Page 186 of Nine Months to Love
Without saying a word, he leads me to the security room. The tech on duty pulls up the footage. I watch in silence as armored jeeps roll up to the manor. Men in tactical gear pour out. My guards engage. Gunfire erupts.
Then the basement door opens.
Mikayla steps out first. Then Olivia.
She’s not being dragged. She’s not struggling. She walks to the jeep on her own two feet. Mikayla climbs in beside her. The door closes. The jeeps tear off.
The whole thing takes less than three minutes.
I watch it again. And again. Looking for something I missed, some sign that she was coerced. But there’s nothing.
She left me.
“Where did they go?” I ask in a hoarse croak.
“We lost them about two miles out. They must have switched vehicles.”
“So we have nothing.”
“We’re working on it. Mikayla’s phone is still here. Olivia’s is gone, but it’s turned off. We can’t track it.”
I turn away from the screens as acid burns in my throat. “I need to see the basement.”
Taras follows me down the stairs. The door to Mikayla’s cell is wide open. It’s empty.
I walk inside and check under the mattress. Nothing. I check the drawers. Nothing.
Then I see it. On the floor, half-hidden under the bed frame. A small, black recording device.
I pick it up and press play.
My own voice fills the room. “That’s the only reason I want her back. I don’t care about her, but I do care about the baby in her belly. I care about my heir.”
The recording ends.
I stand there, staring at the device in my hand. That conversation—I remember it now. I was trying to manipulate Mikayla, to make her think I didn’t care about Olivia so she’d give up information on my mother.
But Olivia doesn’t know that. She must’ve heard this and thought I meant it.
“Fuck!” I hurl the device against the wall. It shatters into pieces.
Taras doesn’t say anything. He just watches me.
I storm out of the basement and go upstairs to our bedroom. Her clothes are still in the closet, her things on the nightstand. Everything exactly as we left it this morning.
I search high and low, here and there, until a second clue turns up: a journal, tucked under a pillow on the window seat.
Myfather’sjournal.
I freeze as my fingers brush the cracked leather cover. The journal’s smell hits first. It smells just like him. My throat tightens as I flip through pages. How many nights did I spend as a boy watching my father carve his handwriting into this book? Pen clenched between his nicotine-stained fingers, a late-night vodka at his side… The memory makes bile rise in my chest.
So do the words.
I should never have done what I did. It was not her that ended our marriage. It was me. She lost her child because of me. How can I ever expect her to forgive me for that?
I read it again. Then again.
No. No, that can’t be right. I saw what she did. I watched her betray him. I watched her choose Vasily over him.
