Page 37 of The Madman and his broken Princess
Eight hundred and one days without Amelia.
Eight hundred and one days of searching for her.
Nineteen thousand, two-hundred and twenty-four hours.
One million, one hundred fifty-three thousand, four hundred, and forty seconds.
Too long.
And every second more was almost unbearable.
“It’s her,” I said as I stared down at the photo on my phone screen. A contact in Outfit territory had found her.
Sasha, my driver for the day, nodded. “We’re almost there, boss. Soon you’ll have her back.”
Almost there. My heart clenched. Nothing could go wrong now. I peered out of the window at the small corner flower shop where Amelia worked. I couldn’t look inside from my vantagepoint, but the men I had hired had assured me she was in there. They had kept an eye on her since this morning.
“What are you going to do with her?” Sasha asked. My head whipped around, and I narrowed my eyes at him. Regret passed his face, and he ducked his head. “None of my business. I apologize.”
Niccolo had asked me the same question this morning when we’d found out our search was finally over. I hadn’t been able to give him an answer. Rage had blinded me, but now I felt a potent mix of anger and longing.
Amelia would return to the mansion with me. She would never get the chance to run. She would be mine forever.
My heart pounded in my chest when I left the car. Passersby stopped to gawk at me, then quickened their pace after a look into my eyes.
I smirked. Slowly, I approached the shop windows. I was almost scared.
What if the Amelia I saw today wasn’t the Amelia I remembered and desired? The one who filled my dreams and nightmares? What if she’d become unrecognizable? She had looked the same in the photo, only more grown up and even more beautiful, but what if her core had changed, the very thing that had made her her?
I peered through the shop window, and my breath stalled in my chest when I spotted her. She was dressed too casually, in jeans and a shirt, but it did nothing to reduce her beauty. Her hair was still the beautiful red I remembered, and her blue eyes made my heart clench. She smiled at the customer.
She was still my Amelia. My dove. The reason for every breath I took.
And she was mine.
18 years old
My smile felt stiff as I showed the woman the bouquet my boss had created, with the additional flowers she’d requested. She was my last customer of the day. It was already ten minutes past six, and the store usually closed at six sharp, but she had come in a minute before closing time. She had started browsing the array of flowers on display, picking several she wanted added to the original bouquet, which wasn’t easy since it had been intricately bound, and I usually only did smaller arrangements.
I was desperate to get home so I could relieve Flavia of watching Luciano. She had the night shift in the bar she worked in, so I had watch duty. We both worked long hours so we could afford the place we rented in Minneapolis. We had been in town for eight months, the longest we had stayed anywhere in the past twenty-six months. This place almost started to feel like a real home, as if we might be able to put down roots here. Sometimes I worried we shouldn’t even think about making any place our longtime home, but both Flavia and I couldn’t move anymore. We were exhausted from the constant running, plus it ate up toomuch of our hard-earned money. We both hoped the Camorra couldn’t ever reach us here. That Nestore wouldn’t find me.
My heart clenched thinking about him like it did every time he crossed my mind, which happened daily, but I still knew it was the right decision. My panic attacks had stopped despite our life on the run.
I dreamed about him every night. Sometimes those dreams were visions of a happy future we would never get, and sometimes they were nightmares filled with Nestore’s rage and images from the past.
Sometimes I dreamed of finishing school, of opening my own floral store, of a bright future without fear of being caught. On occasion, I had searched the net and the darknet for information about Nestore, hoping to find something that would give me hope. But last time I had checked, six months ago, Nestore had fought in a cage in Las Vegas and brutally killed his opponent. His eyes had been full of bloodlust, rage, and madness. He’d terrified me.
After that, I had stopped looking. Nestore wasn’t on a path into the light. He had gone further into the dark.
Because you left.
My belly turned with acute guilt, but I shoved it back. “Are you listening to a word I just said?” the woman seethed, eyes narrowed in reproach.
“I’m sorry. It’s been a long day,” I said with an apologetic smile.
She tossed her blond hair back. “That’s hardly my problem.”
The bell over the entrance rang as the door opened. I must have forgotten to turn the sign in the window that said we were closed. “I’m sorry—”
