Page 2 of Consort of the Crime Queen

The soft chime announces my arrival and I slide out, senses heightened. Too quiet. The hush shrouds the hallway as I pass all the shut doors with their impersonal numbers until I reach the one I want, pausing outside it with my heart lodged in my throat and my fingers clenched tight on my gun.

Just get it over with. I've faced far worse, after all.

I enter silently, and I know at once that she's not here. No one is here. The apartment has that unmistakably empty feeling of a place deserted. And I prove it to myself as I walk through. Aurora's clothes—the few that she brought with her from Elysium—are packed neatly into her suitcase, her toiletries along with them, left here as though in polite rejection of anything I ever provided her. She wants nothing that I gave her, except the money and the passports.

There's nothing else. No note. No explanation.

I got excited about a bouquet of flowers and a broken tablet, two unconnected things, no doubt. I let my imagination run wild over nothing.

I sink down onto the bed for a moment. "What the hell did you expect?" I ask myself, trying for the vicious, cold voice of Hades, the one that gets my people in order.

But all that comes out is a shaky whisper.

I reach out a hand to the suitcase, plunging my fingers into the silky clothes she left behind, as though I could pull her back through sheer will alone.

But after a moment, the heavy stillness begins to feel…wrong.

Yes. Something is very wrong. Because when I search through the suitcase, then through the rest of the apartment—nightstand, coffee table in the living room, the drawers of the small stand next to the door—I can't find her phone.

If she wanted to leave me behind for good, surely she would have left her phone as well. Even Aurora, naive as she is, must be aware of the usefulness of tracking devices on smartphones. She's heard me talking about them often enough, and the others in the Syndicate.

As for Aurora's, her phone was fully tracked and connected to my own, one that I bought specifically for this week. I pull it out and check her location.

If she's halfway to Bermuda, I'll destroy my phone and never attempt to contact her again. But if?—

There.

A pulsing red dot shows Aurora's phone, stationary in the building.

I bolt from the room and down the stairs, too impatient and worried now to wait for the elevator, back down to the foyer and that enormous bouquet of flowers. I look around the desk that they're sitting on, and then I see it—not her phone, but something that gives me just as much pause.

A hypodermic syringe. Used.

But she's not here, though she should be nearby, or her phone should. I take the staff exit into the back alley and it doesn't take me long to spot Aurora's phone tossed aside on the grimy pavement, screen cracked and dark.

I run back to the flowers, tearing them apart as I search for a clue. There's nothing. No name, no florist shop—but of course there won't be. I should have understood the moment I saw them, but I was distracted by my perceived rejection. I grab up the tablet from the ground, as smashed as Aurora's phone, but it does turn on when I try it—unsecured, even, as though whoever it was who sent someone for her wanted me to know what they'd done.

Wanted me to be as enraged and panicky as I feel right now.

Her signature is still half-formed, traced over a fake acknowledgment of receipt. I know it's fake because the rest of the tablet is entirely blank of any other information, not even connected to the internet.

Whoever took her has been waiting. Watching. Biding their time, snatching her at the time it would do most damage to me. And I was oblivious. Foolish. Weak.

Always so damned weak where she's concerned.

The rage surges higher, and I embrace it gladly as it turns from hot into the more familiar icy sharpness. It fuels me, forges my resolve into steel.

I knew there were risks. So did she. I thought the greater risk would be never allowing her the chance for freedom, but now I see how foolish I've been.

I failed her.

But I won't fail her again. No force on heaven or earth will stop me from getting her back and destroying anything—anyone—that tries to keep her from me.

I stare at the broken tablet in my clenched fist, imagining it's the neck of whoever dared lay a hand on what's mine. But of course, I already know who it was.

And I will hunt Nero down and end him like the rabid dog he is.

CHAPTER 2

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