Saint stood in front of the glass wall of his penthouse, overlooking the streets of Chicago, staring intently at the pale grey moon adding its own light to the quiet city below. His hands stayed tucked into his silky pants, a black t-shirt stretched across his chest, his jaw locked as he ruffled his hair with his fingers before turning back to the guards now standing in front of him, heads bowed.
"Your excuse is she deceived you." Saint repeated, cracking his neck with a single turn. He had left Aurora and Alyssa under their care, and not even seven minutes after he’d left their side, he got a call saying Aurora was nowhere to be found. Seven minutes. He had counted them since, replaying every second like it might explain how she’d slipped through a house full of armed men.
Milo had called to let him know their underground warehouse security had been breached an hour earlier, from the outside, but using the same code only a handful of people within the penthouse ever used. For hours he had been trying to trace it, but kept getting blocked. The moment Saint heard, he got into his car immediately, not before warning the guards not to let Alyssa or Aurora out of their sight, a warning that had clearly meant nothing by the time he returned.
The moment he reached the warehouse, Milo asked, tapping furiously at the keyboard, beads of sweat trailing down his forehead toward his cheek and bare chest, unaware Saint was already behind him. The room smelled of burnt coffee and overheated hardware, three monitors casting pale light across Milo’s face as lines of code scrolled faster than a human eye should be able to track.
"What went wrong with the security code?" Saint asked from behind. Milo spun around and pulled a gun from under the table, pressing it against Saint’s forehead.
"What the fuck, man?" he snapped, dropping the gun onto the table while Saint moved to the couch beside the bar, gulping down half a bottle of liquor before slumping into the seat.
"Someone breached the security and released our location to the outside world. I’m trying to break the code they sent," Milo revealed, jotting something down on a notebook before striding toward Saint and handing him both the laptop and the notebook.
"20_5_12_18_5_8_15_7," Saint read aloud, gulping down another shot of champagne.
"Not a phone number. Letters." Saint muttered. "Get me a pen."
"Someone’s sending a message," Milo added, tossing the pen at him.
Saint spent the next five minutes arranging the numbers into letters, the rest of the room falling away until it was just him, the pen, and the slow certainty building in his chest. Finally, he got it. He threw the pen back at Milo, chuckling as he muttered a low, vibrating name. "Edmund Hawthorne."
"Let her go," Milo whispered, shaking his head. "That’s it. My brain just shut down for a second, that’s why I didn’t catch it," he defended, earning a low, rasping laugh from Saint.
"Always got an excuse for being dumb." Saint laughed, gulping down another drink as Milo turned back toward the laptop. A new ding sounded.
"Another message just came in. I don’t think it’s from Edmund anymore. This one’s coming from a different signal, heavily encrypted." Milo stammered, handing the laptop to Saint.
"Another message just popped up," Saint added, his eyes scanning the screen as red dots spread across it, different messages arriving from different signals, each one blinking like a warning he didn’t have time to decode.
"We’ve got a big problem," Milo whispered, dragging a hand through his hair.
Just as Saint was still trying to piece everything together, his phone buzzed. A message from his security guard: Aurora was nowhere to be found, but mall security footage showed her entering a car minutes after he’d left.
His grip tightened around the phone, his eyes going completely dark with rage as he drained the rest of the champagne bottle that had already been open when he arrived. Beneath the rage sat something he refused to name, something colder and older than anger, the same feeling he’d carried since he was ten years old and learned exactly how fast a person could disappear. Milo caught the shift in his face and said nothing, only stared, brow furrowed.
"I need to go. Don’t tell anyone about this," he warned, rising from the couch and striding toward the door with long, predatory steps.
The moment he reached his penthouse, Alyssa sat curled against her teddy bear, sniffing its scent, while the guards lowered their heads, fidgeting, eyes refusing to meet his.
"Boss." The head guard stepped forward slightly, eyes still fixed on the floor.
Saint walked closer to Alyssa and pulled her onto his lap. She wrapped her arms around his neck, sniffling.
"She left me," Alyssa cried, tears trailing down her cheeks.
"I’ll bring her back, Alyssa. Go upstairs to your room and let Nina talk you through it while Uncle fixes things down here," Saint assured her, freezing for a moment, never expecting her to be this vulnerable over someone she’d just met, someone who had been a stranger in his house not even up to a week.
"Promise me." Alyssa held out her pinky finger, her bubbly face turned up at him, waiting for him to link his own finger with hers.
Saint smiled and wrapped his finger around her tiny one. "I promise to bring her back before you wake up. Now go find Nina while I take care of this."
She jumped off his lap, teddy bear still clutched to her chest, while the nanny gathered the few things she’d managed to grab before they left the mall.
"What do you have to say, Adrian?" Saint asked, moving toward the balcony with his guards trailing behind, the city stretching out beneath them, indifferent to the chaos unraveling inside his chest.
"I believe she might still be nearby. Maybe at a friend’s place, someone close," Adrian rambled, stepping back immediately before Saint could snap at him.
Saint turned around, sweat forming on his forehead. "Tell Dax to send you Jules’s location."
"Boss, Dax refused to be disturbed."
"You got a better idea, Adrian?" Saint asked, brow arched, patience already worn down to nothing.
Aurora remained frozen on the spot, goosebumps rising across her skin, her blood running cold. Her hands shook at her sides, and she nearly lost her balance, one thought looping over and over, that Jules needed her and she was standing here uselessly instead of moving.
She stayed frozen, tears blurring her vision, she pressed the call button to her ear, waiting for Jules to say something, anything, even her name. Instead, a velvety baritone voice echoed in her ear, calm in a way that made everything in her go still.
"Come home, Wife."