Page 129 of Promised to the Alpha Prince

I rubbed a hand over my face, stepping back. “I didn’t mean to suddenly make this sexual,” I muttered.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You can come in if you want.”

“But… Nikolai and Aurelie, they disappeared—”

“On a date, probably. He’s just going to be knotting her good and hard for a few hours,” said Johannes. “We don’t need to worry about it. We can just distract ourselves, maybe?”

I sighed. “Yeah, maybe.”

He stepped out of the doorway.

I stumbled inside.

He grabbed me, holding onto the back of my neck and looking directly into my eyes. “I think I could love you, Dmitri. You call to a part of me, an aching, needy part, and I know you know that.”

“I do know that,” I breathed. “I do. I want to soothe that ache for you.”

“Yeah,” he said, his gaze going cloudy. “Yeah, please, alpha.” He kissed me.

I clutched him, and I felt like I’d been drifting out at sea, and he was the dry land. I wanted to anchor myself in him somewhere, knot right into him as hard as I could.

aurelie

NIKOLAI MADE ME drive.

Well, first, he drove, and he did a bunch of evasive maneuvers to lose the paparazzi. They’d been camped out on the outskirts of Heirastein Castle, and they tried to follow us, but Nikolai lost them, all of them.

Then, we switched, and I drove. He sat in the front seat, on a tablet that he had on his lap. He told me that Corentin’s phone wasn’t trackable, that it seemed to have disappeared off the planet but the last time it had been seen it was at a nearby airport in Valhn. “Might have been turned off. Might have been crushed or something. They took him from there, I guess.”

I was worried about Corentin. “You think they’re hurting him?”

“I wouldn’t put it past them, but assuming they’re serious about the ransom, I doubt they’d damage him too much. They’d want you to give them the money after all.”

“Assuming they’re serious? Why would they ask for a ransom they don’t want?”

“I just can’t make it make sense yet,” said Nikolai.

“But you knew who it was right away,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll figure it out. Anyway, we can’t trace his phone, but that would have been too easy. I know of a place in Valhn, near that airport, where the Banninos might have taken him. They’ve held people captive there before. I think we should go and check it out.”

“Okay,” I said.

He put the address into the GPS on the car so that I would have the directions.

Then he started doing more digging on his tablet.

Our phones were beeping constantly. It was Dmitri and also Johannes, but Nikolai said to ignore them, and I wasn’t in any mood to deal with them at this point. I was too worried about Corentin.

Also, I didn’t know what might happen if I explained to Dmitri what was going on. I had a feeling he’d want to get in here and take charge, and I was trusting Nikolai with this. It seemed best to let Nikolai do what Nikolai did best.

So, I ignored all the texts. When they started calling, I ignored that, too.

“What are we going to do when we get there?” I said.

“I’m not much for making plans,” he said. “Plans require everything to go right, and something always goes wrong. It’s better to react in the moment, do what’s best given the situation. The situation is volatile, usually, anyway. Everything can shift in one moment, depending. Sometimes, you think you’ve got the upper hand and someone comes up behind you with a gun. Planning doesn’t work.”

“Okay,” I said softly. “So, we’re just going to go track down some mafiosos and wing it.”

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