by Elodie Colt
I beeline for my car and slide inside. Irritated, I discard my jacket and yank my tie over my head, tossing both onto the passenger seat and simultaneously starting the engine. I speed off with screeching tires, leaving black marks on the tar.
She knew, my mind screams on repeat as I use the full 335 horsepower engine to slice past bricked buildings, run-down stores, and incompetent drivers.
She knew that Nick was her half-brother. She knew that Vincent had an affair with her mother. She knew that my adoptive father was her real father. She knew that she was my (and bile rises up my throat every time I try to say the word out loud) goddamn step-sister.
Fate is fucking me in the ass with a ten-inch steel dildo. It’s not enough that my ring landed in the hands of the woman I fell in love with. No, she has to be the full-blooded daughter of the one man I’d secretly wished to be my real father ever since the word Daddy bubbled from my baby lips.
Vincent almost passed out when it hit him that his daughter isn’t lost as he’d thought, but, in fact, working in his very own fucking gallery. Understandable. She’d been here for two weeks, sleeping under his roof, and he’d been totally clueless. Brooke will suffer a stroke when she finds out that she hired the product of her husband’s long-lasting affair to work for the company. Ella knew the dirty, little secret had the power to destroy the entire family, so she ran before the bomb blew off.
And self-destructive me is about to hunt her down. Again.
I pop open the first buttons of my collar, sweat trickling down my neck as I steer the wheel with one hand. I need to find her. If she thinks we’re over just because her daddy adopted the boy who accidentally became her lover slash future-husband, she’s sorely mistaken. Step-sister my ass. I’m going to hire an army of lawyers and raze every court to the ground to make our relationship legit.
I shoot up the driveway, throwing my BMW into park in front of Zoya and Holly’s house. Ella’s bike is nowhere in sight. Fuck.
I jump out of my BMW and pound up to the entrance, banging on the door and punching the bell for good measure. Heavy cursing and fluttering footsteps resound from the other side before someone answers.
“Are you fucking… Oh.” Zoya’s expression turns from angry to shocked in a heartbeat. “Nathan, what—”
“Is Ella here?”
Tendrils of panic weave through my stomach when her eyebrows turn downward. “Uh, no. I thought she was with you.”
“She left,” I snarl.
Not waiting for an invitation, I breeze past her. I flicker my gaze over the space—the vintage-decorated living room, the brittle wooden stairs leading to the upper level, the century-old kitchen—stupidly hoping that Ella might appear out of nowhere, but I can already feel the lack of her presence wilting my heart.
“What’s wrong?” Zoya asks, picking up on my agitation as she closes the door. “Did you two have a fight?”
“Something like that…” I run a jerky hand through my hair. “She doesn’t answer her phone. I need to sort things out with her.”
Zoya crosses her arms, munching on her chewing gum. “You should know Ella by now. She’s the type to run off sulking when she’s upset, ignoring all calls in the process.”
She’s not upset. She’s devastated, forlorn, and totally gutted.
“So, she hasn’t come home tonight?”
Her response is a head shake. “No. I would have heard her bike coming up the driveway.”
Don’t panic. Keep your shit together.
“I’ll call her,” she says. “Maybe she’ll pick up on me.”
I don’t have high hopes, but it’s worth a try. Zoya is her anchor. I’m still just a hook—I can catch her, but I tend to lose her. I’ve yet to become the person to ground her.
Zoya pulls her phone from the pocket of her ripped shorts. I drum my fingers on my elbow as she presses the device to her ear. Half a minute later, she ends the call with a frown.
“Voicemail.”
I expel a long sigh. “What about her apartment in Brighton Beach?”
“She hasn’t been there lately, as far as I know, because of Luka…” She tugs her phone back into her pocket. “If she drove there, then it would be just to grab some things. She wouldn’t leave her dragonflies unattended for more than twenty-four hours. How about you just tell me what happened?”
I rub two fingers over my lips, debating whether or not to fill Zoya in on our epic family disaster. In the end, I decide to just spill the beans. It’s not my tale to tell, but if Ella wants to throw a fit, I’m happy to let her slap me.
“Okay, uhm… There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to tell you right out.” Harrumphing, I scratch a spot on my temple. “Vincent Crawford is Ella’s father.”
Zoya’s expression doesn’t change as she cocks her hip, blinking up at me from two heads down.
“Not sure what kind of joke that is, but I’m missing the punchline.”
“No joke. Vincent is Ella’s real father. You know that your mother lived in the states some time ago. Vincent fell in love with her and knocked her up. When Marina found out he was married and had family, she went back to Russia. Years later, she learned that Vincent conducted that heist and sent him a letter, telling him she’s done with him and that she’s raising his daughter—a daughter he will never get to see. Ella found out by accident and took a hike.”
I deliver my speech swiftly, watching as Zoya’s face becomes paler by the second until she traipses into the kitchen to deflate in a chair, her gaze turning inward. Sullenly, I tag along, perching my hip against the kitchen table.
“That’s… that’s impossible,” she stutters.
I wish it was. “Why?”
Her eyes, wide in trepidation, travel up to mine as she throws her hands in the air. “Because it just is! The likelihood of Ella meeting her father here in the US, almost thirty years after she’s been born, your father, is just…”
“Zero point zero?” I help her along, smacking my lips. “Yep. I think there’s a better chance of getting struck by thunder twice in a row, but hey, life’s a bitch.”
She zones out, her gaze riveted on the floor. “Ella was always quite secretive about her real Dad. Until a few months ago, I had no idea we had different fathers. I was furious when she told me. She’d been keeping the truth under wraps for a year.” She shakes her head. “She never wanted to search for him because she knew, whoever the guy was, he broke Mom’s heart.”
Oh, yeah. Daddy dearest made heart breaking an accredited profession.
“Jesus fucking Christ…” She drags both hands down her face, leaving claw marks on her cheeks. “How did she find out?”
“She connected the dots before I could,” I say with a shrug, skipping the part with the ring for now. Time is of the essence. I need to find Ella before she does something stupid. “I think she came to me to set the record straight, but she never got the chance. When I woke up this morning, she was gone.” I send her a pleading look. “I need to talk to her. Right fucking now.”
She drops her hands onto the table and says in a leaden tone, “Don’t push her. Knowing my sister, she needs time to recharge and get her thoughts in order. She just found out her boyfriend is her brother, for God’s sake…”
I swallow down a snarky comment at the word boyfriend as if I were a ninth-grader who’s still indecisive about whether or not to shave off his pubic hair.
“I’m not her fucking brother,” I seethe, pushing away from the counter. “Vincent adopted me, remember?”
To my surprise, Zoya looks at me as if I’d gone mental. “Blood is thicker than water—”
“I told you I’m not—”
“—but you can drown in both,” she hisses. “Your relationship might be legit but still debatable to the public eye and awkwardly ambiguous.”
I expel a loaded sigh, wiping a hand over my sweaty chin as I pace the ugly kitchen tiles.
Zoya leans forward in her chair. “Just imagine introducing her to V
incent. Who will call him Daddy, I wonder?”
I wince but save my face quickly, giving her a flat stare. “After everything he did, I doubt he’ll ever get to hear that name again, not even from Nick.”
“Maybe…” she drawls, looking thoughtful. “Knowing Ella, she’d rather shoot herself in the foot than meet him in person. Apart from the fact that the ‘notorious art stealer’ doesn’t make for an exemplary father title, he betrayed our mother, just like yours. And you know as well as me that my sister isn’t the forgiving type.”
I stop mid-pace, slapping my hands on the table opposite her and drilling my eyes into hers. “Then I’ll force Daddy to his knees and make him grovel until his knees bleed. A million reasons are keeping Ella and me apart, but there’s one fucking reason to get her back.”
I insert a pause after my heated speech to take a breather, prompting Zoya to ask, “And what’s that?”
I lean in slowly, almost predatory, bending my upper body over the entire length of the table. Zoya recoils an inch, her eyes widening as if afraid of me snapping my teeth at her.
“My fierce, irrevocable, never-ending love for her.”
Zoya Benson—check.
Leaves about half a dozen other people to convince that I give zero fucks about the wicked Crawford family tree, and one of them bailed out on me again.
Seriously, I’m starting to think that playing hide-and-seek is Ella’s favorite pastime. Maybe she’s getting off on me chasing down her pretty ass. I should consider wiring her before this becomes a daily occurrence. Shoving a tracker into her sexy leather jacket or implanting a chip into her skin.
Or you just hire someone to do the job for you like you already did countless times before.
Stomping on the dusty ‘HI. I’M MAT’-mat, I jam the second key Zoya gave me into the lock and push the door open. No, I need to keep Wayde or James or whoever likes to get their hands dirty out of this. I’ve already ravaged Ella’s private life to the point she couldn’t even sneeze without someone recording it, and I refuse to cross that line again, not to my bride-to-be who—
Wait… what? Your relationship is still in baby shoes with a massive family disaster threatening to ruin it all, and you’re already claiming her as your future wife?
Irritated, I kick the door to Ella’s apartment shut behind me. Save for the traffic sounds in the distance, the place is silent. Ella isn’t here, and even if I hadn’t high hopes in the first place, a wave of disappointment washes over me.
I aimlessly roam the rooms, looking for anything that could give me a clue. Her scent has faded, clouded by dust, memories, and stifling emptiness. Judging from the dead palm tree in the corner, she hasn’t been here since she left to move in with her sister.
Daunted, I amble into the kitchen to peek through the blinds, secretly hoping to catch a glimpse of her bike or a mass of brown hair. No such luck. I check my phone—dozens of unread emails cram my inbox along with a string of ‘urgent!’ messages from Brooke, but none from the only person I want to send me a fucking sign that she’s still alive.
I tap the edge of my phone against my chin. Zoya said there was a possibility that Ella took a tour to a park, but I can hardly scour every park in Brooklyn.
Zoya told me not to push her, to give her time until she’s ready, but fuck, I can’t wait a second longer. Knowing Ella, she thinks I’m about to write her off because of that stupid family twist, killing our relationship before it even had a chance to bloom. She’s wrong. I don’t care which sperm created her. That bitch called fate threw every hurdle our way known to mankind. One more won’t make a difference.
“Where did you fly off to, dragonfly girl?” I mumble to myself, ungluing my phone from my face to log into the gallery’s camera feed.
After a few seconds of roaming the log, I find Ella bolting out the backdoor, panting, with a hand over her heart and on the verge of collapsing right there on the cobblestone. I go rigid, watching with a pained gaze as she’s trying to get her shit together and fight off her brutal panic attack.
“Girl, why didn’t you wake me, dammit…”
When she has finally regained control, she straightens and grips her hair in chunks. I can see the despair on her face—the pinched eyebrows, the quivering lips, the tears glistening on her cheeks. Her watery gaze snaps up, colliding straight with the camera lens, and she retracts a few steps until she’s out of sight. With a growl, I fly my thumbs over the keyboard, trying to find another camera that might have caught her, but she has vanished without a trace.
A tendril of wariness starts to slither inside me as I check more feeds from other angles, but it’s as if she went up in smoke—no sign of her on the sidewalks or the streets. Gone, just like that.
A sudden whir to my left makes me swing my head to the source, and I tug my phone back into my pocket to follow the sound coming from the living room. A bee? A hornet? Definitely something bigger than a fly gathering from the loud hum.
Straining my ears so as not to lose track of the strange buzz, I tip back my head. A designer lamp hangs on the ceiling, but it’s not the six bulbs attached to it that unlock my jaw, paralyzing me on the spot. No, it’s the insect whizzing in random circles.
A dragonfly.
Ella’s dragonfly, Crawly.
“Fuck me…” I mutter into the emptiness of the room.
Stunned, I fix my gaze on the green darner—that’s what Ella called the race with the green body and blue tail. With its translucent wings flapping faster than the eye can follow, it flutters around a bulb before it does a nose-dive, beelining for me… and landing straight on my shoulder.
Just like it had all those months ago.
My eyes almost cross as I zoom in on the tiny creature, not daring to twitch a muscle. Ella is the expert on dragonflies, but I have zero doubts that the insect wriggling its paper-thin legs over the wrinkles in my shirt is the same that appeared on the beach that day a long time ago.
And it’s a spitting image of Ella’s dragonfly tattoo.
“How is it possible you’re still alive?” I whisper, my breath stirring the tips of its wings, and I swear its black, bulbous eyes snap up to me, piercing me with a weird intensity I don’t understand.
It wants to tell you something. Something important. Something—
And just like that, it soars into the air and flaps away. I startle, taking off after it, though I have no clue why. Slightly panicked, I skitter into Ella’s bedroom where the insect had flown off to, but when I arrive there, there’s no sign of the animal.
I grab the door frame, skimming my gaze over every nook and corner. The dragonfly is gone. Nothing stirs the air, not even the flap of wings.
And the weirdest part? The windows are closed. Each one throughout the entire apartment. I know because I checked last time I was here with Vincent, which can only mean one thing, as ludicrous as it might sound…
The green darner was a sign after all.
It wanted to deliver a message, a warning about what I’ve been afraid of since my girl had vanished from every camera feed surrounding my gallery.
Ella is in danger.
22
Ella
Crack.
The sound grinds down my spine like a thousand pointy nails scraping over each vertebra.
Crack.
The taste of bile-soaked cotton balls explodes on my tongue, biting through the fog pounding at my temples and evoking nightmares that I hope to eradicate in the future when scientists have finally achieved a breakthrough in memory erasure.
Crack.
My headache shoots up to unbearable levels, and I suck in a ragged breath. But the motion is sluggish, unsatisfactory, awfully strenuous as if something is keeping the oxygen from filling my lungs. My diaphragm constricts, and I flinch out of impulse, which is when two things hit me at once.
A—I can’t breathe.
B—I can’t move.
My pulse gallops out of control, and I snap my eyes open. Everything blurs and t
wists and distorts, blending into a motion of colors. There’s only a sliver of air wheezing through my lips, far from the amount I need to keep from passing out, and my nostrils contract as I feebly pull in air through my nose.
“The disorientation will fade. Just calm down and breathe.”
The horribly familiar, appalling voice echoes around the space as if coming from everywhere at once, and my head wobbles on my neck before I finally find the right muscles to lift it. Seconds pass, and while I concentrate on the hard thuds of my heart, I become more and more aware of my body functions.
I blink, desperate to get my surroundings into focus. Finally, my vision sharpens. Something scrapes against my mouth, moving as I twitch my cheeks.
Shit, I’m gagged!
A piece of soft yet uncomfortable fabric is wrapped around my lips, knotted at the back of my head and covering the lower part of my face. My fingers move but my wrists don’t, and a glance down tells me that they are tied to the armrests of a chair.
Just like my feet and upper body.
My eyes widen in terror, my fearful gaze flickering over the space, but it only takes me a nanosecond to put the puzzle pieces together.
Because I know the person currently sitting opposite me, lounged out on a sofa with an apprehensive yet curious expression on his face as he continues to crack his knuckles.
“Lu…pha,” I choke out his name through the saliva-soaked piece muffling my voice.
His thin lips hint at an uncertain smile. “Hello, Elenka.”
God, how I loathe his voice. That rough, sharp accent ringing with a tone he thinks is warm and comforting, whereas it only hurts my auditory canal. Shock morphs into anger and then twists again into white-hot fury when a horrific realization hits me.
This is not a nightmare.
It is bitter-cold reality.
“I’m going to take the rag off, okay?” He pushes his gangling limbs up from the sofa. “And save yourself the screams. No one can hear you out here,” he adds in a remorseful tone, as if it pains him it has come this far.
