, closing the bedroom door behind him.

I know he doesn’t like to worry my mom unless he absolutely has to, and I’m all right with keeping her in the dark on this. I know she’ll do nothing but panic and worry. “Aria and Selina are gone,” I tell him. Then, with a grimace, I add, “Constantine Carbone took them.”

“How the fuck did this happen?” he asks. I explain everything that Renato told me, and my father’s eyes widen and then narrow. “Does Aldo know?” he asks urgently.

“Yes, I already called him. He’s working on it, trying to figure out where they’re going.”

“Let’s get to the control room. Tell me everything on the way,” my dad says in a rush.

We meet Renato in the backyard, and the three of us hurry to the control room in tense silence. There’s nothing to say; nothing to make this situation any better. My sister and girlfriend are gone, and they were taken by the worst person on the fucking planet. Who knows what horrific acts he’s committing on them right now.

I squeeze my eyes shut and stumble against the wall going down the stairs.

“You all right, man?” I hear Renato ask.

I nod slowly and then force my eyes open. I need to get my shit under control. Selina and Aria need me to be clear-headed. I can’t think about what could happen. I just need to find them and bring them home before anything does happen.

“I’m fine. Let’s go,” I tell him, urging him to keep going.

The room is buzzing with adrenaline, and the smell of coffee hits me like a brick wall as I look around at our IT guys diligently working on several computers. Aldo’s fingers are moving feverishly over a keyboard, and the three of us move behind him to stare at his monitors. He’s putting in some kind of code, and there’s camera footage jumping around from one angle to another on one of the wide screens.

“Aria only took one guard with them, and he was told to wait in the car a few blocks away,” Aldo informs us. “He had no idea what even happened until the cops showed up.” Then he adds, “I’m hacking into the city’s live traffic cameras. I’m trying to track them from the club to see which direction they were going.”

My father scrubs a hand down his face. “I can’t believe Aria would do this. How did she not realize the danger they were in?”

“She couldn’t have known Constantine would show up like that,” I tell my father. Aria isn’t reckless. She’s just very naive at times…which isn’t totally her fault. My parents sheltered her too much; not that I can really blame them after what happened with Selina, however. Fuck. I could go around in circles a million times trying to make sense of it all, but now isn’t the time for pointing fingers.

“How did he find them?” my father asks the million-dollar question that is on everyone’s mind.

Renato shrugs. “Coincidence?”Property belongs to Nôvel(D)r/ama.Org.

I shake my head. “No. More like convenience.”

“Are you sure Dr. Catalano checked her for tracking devices?” Aldo asks me, and I can’t say the thought hasn’t crossed my mind in the past thirty minutes.

“The doctor said she couldn’t find any,” I answer, but now I’m second-guessing Dr. Catalano’s opinion. If she just did a quick search on Selina’s body, she wouldn’t have found anything. I’m sure Constantine wouldn’t have made a tracker easy to find.

“We should have been more thorough, ran a scan on her,” my father says through clenched teeth.

“It would explain how he found her,” Aldo suggests. “That’s the most plausible reason at this point.”

“Fuck,” I mutter under my breath. I think back to the time when Selina told me about Constantine mysteriously finding her and murdering the family that was helping her. No wonder she was always trying to leave here. She knew deep down he would find her again even if she didn’t know the logical reasoning behind it. And I dismissed her fears like a fucking idiot. I made her feel safe when she truly wasn’t at any point. And look what happened. I failed her. I failed them both.

My father clasps a hand over my shoulder. “You didn’t fail anyone,” he says, and I realize I must have spoken the last part of my thoughts out loud. “We’re going to find them. We’re going to bring them back home where they belong,” he tells me.

I give him a nod. Even though his words make me feel minutely better, my stomach is still doing nervous flips. This is Carbone we’re talking about. He took Selina from me once before and was able to disappear for a fucking decade before I was able to find her again. I don’t think I could live without her, knowing she was out there in the world with him, being his plaything to torture and maim.

My hands clench into fists at my sides. No, I can’t think like that. There is no other option at this point but to find them. I won’t let her disappear again. She’s my girl. I won’t stop until I find her. And once I do, Constantine will pay for what he’s done to her with his life.