Page 138 of His Juliet

When I burst into that warehouse to find my father dead, my mother half-unconscious from torture.

Finding Juliet covered in blood on the bathroom floor, knowing I had caused her to feel that despair.

But in all those instances, I coulddosomething in response. Now, with Juliet gone, the memories I could never scrub from my brain merged inside me, feeding and fueling my monster.

“Where the fuck is she?!” My roar tore through the empty apartment.

I ran to the bedroom, desperately clinging to the delusion that she was just in the bathroom or hiding under the bed.

“Juliet!”

Silence.

I tore at my hair, scanning the room. The bed was made like she hadn’t slept in it at all, and lying open on top of the covers was a book I didn’t recognize.

A passage was underlined. It took me a moment to focus on the words.

O my love! My wife!

Death that has sucked the honey of thy breath

Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.

A sick feeling rose in my chest as I flipped the book closed to see the cover.

Romeo and Juliet.

66

ROMEO

I paced the meeting room.The walls were closing in on me.

Twenty-four fucking hours.

That’s how much time had passed since Juliet was taken. My soul withered as if I were a flower deprived of sunlight. Or the moon, deprived of my stellina.

Whoever had taken her had sabotaged our generators before cutting the power to the entire city block. Franco, aided by Sienna—who hadn’t believed he was a traitor—had been monitoring our security and was the first to realize something was wrong. But the Albanians had been too swift, taking Juliet down the fire escape before vanishing into thin air.

I couldn’t take this anymore—this waiting around and doing nothing while our enemies had my girl.

My Juliet, who was terrified of leaving the house.

My Juliet, who had already endured too fucking much in her life.

“We need to go to Albania,” I said for the tenth time.

Franco had identified a private plane leaving Teterboro Airport in New Jersey yesterday, headed to the capital city of Tirana.

“I have the jet on standby,” Matteo said, glancing over at where Sofiya and Clementine were curled up on the couch next to Noodle. “But we can’t go without confirmation. We don’t know if she was even on that plane.”

“I’m waiting to hear from our contacts on the ground,” Sienna repeated patiently. “It doesn’t make sense for them to take her to Albania. If they’re holding her for ransom, we should have heard something by now.”

I threw the copy ofRomeo and Julietagainst the wall. The underlined words on the page haunted me. My Juliet wasnotdead.

I couldn’t live in a world without her.

“Shit, shit, shit.” Franco clicked furiously on his keyboard, and I whirled to face him.

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