“God damn it, Anastasia!” Luke hisses angrily through my earpiece. “What part about ‘stay where you fucking are’ don’t you understand?”

The gates in front of me groan open, but I don’t make any moves to drive forward. I sit with my eyes darting back and forth, straining my ears through the earpiece for any indication that the distraction has worked.

“Daddy?” I whisper.

“I’ve got eyes on him,” Woods replies. “They haven’t seen him yet, but they’re getting closer.” There’s a faint clicking noise that sounds like the hammer being pulled back on a gun. “I’ve got the guy on your right, Ray. You go left.”

I take a deep breath, watching several shadowy figures emerge from the house and start moving toward me. My heart is thundering in my chest, and every inch of my skin is covered in terrified goosebumps.

“Wait,” Woods whispers. “They’re turning around. They’re heading back toward the gate.”

“My guy too,” Harper says. “He got a radio call, they’re all headed towards Mrs. Grey.”

Thank god.

Two of the figures coming up the drive step into the wash of light from my headlights, and a different kind of fear grips my chest. My hands are trembling, so I pull them from the steering wheel and tuck them beneath my legs, doing my best to turn a fully confident front on the man who approaches my open window.

“Good evening, Mrs. Grey,” he sneers, and the passenger door opens. A hand reaches across the empty space and yanks me out of the drivers seat. The pressure puts too much stress on my shoulder and I let out a pain filled whine as I leave my seat. My legs get tangled between the seat and the man who quickly slides into the car to replace me, knocking my knees together hard enough that they still sting when I’m finally set upright in a stranger’s lap in the passenger’s seat.

“They’ve got her,” Smith says.

“Not for fucking long,” Luke replies, and the way he says it sounds almost like a personal slight. I can hear him moving quickly through the property. Some kind of foliage rustles around him, there’s a crunch of gravel beneath his feet.

“Sawyer, you’ve got company,” Wyatt warns him, but Luke’s response is almost gleeful. As the van starts to pull forward through the gate, I listen to the scuffle he has with whoever caught him. There aren’t any gunshots or any calls for help. The only thing I hear are muffled sounds of struggle, until Luke finally whispers, “I’m at the house.”

“Annie, listen to me,” my dad says urgently. “We are coming for you, but you are going to need to buy us a little time. Do not struggle, do every single thing they tell you to do. Just keep them talking, okay?”

I can’t answer, so I take another deep breath and let it out in a long, loud sigh that I hope he knows means I heard him. I don’t get any confirmation, only a volley of hushed orders and quiet grunting.

The van pulls into an empty garage and the rumble of the door as it closes behind us sounds more ominous than I’m prepared for. It makes every part of me tremble. I’m keenly aware that they’re going to try to use me against Christian, and everything that implies makes my heart hammer against my ribcage.

They can’t find out I’m pregnant.

I press my eyes closed as tightly as I can, fight the instinct to cradle my stomach, and remind myself that they’re going to bring me to him. Once I have him, my team will get us out. I just need to have a clear head and keep my courage until then.

“She’s inside,” Woods says. “Let’s move.”

“I’m already in the house,” Luke says, though he says it so softly, it’s almost impossible to distinguish the words.

The door that leads from the garage into the house opens, and a man hurries through it. He looks at the van with a giddy kind of excitement that looks too childish for the menacing atmosphere around him. When I’m pulled from the car and he gets his first real look at me, that excitement transforms into unbridled joy.

He looks up, holding his hands together as if in prayer, and whispers, “Thank you.”

Someone behind me calls something in Arabic, which the man in front of me responds to. I glance between them, trying to understand what was said, but Harper answers for me.

“They’re searching the van. They’re trying to figure out if she’s alone.”

There are more foreign words exchanged which Harper tells us is a consensus that I came on my own, and an order to sweep the van for any tracking or listening devices. The entire time she whispers in my ear, I keep my face blank. Every ounce of my control goes into keeping myself from reacting to the sounds in my earpiece so that it won’t be discovered. Especially when rough hands start searching my body for a wire. 

Thank god military technology isn’t that clumsy anymore.

The man who seems to be the one giving orders begins stalking toward me, and I close my eyes. Searching deep inside for strength.

His hand reaches up and cups my face, so I open my eyes and look at him. The shit eating grin on his face widens further.

“It really is you,” he says, the British accent in his voice telling me exactly who I’m dealing with. Nigel Dalton. “Could you really be this fucking stupid?”

“Or this fucking serious,” I say back, surprised by the even tone in my voice. On the inside, I can already feel adrenaline moving through my veins. “Where is my husband?”

“Hm, maybe I was wrong, Mrs. Grey. Maybe you’re exactly the person I need.”

He smirks at me, then pushes my face away with enough force that I nearly topple over. Hands grab me from behind, keeping me upright, and then hold me so there’s no way I could escape their grasp.

When Nigel turns around and re-enters the house, I feel a shove against my back that forces me to follow after him. The house is dark, except for a single ray of light at the end of the hallway that sends obscure and frightening shadows looming over me while the threat of danger creeps nearer. There are muffled sounds that are hard to distinguish coming from somewhere in the house, and as we approach that light, they become clearer. I hear a deadened blow followed by a pain filled grunt that I can immediately recognize as Christian’s.

A hand covers my mouth before I’m able to scream. I thrash violently against the hands holding me in place, not feeling any pain from their restraints and using that numbness to fight harder. I’m single minded in my need to get to Christian, but the moment I’m able to slip through one set of hands, three more are on me and I’m wrestled to the ground and gagged.

“Annie, are you okay?” my father’s worried voice demands in my ear. I fight against the man restraining me, knocking my elbows against the hardwood floor, and whimper in pain. “Annie?!”

“I’ve got eyes on her,” Luke says, so deathly quiet it sends a chill up my spine. “She’s got six guys with her, all armed.”

“Do not pursue alone!” my father hisses between panting breaths that tell me he’s moving very quickly, but Luke’s threatening response sounds so disconnected from himself that I’m not even sure he’s aware he spoke out loud.

“Get your fucking hands off of her.”

“Luke, that is an order! Stand down!” 

My head is being held tightly against the unyielding floor, but my eyes dance around to every corner of the room they can find, looking for Luke’s approach. No one seems to move though, so he must still be hiding. Waiting. I let my body go limp, and Nigel lets out a taunting laugh before he turns away, instructing his men to keep me there.

He rounds the corner and says something again in Arabic. A few seconds later, another man joins us from the room where Nigel is now and when I see his blood covered hands, I can’t stop the impulse to fight against the man holding me again. We struggle for several seconds until I hear Nigel speak, and I go still again. 

“Had enough?” he asks. There’s a spitting sound, and the creek of a wood chair before I hear Christian’s strained, but arrogant response.

“Are you kidding? I used to get off on this shit.”

Nigel laughs. “You’re very brave, I’ll give you that.”

“What do you know about brave? You’re a fucking coward. I can see it in your eyes. You’re terrified that your entire pathetic life’s work is about to be completely unravelled by a better man. You think you’re in control here, but make no mistake, at the end of this, you are going to lose everything. And I am going to take it from you.”

“Do you know what I really think, Grey?” Nigel asks. Christian doesn’t respond, but he continues anyway. “I think you’re going to pick up the phone, call Ms. Bailey, and tell her to break your energy technology apart bit by bit.”

“That’s never going to happen. I don’t give a fuck what you do to me.”

“To you, maybe. What about your wife?”

I can’t see him. I’m not even in the same room as him. But I can feel the change in the air the moment those words cross Nigel’s lips.

“Careful. That’s a line you really don’t want to cross. I’m going to ruin you, but you won’t walk out of here if I even hear you mention her again.”

“Well then, you’re not going to like what comes next very much. Not unless you pick up the phone and call Ms. Bailey.”

“Harper and I have the north entrance. Smith, Wyatt, are you ready for entry?” My dad’s voice and the responses from my team in my earpiece nearly drown out Christian’s response. 

“Bullshit.”

“Excuse me?”

“You don’t have her. Ros wouldn’t lie to me.”

“You’re sure about that?”

 “Unequivocally. I know what and who I have around her. I know you don’t have her.”

“I mean, it’s not like your confidence isn’t earned, Grey. I’ve watched others fail over and over again… but I would hope by now you’ve realized that I’m not like the others. And I’m not fucking around. Pick up the phone.”

“Go to hell.”

“There’s a 2nd story and an open landing over this room.” Luke whispers. “I can see at least one guy up there and he’s packing. Someone’s gotta get up there or he’ll pick us off like fish in a barrel.”

“I’m headed that way,” My dad replies.

“You really going to make me do this, Grey? You really wanna go this far and put the woman you love through what I’m gonna do to her?”

“You’ll never touch her. My people would die first. And if they do, you’ll still have to get through Sawyer, and you’ll still have to get through her dad. I know neither one of them will let her out of their sight while I’m gone.”

He sighs. “Alright, but remember I gave you the chance to stop this…”

 The floor creaks with heavy footsteps, then Nigel’s voice calls out into the hallway in Arabic once again. The body holding me down disappears and suddenly I’m wrenched up off the floor. The gag that had been held in my mouth falls forgotten to the ground as they drag me into the room and toss me, hard, onto the floor at Nigel’s feet. I feel a shock of panic for my babies, and it’s made worse when he pushes me roughly with his foot and I roll so that Christian can see my face.

His is a disaster. He’s bleeding from his nose, his lip, and nasty cut on his left cheek. There are different levels of bruising all around his face, the newest ones bright red, others a deep purple, and some that have already started to fade to a greenish-yellow. It adds dimensions to his face that shouldn’t be there, and it makes the anguish I see when his gray eyes meet mine seem almost monstrous.

“Ana?” he breathes in horror.

“I’m okay,” I answer back. Nigel’s hand twists in my hair and yanks me up off the ground, making me shriek with pain. Then he pulls my face right up to his lips.

“Let’s not make promises you can’t keep. Okay, sweetheart?”

“Let her go!” Christian commands. Nigel smiles at him.

“I’m sorry, Grey. You want this to stop, you’re going to have to call Ms. Bailey..”

He reaches for a knife sitting on the table next to him and brings it to my skin. Christian starts to thrash violently against his restraints, but I go perfectly still. 

Keep him talking. Protect your children.

“Wait!” The knife pauses only a breath away from the skin on my throat, while Christian continues to struggle uselessly. The hand Nigel has in my hair tightens. 

“That’s a useless word, beautiful. You’re not in Seattle anymore. You don’t have any power here.”

A high pitched noise sounds from somewhere off to my right, and Nigel’s hands release me. He falls to the ground, clutching his arm, and when I see the blood start to seep through his fingers, the room devolves into chaos. Several shouts fill the room and guns are drawn, pointing in every direction. There’s a crash on the other side of the room, and every barrel turns toward it, which is when Luke comes through an archway opposite from the entrance to the hall and dives at the man closest to him.

They roll across the floor, but the gun that turns in Luke’s direction drops when the man holding it is shot in the shoulder from somewhere on the 2nd floor. The man who was holding me down in the hall waves for someone to go investigate, but as they start to move, the glass on the windows of the back wall shatter apart into a million pieces and Wyatt and Smith come into the room with weapons drawn.

I move to Christian. He leans over to cover as much of my body with his as he can while I unfasten his right wrist from the arm of the chair he’s in. Once it’s free, his adept fingers are faster at untying the last knots and the moment he’s released himself, he grabs me and pulls me behind a sofa. His body covers mine, his hands gently hold my head to the ground, and bullets fly over the top of us.

“Where’s Calliope?” he whispers.

“They don’t have her, we came here. She’s safe.”

“Fuck.” He lets out a sigh of true relief that’s washed out by the implied threat in the very next words out of his mouth. “Stay down, and do not move. Do you understand me?”

“What?”

“Stay down, Anastasia.” He pushes himself up from the floor and launches himself over the couch. I scream for him to come back, but the sound is lost in the pandemonium around us. Crawling on my elbows, I move to the very end of the couch and peer around it. The room looks like a scene from The Avengers, but in the worst way possible. The danger all around me is so incredibly real, and it’s everywhere. Luke is locked in a fight with someone who is much bigger than he is. Wyatt and Smith wrestle with another guy who is trying to get a clean shot up at the 2nd floor balcony, and when I look up at his intended target, I see my dad fighting with a man who is trying to dump Harper over the railing. In the struggle, his gun falls to the floor with a sickening thud, just as Nigel scrambles up off the floor and tries to bolt from the room.

Christian slams him down on the ground.

It’s hard to know where to keep my attention, since every man I love is locked in a life and death battle. The glint of the knife Nigel dropped catches my attention just as it’s about to be brought down into Evan’s back, but Wyatt is there and the two of them manage to gain control of the weapon. Smith has to fire again, hitting his assailant in the thigh and incapacitating him. My dad has gotten Harper out of her precarious position, but the man the two of them are fighting seems to be better at hand to hand than either of them are. Luke tears around the room like the Tasmanian Devil, unleashing violence on whoever gets in his path. Christian attacks Nigel like a bloodthirsty wolverine.

Eventually, Harper and my father gain the upper hand and manage to subdue the man they’re fighting. Luke brings the last man left to resist us to his knees with a gun pointed at the back of his head, and everything goes still except for Christian.

“Mr. Grey,” Woods says as he and Wyatt pull him off of Nigel. Christian doesn’t stop. He fights their restraints just as hard as he intends to fight the man who put his hands on me until Luke manages to break through his bloodlust with one single word.

“Ana.”

Christian stops and looks back at me, finding me kneeling at the end of the couch and trembling. His eyes meet mine and with each second they stay locked there, his breathing becomes more regular, his body relaxes, and his face softens. Evan and Wyatt release him and he starts towards me. But behind him, I see Nigel sit up and weakly pick his gun up from the floor, and point it at his back.

“Fuck you, Grey…”

“Christian!” I scream.

The gunshot rings through the otherwise silent room at exactly the same time that Luke and I begin to move. Luke leaps through the air and slams into Christian, both of them falling to the floor. He hits him hard enough that Christian lets out a harsh grunt of pain before he scrambles to his knees and looks back at the man who fired. But the rage that brews inside of him is quenched by my father’s horrified scream.

“Annie, no!”

Christian rounds on me at the same time I look down at the blood quickly soaking the front of my shirt. The bullet hit me in the chest, right below my right collarbone, but I can’t feel it. I can’t feel anything. Everything around me seems to slow down. My father leaps down the last few stairs and starts to sprint for me. Luke launches himself off the ground. There’s another gunshot, and the other members of my team start shouting at one another and moving around the room. The color drains from Christian’s face and his expression morphs with anguish.

“NO!”

I still don’t feel it. Not until I try to take a breath and the air that moves through my lungs suddenly has me drowning in fire. I collapse just as Christian gets his arms around me.

“No, no, no, no, no!” he insists, again and again, his eyes moving over me in disbelief as he slowly lowers me to the ground. A weird convulsion moves through me, making my body jerk unnaturally, and it seems to break Christian’s sanity. He reaches for the weak part of my collar and yanks against it, shredding my shirt down the middle and exposing my wound.  Both Luke and my father fall to their knees at my side in the next second.

“Get out of the way, Christian,” my dad says, pushing his hands aside so he can press his own against the hole in my chest. I start to choke on the fire blazing in my lungs and my dad’s eyes move to Luke.

“Exit wound?”

Luke carefully pushes me up onto my side and glances over my back. When he speaks, he sounds terrified. “Yeah, it’s sucking air.”

“Fuck,” my dad hisses. Christian looks between them with alarm.

“What does that mean?”

“She’s not getting enough air,” Luke says. “She’s going to suffocate.” My father looks up at the rest of my team.

“Get me something to seal it!”

“I’ve got it,” Luke says. He shrugs his backpack off and tears it open. He pulls out something black, but whatever it is, he tosses it aside and instead takes the clear cellophane wrapper it was encased in and presses it to my skin. “Grey, there’s duct tape in there. Give it to me.” 

Christian’s hands dive into Luke’s bag and he pulls out a roll of duct tape. With his teeth, he quickly tears four short strips off that Luke uses to completely seal the plastic wrap to my skin. I whimper while he works, but the pain boiling inside my chest isn’t enough to keep me from hearing the torment in the angry words he spits at me through his impending tears.  “You’re so fucking stupid, Ana. Why would you do that? Why the fuck would you do that?!”

I try to tell him I’m sorry, I try to explain that it hadn’t been a decision—that Christian was in danger and I reacted on impulse. But when I open my mouth, the only sound that comes out is a ghostly moan.

“Don’t try to talk, Annie,” my dad says. “Be still. I need you to stay calm, because the more you panic, the faster your heart is going to beat, and the more blood you’re going to lose. I need you to just breathe. Okay, sweetie? Just breathe for me. Breathe for your babies.”

I take a breath, but the fire makes me wheeze. My father’s eyes shoot up to my husband.

“Christian, keep her focused. Keep her calm.”

I feel his hands cup my face, and then the only thing I can see are his eyes. They’re swimming with tears, but there’s a fierce kind of determination burning like the flames in my chest behind them.

“Breathe, baby. I need you to keep breathing for me.”

It’s painful, but I manage to breathe in and out every time he tells me to as long as his eyes stay connected to mine. I’m starting to fully realize what’s happened to me, and as my mind races to my babies, I want to panic. It’s not even a want, it’s a natural, biological reaction that I put everything into fighting because that’s the only way I can protect them. It feels like trying to stop falling after you’ve jumped out of a plane, but despite the impossibility, I find a way to do it. Because it’s the only way I can save my babies, and I have to fight with everything I have for the man holding on to me. 

“Breathe, baby…” He pleads again. 

I do. In and out. In and out. In and out. 

Each and every of those breaths feels like swallowing a hot fire poker. 

Once Luke has the wound bound tightly in plastic, it becomes a little easier to breathe, but everything around me starts to drift away. I can see my father, Luke, and Christian, but it’s like I’m looking at them in a dream. The pain radiating in my bones starts to fade, my vision goes black around the edges, and the fire in my chest turns to ice. It’s like the chaotically beating chambers of my heart freeze the blood pumping through them, until my whole body goes cold and I begin to shiver. There’s a faint taste of blood creeping into my mouth.

No. Please, no…

“Ana, stay with me,” Christian says, commanding rather than pleading. “You have to keep breathing, baby. Just keep breathing.”

“We’ve gotta get her out of here,” my dad says. “Get her back to the plane.” He nods to Christian, who then scoops me up to his arms. He moves so quickly through the house to the garage that it makes me nauseous. Everything around me begins to spin, the same way it does when I’ve had too much tequila. Only this time, I’m terrified to let myself succumb to the blackness that beckons me toward peace.

“Hang on, Ana,” Luke begs while he helps Christian get me into the van. They lay me on the floor between the seats, and Christian straddles my waist so he can keep pressure on my chest. His eyes move wildly back and forth as the thudding beneath his hands begins to grow weaker.

“Don’t you dare, Anastasia,” he warns me, tears finally breaking and rolling down his cheeks. He pushes harder against my chest. “You are not allowed to leave me, do you understand? You are not allowed to leave Calliope. Don’t you fucking dare!”

Smith takes the wheel and hits the gas so hard that the tires squeal and smoke beneath us. We fly in reverse down the driveway, and the blackness presses down on me harder, becoming more and more difficult to resist with each passing second. Wyatt produces a medical kit from somewhere in the van that mercifully has a transfusion line inside. He and Luke help get the needle in my father’s arm while Christian holds pressure on my wound. The cold starts to feel more persistent and my mind moves again to my babies.

“Christian…” I whisper weakly. He shakes his head.

“No, stop. No good-byes, you just need to hold on. Just keep breathing…”

“She’s going under,” my dad’s voice echoes in the distance. “Luke change places with Christian and start chest compressions…”

There’s a shift, and then I succumb to unconsciousness. The last words I hear are Christian’s desperate plea.

“Please, hold on…”

Next Chapter

“Alright, is everyone on?” Taylor asks, placing his phone on the table between him, Luke, my father, Elliot, and Carrick. Ros and I both hover nervously behind them.

“We’re here,” Smith answers. Taylor turns to Luke and nods.

“I got into the city traffic cameras. There’s one at the intersection down here that caught an unmarked van leaving the parking garage at 2:41 AM, so I used that time stamp to follow them down the highway to the airport. They had a private plane waiting for them, and I couldn’t get the security footage from the airport, but I did manage to get the flight logs. No manifest, but there was a destination. Riyadh.”

My dad’s brow creases with surprise. “Saudi Arabia?”

The words trigger a memory that plays through my mind like a film reel. A conversation between Carmen and Christian the night he took me to that sex club in New York.

Don’t you realize what will happen if you pull this off? Eliminating the need for combustible fuel will eliminate the need for corporations who make that their business. The Saudis, Exxon, BP, Halliburton… You prepared to take them on too?”

The echo of Carmen’s voice fits our current situation like a puzzle piece, completing the picture of a nightmare I should have been prepared for. The warnings were there, I just stopped listening. I let my guard down, I stopped searching, and now…

The nervous energy I felt before suddenly becomes a little more tangible. A black thorn of fear coiling around my heart, it’s poison seeping dangerously into my thoughts.

“Did you forget about me, Ana?” Lincoln’s voice echos in the back of my thoughts, nearly drowning out what Luke says next. 

“I still know some guys in that area. I put out an APB for the flight and got a license plate for the car that met them at the airport. That eventually led to an address, and a name. Ahmad Hassan, the co-founder of HD Oil. The largest private oil company in the world.”

“Co-founder?”

“He’s got a partner. Nigel Dalton, who seems to be a real piece of work from everything I was able to find. We’re talking cartoon levels of villainy here. The man is personally responsible for the near eradication of three different marine species in the Arabian Gulf because of unsafe pollution from his oil rigs. He was being investigated over it, the investigator ended up dead.”

“He wouldn’t happen to be British, would he?” I ask.

“Yeah, he’s an expat.”

“He’s the one who called,” Ros says. “He’s the one who asked me to dismantle Endurance.”

Luke nods. “Then we’re on the right track.”

“So, what now?” Elliot asks. “Do we call the FBI back and tell them all of that?”

“No, that’ll take hours, maybe days, and I don’t think we’ve got that kind of time,” Luke says. “Ana’s got a plane and I know a guy still stationed in Kuwait who can get us over the border. We get into town, lay low until it’s dark, get inside the house, and bring Grey out.”

My father blinks at him. “That’s your plan? Some guy you know will get you over the border?”

“Well…”

“Do you know how far it is from your crossing point to Riyadh? Do you have any idea how many checkpoints there are or what the patrols are like along the way? Do you know what the road conditions are or if there are any kinds of hazards we’re going to deal with? What are you going to do if we run into trouble?”

Luke mashes his lips together. “Okay, maybe I’m open to suggestions.”

My dad gives him an incredulous look, then lets out a huff and throws his hands in the air. “Somebody get me a map, I guess.”

Jade perks up, eager for a way to help, so I direct her to the hallway that leads back to Christian’s office with my eyes. “In the library. Mia, will you show her?”

“Yeah.” Mia untangles herself from her mother and darts to Jade, snatching her hand and pulling her towards the library. They come back with the oversized, hardbound atlas that I’m pretty sure Christian bought more for how it looked on the shelf than for its intended purpose, but the maps contained inside are much better quality than I’d given them credit for. Carrick and Elliot end up stepping away from the table because my father, Luke, and Taylor pour over the maps, comparing them to pictures on Google Earth Luke pulls up on his phone, while laying out objectives and speaking in military terms that seem like a native language to them, but completely foreign to everyone else.

But I’m happy to let them handle the logistics. Both because any opinion I could offer would be grossly uninformed, and because I didn’t actually eat anything, so I only get to stand there for a few more seconds before my morning sickness hits me like a fucking wrecking bottle and I end up back on my knees in the bathroom.

Luke comes for me a few minutes later.

“Here,” he says, handing me a bowl of oatmeal. I take it and glance expectantly up at him, waiting for him to tell me the plan. Instead, he frowns. “I may have underestimated how difficult this was going to be. Your dad’s pretty firm that going in ourselves is a mistake. We don’t know what’s waiting for us and we have no idea really what these people are capable of. Turns out, an American billionaire being held hostage over Nobel Prize nominated technology that’s already been sold internationally, has like… huge implications, or something. I don’t know. He doesn’t think we should be taking this lightly.”

“So, what does he think we should do?”

“He and Taylor are talking about it now, but I think they’re going to call the FBI.”

“But you said—”

“I know.” He frowns, and I wonder if it’s because he has the same understanding that I do. That each and every second is precious, because right now, they’re counting down to Christian’s last. Tears start to well again and a horribly acidic taste fills my mouth. My body begins to hum with a nervous energy that makes everything feel uncomfortable and too restraining, like a phantom straight jacket.

“I knew this was going to happen,” I admit in a shaky voice. “Everyone treated me like I was crazy, but I knew this was going to happen again.”

“You weren’t crazy. Reckless, maybe, but not crazy. I told you before, Ana. You weren’t as wrong as he made you believe you were.”

I swallow the bitterness on my tongue. “All those people you told me about, all the things that Taylor’s stopped… did he know these people were out there?”

He shakes his head. “No, we weren’t prepared for anything like this. This isn’t some street thug trying to get a ransom or even some psycho with resources, like Lincoln was. These are the kinds of people that stage coups to overthrow foreign governments. The people who came in here are trained, just like we are. Maybe better.” He pauses, his jaw flexing like he’s chewing on his next words before deciding to say them aloud. “I wouldn’t have left if I knew this was coming. I’m sorry, Ana… I’m so fucking sorry.”

I take a deep breath and shake my head, refusing to accept the hint of defeat in his apology. “What would he do, Luke? If it were me who disappeared in the middle of the night, and he was here… what would Christian do?”

His shoulders rise and fall, but he gives me a starkly honest response. “He’d already be on that plane.”

I nod, and allow his words to give me resolution so that I can peel myself off the floor and march back out to the living room. Everyone is now surrounding Taylor and my father, trying to make arguments that they both seem to just be ignoring. I don’t give either of them a second glance. I move between them, pick up my cell, and begin scrolling through my contacts.

“Ana?” My dad checks. “What are you—”

A voice is speaking through the phone, so I hold up a hand to silence him. 

“Yes, this is Anastasia Grey. I need to speak with Senator Blandino immediately.”

It’s incredible how fast things turn around once I have the chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services on the phone. In just a little more than an hour, the plan to extradite Christian goes from borderline childish, to clinical. We’re given access to whatever resources we need and are offered every piece of relevant intelligence the United States government has. The only caveat is that, to prevent any possibility of starting an act of war, the US government, and by extension the military, has to remain as uninvolved in Christian’s rescue as possible. 

It’s a conundrum that pulls me back to countless memories over the last few months, desperate confessions from Christian about why Endurance meant so much to him.

“I want power. I want to build the kind of empire that controls what’s really important. Information. Policy. World Leaders. By the time I’m finished, wars will be fought before anyone ever gets close to you or Calliope again.”

Just like everything else, he was right. Maybe wars will be fought.

“So, with that understanding,” the military commander on the other end of the phone says. “Who do you have that could lead this kind of mission?”

“Jason Taylor,” Luke answers. “He’s got the most military experience of anyone on the team, and the most command experience.”

“No,” Taylor says. “I don’t.” He winces again as he shifts in his seat to lean forward. “I’m not in any kind of shape to get in a combative situation, and you need good men. Captain Steele has more expertise than I do, and more experience. I think I should stay behind with Calliope and the family, and Ray here should take the rest of my team with him, and take the lead.”

My dad nods. “I can do that.”

“Alright,” the voice calls through the phone. “Then Captain Steele will take point. We’ll coordinate military escorts into Saudi Arabia and ensure you’ll have a safe rendezvous point. You’ll have a vehicle waiting for you to get into the city, and personnel to back you up if you get in trouble.”

My dad glances around the room and gets a half-nod from Luke and Taylor. “Good,” he says. “It’s almost a 24-hour flight to Riyadh so better get going.”

“There’s a convoy headed up from Lewis-McChord. They’ll meet you at Boeing for take-off and they’ll give you everything you’ll need for us to stay in contact while you’re in the air.”

“Thank you, Colonel.” My dad hangs up the phone and Taylor gets out of his seat.

“All of you need to go back to the main residence. We’re going into lockdown until the team returns.”

“You too,” Luke says to Jade, and Taylor nods.

“Everyone.”

I take a deep breath and go to Kate. “Tell Calliope I love her, and don’t take your eyes off her, okay?”

She wrinkles her brow at me. “What are you talking about? You’re coming with us.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Ana…” Luke begins to argue, but I shake my head.

“I’m going with you. If it were me, there’s no way Christian would stay behind. It’s not any different the other way around.” I turn and stare my father dead in the eyes, leaving no room for argument. “I can’t stay behind and not know. I’m going.”

“You’re pregnant, sweetheart.”

“And I’m still going. Every second we stand here arguing about it, is another second we’re not getting to Christian.”

He hesitates, but only for a moment. The reluctance in his eyes is clear as he nods. Kate looks at me like she’s sure I’ve lost my mind and, maybe I have, but there’s just absolutely no way that I could stay here and not know what’s happening.

As everyone starts filing for the elevators, I feel a strong pair of fingers wrap tightly around my arm and yank. I turn to meet a pair of turbulent blue eyes. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Don’t, Luke. You’re not going to change my mind.”

His jaw tightens and I can see the storm of words ready to strike out at me like lightning teetering just on the edge of his tongue. But he meets my eyes and reads something there that makes him hold them back. Instead, he leans in and whispers in a voice so low that it’s almost threatening, “I swear to god, you will do every motherfucking thing I tell you to do, no questions asked. You got it?”

“Yes.”

“I mean it, Ana. Even if I tell you to run away and leave him behind, you do what I tell you to do.”

“It’s not going to come to that.”

“Anastasia…”

“Okay. I’ll do whatever you tell me to do.” He nods, but his eyes are still suspicious and he hovers behind me as I hug Grace and Mia goodbye. Kim sweeps me into her arms and offers words that are surprisingly encouraging, and Elliot makes me promise that I’ll tell Christian that he’s going to kill him the second he sees him for putting him through this. I give him a weak smile, then turn to watch Jade give Luke a long and deep good-bye kiss. Their eyes meet, exchanging a goodbye more personal than words ever could, and then she turns to me.

“You make sure he comes home to me, okay?”

I nod, then pull her into a hug.

Downstairs, Taylor funnels the rest of my family between the SUV and Grace and Carrick’s car. Transporting everyone back to the house takes every vehicle available to us, except one, and as I toss the keys to Luke his eyes widen.

“Holy shit, are you sure?”

I give him a very serious look. “Everyone else is already on the way to the airport. I expect you to get there as fast as possible.”

He hits the button on the key fob, and the lights to the Lamborghini blink back at us. He grins. “Ah, hell yeah.”

Luke quickens his pace as we take the last few steps to the car, while my dad glances uneasily through the windshield.

“There’s only two seats…”

I yank up the butterfly door and stand to the side for him to crawl in first. “There’s plenty of room for me to sit on top of you.”

A grimace crosses his face as he realizes how I know that, but he ducks into the car all the same and only bemoans its foreign status as I reach up to close us inside. Luke revs the engine while he shifts into gear and then peels out of the parking garage.

He keeps the speedometer above ninety, so we’re pulling onto the airfield at Boeing in less than ten minutes. Taylor has called ahead to have my jet prepared, but while we idle on the tarmac waiting for the rest of my team, I catch a glimpse of Christian’s plane still parked in the hangar. There’s an eerie kind of lifelessness that hangs heavily in the darkness around it. My own plane hums with life, the windows alight and welcoming, the stairs already stretching out to greet me.

It feels too much like a metaphor for what’s at stake.

“You ready?” Luke asks, turning to me as a familiar car pulls onto the tarmac behind us. I take a deep breath and nod. He reaches over and squeezes my hand before stepping out of the car and pulling me to the plane. We’ve already started to move by the time we take our seats, and the silence that had been so impressive the first time Christina took me up in this plane sounds oppressive as we take off.

It’s a long flight, and it’s not easy for me to sleep despite my father and Luke constantly suggesting I do just that. But every time I close my eyes, I’m terrorized by the echo of a voice in the back of my mind. It’s not Lincoln this time, it’s Christian. And the sound is filled with pain. The images my mind conjures of what they might be doing to him to get him to agree to destroy his life’s greatest achievement is more brutal than I would have through myself capable of. Eventually, it becomes too much, so I crawl onto the sofa next to Luke, lay my head on his shoulder, and wait with him in silence until we finally land.

It’s slightly disorienting stepping off the plane. It was dawn when we’d left Seattle, but the sun is low in the sky and somehow, still blazing hot in Riyadh. I don’t know what the time difference is, only that we have been on that god forsaken plane for an entire day, which means that they’ve had Christian for almost two.

I follow in the dusty cloud that pulls up from the sand with every step my father takes. He shakes hands with a man in a military uniform that has an impressive number of badges and bars displayed across the front. I watch the men the military has sent to our aid unloading a van from an aircraft carrier a few hundred yards away, and frown. When they said they’d provide a vehicle to get us into the city, I’d imagined a souped up Humvee with armored, reinforced steel and bullet proof glass. The drab and unimpressive shell of this vehicle looks too vulnerable, too ordinary. and for the first time, I think I really feel the danger in what we’re about to do.

“We can do this, right?” I hiss to Luke, holding a protective hand over my stomach. He reaches over to squeeze my arm.

“You don’t have to come if you’re scared. You can stay here, on the plane, with these fine men. You should stay here. They’ll protect you.”

I turn back and watch the soldiers milling around us again, my eyes narrowing in on the weapons laid across the table next to my father, and the guns on the jets that had landed on the sandy, makeshift airfield with us. It’s all a ‘Plan B,’ but I’ve been through this enough now to expect the worst case scenario. The threat of escalation is all around me, and if I’m not there to see how everything goes down, that’s all I’m going to think about.

“No,” I tell him. “I have to come. I need to see that he’s okay with my own eyes.”

His lips press together and his forehead creases with worry, but he nods and leans over to kiss me on the temple. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you, okay?”

“I know.”

After listening to the life and death instructions given to us by the military commander running base camp, we pile into the van and start towards the city. It’s a good twenty-five miles of open desert between us and the first sign so life, and the drive gives me too much space and silence to think about what we’re moving towards. It’s tense, nearly unbearable, and the only thing I can do is stare blankly at the equipment around me and… hope.

As we make our way into the city, using military GPS to take us directly to the estate where Christian is being held, Luke pulls out his phone and curls into the side of the van as though it could give him any modicum of privacy. I try not to listen, but he’s the only one who speaks, so everyone in the van hears everything he says.

“Hey, we’re just about there… I just wanted to call and tell you that I love you.” He’s talking to Jade, and there’s a kind of vulnerability in his voice that sounds strange coming from him. Luke is normally the guy who’s looking for a fight, who gets excited by the prospect of danger. Now, there’s hesitation, and it’s because he has something to lose now. And listening to him say goodbye to the woman he loves, just in case, has me in tears when we pull onto the dark street where my dad finally kills the engine.

“Is everyone ready?” he asks, slowly unbuckling his seatbelt and peering through the windows for any sign that someone has noticed our arrival. There’s a rumble of agreement that sounds around me, then Luke takes a black, heavy case out from under his seat and passes earpieces around. I twist the completely invisible bud into my ear, and nod when my father tests to make sure we can hear him. But when everyone begins to file out of the van, Luke’s hand tugs me back inside.

“You’re not coming.”

“What?”

“There’s a good chance it gets hairy in there and we can’t focus on your husband if we’re worrying about you. So, stay here, stay low, and stay quiet. We’ll be back with Christian in just a few minutes, okay?”

“But—”

“You’ll be able to hear us, Annie,” my dad says. “The moment I have Christian safe, I’ll give him my earpiece.”

“We need you to do this,” Evan adds. “Sawyer’s right. You first, remember?”

I take a few deep breaths and try to consider what they’re telling me objectively. Everything inside of me is screaming to refuse. It’s taking every ounce of my control not to bolt from this van and just run to the house glowing at the end of the street, because I know that’s where he is. But I need every single person on this team to come back safe too, and if going with them could put any of them in danger, I can’t argue with them when they ask me to stay.

“Okay.” I nod, though the word tastes like poison on my tongue. “But… be careful, okay?”

“We will,” Luke promises. He hugs me tightly and kisses me hard on the cheek before he disappears into the blackness. I hug Woods next, then my father.

“Come back to me,” I make him promise.

“I always do.”

The door to the van closes and the dome light slowly fades into nothing, leaving me alone in blackness with nothing but the muffled sounds of breathing in my earpiece. It’s one of the most intense moments in my entire life. I can hear my heart beating furiously in my chest, my stomach churns with nausea that I can’t allow to overwhelm me. I cling desperately to every softly whispered command, every involuntary sound, every footstep… waiting for the worst.

“I’ve got two on the south side,” Woods murmurs. “I can see a Galil and an AK-47.”

“I’ve got an AR-15 on the east wall,” Wyatt adds. “Three men. The other two have pistols on their hips.”

“Damn it,” my father whispers. “I’m moving up the north wall, there’s a light up ahead about 500 feet. I think it may be an open gate.”

“I can see it from my position,” Harper says. “You’ve got two on the other side. I’ve got them in my scope.”

“400 feet,” my dad says. “300…”

“Wait, Ray,” Luke hisses. “I’ve got movement on the North side, you’ve got three people headed right for you. 12 o’clock.”

“Fuck.”

“You got cover?” Smith asks.

“No, I’m out in the open here.”

“You’ve got ten seconds,” Luke says. “They’re armed.”

I hear my father grunt, and I don’t know what that means. If he’s found somewhere to hide, if he’s trying to get away, if someone has him… he’s gone silent as he tries to remain concealed and my heart pounds in my chest with each passing second. I wait in agony for anyone to say anything, for one word of reassurance, but there is only dead silence in my ears and it drives me right up to the brink of insanity.

“Shit, they’re going to see him,” Luke says, urgently. “We need a distraction.”

“Is any one open enough that they can create a diversion?” Woods adds. No one answers.

I don’t even think about it. I leap from the back into the driver’s seat and twist the keys in the ignition. My foot finds the pedal and I shove it down against the floor and jolt forward up the street towards Christian’s prison. The engine groans as I try to coax every ounce of speed I can from it.

“What the fuck is that?” Woods asks.

“We’ve got headlights coming up the street,” Smith says.

The gate to the driveway materializes in the beam of my headlights and I hit the breaks, reaching over at the same time to roll down the window.

“It’s me,” I tell them.

“You?” What the fuck do you mean it’s you?” Luke demands. I reach through the window and press the button on the speaker outside the gate. A deep voice responds in a language I don’t understand, but I don’t have to. He just has to understand me.

“My name is Anastasia Grey,” I tell the voice in the box. “I’m here for my husband.”

Next Chapter

“I don’t know, it was still dark…” Elliot’s eyes look into nothing while he answers the questions from the police. He’s not dazed or overcome with shock. It looks as though he’s reliving a memory.

Reliving a nightmare.

“They were already in the room by the time I woke up. Christian and I had been drinking, I was still a little drunk… At first, I thought it was him coming to fuck with me. But then there were more of him, of them. One held me down, one wrapped the tape around my head, and one zip tied me to the headboard. I was helpless before I even knew what was going on.”

“Then what happened?”

“They walked out of the room. I tried to shout for help, but I couldn’t move my mouth under the tape. I was trying to get out of the zip ties when I heard them fighting with Christian downstairs. It sounded bad, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even call out to him…”

“Did you hear anything about what they wanted, or where they were going?”

“No, they never said a word. The only thing I heard was…” He looks up at the still demolished foyer, and his face melts with something between pain and disgust. “That.”

The officer conducting the interview sighs, adjusts the recorder on the coffee table, and then turns to me. “Mrs. Grey, is anything else missing? Cash you had on hand? Jewelry? Any valuables?”

I don’t answer.

I can’t.

It’s not real.

Everything in front of me is happening as though I’m watching it on a television screen. I can see my family sitting around me, I can hear the police asking questions, and I can understand the answers they get in return. But I can’t interact with any of it. I’m in a daze. A completely inert state of unbeing. I can’t speak. I can’t move. I can’t even look at anything except the empty space in front of me.

“Nothing is missing,” Taylor grunts from the far side of the sofa. He makes several pain-filled noises as he shifts to sit more upright. The ice pack he holds to the side of his brutalized face never moves. “They were in, they were out. They only wanted him.”

“Yes,” the officer agrees, dejectedly. He reaches forward and stops the recording, then gives a sympathetic smile to Elliot. “Thank you, Mr. Grey. That’s all the questions I have for you.”

“I wish I could give you more,” Elliot replies, his voice breaking with each word. “You are going to find him, right?” 

“We’re going to do everything we can.” 

Elliot grimaces as he swallows back the emotion clawing up his throat, then sniffs hard and moves to Kate. She kisses and throws her arms around him, squeezing him as tightly as she can while he sobs silently into her shoulder.

“I’m so sorry, baby,” she says, wearing her own pain as loudly as Elliot does. “I’m so sorry for what you went through.”

“I didn’t go through anything. It was Christian—“ He starts to sob again, while Kate runs her fingers gently over his scalp.

“They’re going to find him Elliot.”

“Yeah. They have to.” He pulls away from Kate, taking a few deep breaths to calm himself, and then he turns to me.

“What can I do, Ana?”

I can’t look at him.

“Well we’re going to start by getting everyone together,” Grace intervenes. “I just got off the phone with Ray and he’s on his way down. He asked me to make you a cup of tea.”

A teacup appears on the table before me, and I actually manage to look down at it. It’s familiar. It comes from a set that Christian bought for my apartment on the 14^th floor when I worked for him as an intern. I’d had to bring them up here with me when I’d agreed to move in with him because he doesn’t drink tea. I remember putting them in the cabinet on my first official day living here and realizing, even then, how much they represented the way he cares about me. The way he’s always thinking about me.

I didn’t speak to him for two years, and he remembered to buy me tea cups.

Tears well in my eyes, but I can’t move to brush them away. I stare at pretty pink flowers on the china that look like the dozens of bouquets he’s sent me over the years, and the tears stream unimpeded down my face until I feel Kate’s fingers reach over to catch them. She leans away from Elliot and wraps an arm around me, but it doesn’t make me thaw. I sit. Still. Staring at the teacup.

I wonder if I look as dead as I feel?

“Mia’s on her way,” Carrick says, stalking into the room and brandishing his cell phone with an erratic kind of energy that is deeply unsettling. “I’ve chartered her a flight out of Boston, she’s going to be here in a few hours.”

“I still don’t think she needs to leave school,” Elliot says. “She hasn’t even been there for a week and if we’ve learned anything over these past few years, it’s that she’s a hell of a lot safer in Cambridge than she is here.”

“Elliot,” Kate hisses in admonishment. Her eyes go wide with an unspoken lecture and her head tilts in my direction, but I’m not phased by his blunt statement. It washes off me just like everything else. There’s no point mincing words or trying to paint this any other color than the dark shade of horror it is.

“I don’t care,” Carrick continues. “I want us all together.” His eyes move over all of us, as though he’s taking a head count, and then his eyes go wide with a newly realized fear. “Where are the babies?”

“They’re at Chri– Ana’s house,” Grace says, stumbling painfully over her words. She walks to her husband and wraps him in an unsettled embrace. “They’re with Mackensie and the rest of her security team.”

“Well, get them here immediately!” Carrick argues. My eyes flash up at him like he’s just threatened me, but I don’t have to break through the parasitic void to fight him because Taylor does it for me.

“They’re most secure at the residence,” he says. “Mr. Grey’s approved emergency protocol says the kids should be put in lockdown. Ana should be there too, but—”

“But she’s not going anywhere,” Luke says from across the room. It’s the first time he’s emerged from the security office since he first got here. Now, he looks exhausted. Kate nods in agreement. 

“Not until Luke finds him.” 

The police officers still wandering through the apartment scoff, and Luke’s jaw flexes irritably. He turns intense eyes on me, communicating something he doesn’t want the rest of the room to know. I’m not even sure that it is, but the message I get from it is that he’s watching me. I don’t know what he’s looking for, but the warning makes me think he sees an avenue through this. One he doesn’t want to put me through. One that he’s afraid I’ll figure out. 

And suddenly, I’m aware of absolutely everything around me. 

“You are going to find him, aren’t you?” Elliot asks. 

Luke frowns. “Of course I am. It’s just going to take me a minute to get through everything that’s trying to stop me.  In the meantime, I could use some coffee if there’s any made.” 

“I’ll get it,” Jade says. 

She’s been sitting in an armchair on the other side of the room, burying herself in her phone and trying to stay invisible in the middle of our family crisis for hours. I was surprised, actually at how fast she got here. Or that she even came at all. Luke called to tell her where he was and that he wasn’t sure when he’d be home. Instead of being upset, she drove straight here, left him to do his work, and came to sit with me. When I wouldn’t talk, she just nodded, moved to the chair she’s in now, and let me be silent, filling the lonely emptiness in the room with her presence. 

She gets up, and Luke pulls her in for a grateful kiss before she heads into the kitchen. Grace starts sobbing softly from the other side of the sectional again, which she tries to hide unsuccessfully behind her hand, and Carrick takes the seat next to her so that he can hold her through it. His eyes bounce between Luke and Taylor. 

“How did this even happen? How did they get in here?” 

Taylor grimaces. “Escala.” 

“What?”

“We own the apartment, not the building. So everything we do, we have to give to the building owner. They have the code to the elevator for liability reasons, and we’re only allowed to have recording cameras in common areas because of an agreement we made that states Escala owns the footage and has the right to turn the cameras off at their discretion. They don’t, so it’s never been a problem. But they can. Whoever came at us, did. Nothing broke through our firewalls, every breach Luke has found came from the Escala side. That’s why the garage footage is gone, but not the footage in the apartment.”

“But he doesn’t even really live here,” Carrick argues again. “He’s only been here a few nights, how did they even know to look for him here?” 

“Probably something to do with this…” Luke interjects. He walks across the room and puts his cellphone on the table. A video starts to play on the screen with a logo for a paparazzi website I’ve blocked on all my devices stamped over the picture in the left hand corner. 

Through the shouts and tightly packed bodies, the shiny black door of the Maybach opens and Christian steps out onto the sidewalk in the same suit he was wearing at my doctor’s appointment yesterday. He looks annoyed as he pushes through the first wave of photographers, and as the angle changes with him, I see the blue glass doors of Escala. There’s a very distinguishable clock on a post next to the door that clearly shows the time of his arrival. 

“Why wasn’t he dropped off in the garage?” Kate asks, rounding on Taylor. His face falls.

“He’d asked me to go get him bourbon. I dropped him off at the street entrance so I could go to the liquor store.” 

Jade returns with a coffee cup that she gingerly passes to Luke. He takes a deep drink, grimacing slightly as it scalds his throat, then wraps an arm around his girl and pulls her into his side. Elliot’s knees bounce anxiously, until he eventually pulls himself off the sofa and begins to pace. 

“There’s got to be something we’re overlooking. There’s got to be more we could be doing.“

“I’m not overlooking anything, Elliot,” Luke assures him. “I’m going to find hi–”

His sentence cuts off with the ping of the elevator, and everyone’s eyes turn toward the foyer as though they expect it to be Christian who comes through the doors. As though they think it would be that simple.

As if they truly believe we’re going to get out of this without devastating consequences.

The steel doors slide open and Ros’s heels begin clacking their way across the foyer into the living room. Grace goes to her immediately, throwing her arms around her while Christian’s best friend begins to word-vomit her sympathies.

“Is there any news?” she asks, nervous eyes darting first to Taylor, then to Luke, and finally Carrick. They all shake their heads, so she turns to me.

Her hand flies up to her chest and her face crinkles with unspoken consolation. She moves toward the sofa as though it were a calling, and slides into the seat next to me. “How are you doing, Ana?”

I can’t even yank my hand out of hers, the way I want to.

“She’s…” Kate begins, and immediately stops as the words fail to materialize. Ros nods, and gets up to hug Elliot and Carrick, but I can’t quite make out the words they exchange with one another. I glance around, waiting for a sign. Looking for clarity. Praying for some epiphany that will put some light at the end of this macabre tunnel. My internal pleas are interrupted by a sudden, discordant jingle…

A phone.

“That’s Ana’s,” Luke voices aloud for me.

Kate leans across the table to dig through my abandoned purse, but when she has my phone in her hands and she looks down at the screen, she frowns.

“It just says ‘unknown.’”

The police officer who interviewed Elliot perks up, then snaps to his colleagues currently going over the security footage at my dining room table. “It could be them,” he says, and it’s like I suddenly come to life. Whatever heavy force was holding me down, whatever thing was choking back my voice… all of it disappears, and I practically leap from the couch to snatch my phone from Kate’s hands.

“This is Anastasia Grey,” I start, and an unfamiliar British accent responds.

“Good evening, Mrs. Grey. Are the police officers with you tracing this phone call?”

I swallow, ensuring my voice won’t shake before I continue. The officer who interviewed Elliot is coming towards me with a black box in his hand, similar to the one that Luke had used to record the call Lincoln made at my graduation. 

“They will be.” 

“Then I’ll keep this brief. Rosaline Bailey entered your apartment a few minutes ago. Would you be so kind as to hand her the phone, please?” 

So they are watching us.

“Ros?” I turn to look at her and her eyes go wide. “No, Christian… What about Christian? Where is he? Is he okay?” 

“I don’t have much time, Mrs. Grey.” 

“I… Look, I’m the one you want to help you, okay? My name is on everything that Christian’s is and I’m willing to do whatever it takes to get him back safely. I can give you anything he can, so just tell me what you want for him, and I’ll give it to you.” 

He sighs. “The only way you can give me what I want, is by handing the phone to Rosaline Bailey.” 

My heart hammers against my ribcage while I hesitate. Each second feels precious while Christian’s fate hangs in the balance, but… this is my only line to the man who has him, which makes it the only line I have to him. It’s not so easy to give up…

“Please,” I beg, my bottom lip beginning to tremble. “Please let me talk to him. Let me just hear that he’s okay.”

“I’m sorry, that’s impossible. Please give the phone to Ms. Bailey.”

“Please,” I plead again, only becoming more desperate the more the man reveals. “Please, just tell me what to do to get him back…”

“Give the phone to Ms. Bailey, Mrs. Grey.”

I close my eyes, fighting against the insurmountable force that tells me to keep the man talking and keep him talking to me, and pass the phone to Ros. She reaches out with a shaky hand, but pauses before regaining her composure and slowly pulling the phone to her ear.

“This is Rosaline Bailey,” she says. For several seconds, I watch the myriad of emotions move across her face in silence. First trepidation, then revulsion, then fear, and finally, anger.

“No, I can’t do that,” she says, so firmly I could scream. There’s another long pause while the man on the phone makes his counter argument, but that’s only met with another denial from Ros.

It’s too much for me to hold back. I lunge at her with the same intense purpose I did with Kate and take the phone back. “I can do it. I will do it. Just tell me what you want.”

The voice sighs impatiently. “You’re not the person who can help me, Anastasia…”

“Like hell I can’t. Just give me the number. Ten million? A hundred million? A billion? I don’t care, you can have all of it! I just want my husband back.” I’m shrieking, on the edge of hysterics, and the man on the phone sighs impatiently.

“I don’t want your money,” he says, and then to my complete and utter horror, he hangs up the phone.

“No!” My scream echoes through the deathly silent room while I go into my contacts and try to call the unknown number back over and over again. Each time the call fails to connect, my anguish blooms a little bit further out of my control. I round on Ros. “What did he want?”

She cowers slightly under the force of my words, which I think has more to do with guilt than fear. She glances nervously at the other faces around the room, then looks directly at the police.

“He wants me to dismantle Endurance. He wants everything we’ve developed and manufactured to be destroyed and all of our data erased. He wants it to be like it never existed and for us to bury it deep enough that I will never exist again.”

Her denial reverberates in my mind and nearly has me falling back on the couch in disbelief. That’s it?

“So do it!” I scream at her. She mashes her lips together and shakes her head defiantly.

“I can’t. We have contracts with governments all over the world and the man has been nominated for a fucking Nobel Prize. This technology is bigger than we are now. This is an evolutionary point in human history and nothing can be allowed to step in its way. Christian knew that before anyone else did, and I guarantee you that the reason they’re calling me right now is because he’s telling them the same thing I’m telling you.”

Carrick blinks at Ros in shock. “What did you say? He’s nominated for a Nobel Prize?”

I hold up a hand in my father-in-law’s face, cutting off Ros’s response. “I don’t give a fuck what he’s nominated for. They don’t give the Nobel Prize posthumously.”

I can feel it coming, the break they’ve all been tiptoeing around. It starts like a crack in the fortified walls in a dam. Small, almost inconsequential. The waves of grief compounding on top of it chip it open further and further until I’m only holding on by a few crumbling bits of plaster.

Luke sees it coming, but he doesn’t come to me. “I’m on it, Ana.” he tells me. “I’m going to find him.” Then he turns around and marches back into the security office. 

On the precipice of a total meltdown, I turn away from Ros and the rest of my family, and hurry towards our bedroom. The door sounds so final when it slams behind me, like an ending I’m not prepared to face.

I fall into the bed, the first great sob of the hysteria pulling in the scent of Christian from the sheets. I wrap myself in them like a cocoon while I shake with a grief so profound it shakes my very essence. The tears stream in endless currents down my face, beyond the point I should have any left. Every part of me feels as though it’s being ripped apart, and then somehow ripped again. It goes on and on, the pain only compounding with each passing second, until eventually, someone comes to check on me.

“Annie?”

The door creaks a little as my father eases it open. He stands in the doorway for only half a second, taking in the devastation before him, and then he moves to the bed beside me. His arms coil around me, as if I could be fused back together with enough pressure.

“He’s going to be okay, Annie,” he whispers into my hair. “Christian is so much stronger than any of us, he’ll get through this. He’d fight the whole world to get back to you.”

“What if he doesn’t win, Daddy?” 

“Nonsense. He changed the laws of physics. Does that sound like a man who loses to you?” 

I take a few breaths against his shirt, and soak in the comfort he’s trying to give me. It doesn’t do much, because there’s something about that sentiment that rings like a warning. But the little reprieve I’m able to take from his love gives me the strength to choke back my tears and at least look up at him. In a way, he seems unfamiliar through the glassy layer of despair that coats my eyes. Everything is distorted. Darker, like some of the light has been taken from the world. But there’s hope staring down at me through my father’s eyes, and every part of me wants to believe in it. Even if I know it’s an empty lie.

He reaches for my face and wipes the tears from my cheeks. “Have you eaten anything?” I shake my head, because it’s all that I can do, and he gives me an understanding smile. “Kim came up with me. I’ll have her fix you something, okay?”

“Looks like I’m two steps ahead of you, Ray.”

We both look up and see Kate standing in the doorway. She holds up a brown paper bag and a large cup with a wide red straw. My dad smiles and claps his hand over the blanket that covers my leg.

“I guess I’ll leave you girls to it, then.” I nod and he leans over to kiss my forehead, capturing my chin between his fingers before he climbs out of bed. “I’m here, Annie. If you need anything, I’m just down the hall. If you want to talk or you want someone to cry on… I’m waiting for you, okay? No matter what time it is, I’m here. Just come find me.”

I try to respond, but in the absence of the unrelenting torment, I’ve gone numb again. It doesn’t matter, he understands me better than anyone in the entire world. He smiles back at me, and kisses me one last time. As he leaves the room, he squeezes Kate’s arm.

“Thanks, kiddo.”

She winks at him, then hops into bed with me and gives me a look like she’s about to let me in on a secret.

“I know you probably don’t want to eat, but hear me out. Elliot went down to Dicks and…” She holds up the bag in front of me. The bottom so coated in grease I’m almost worried it will give out. “Deluxe cheeseburger, large fries, and an extra thick chocolate milkshake.” She holds it out to me with confidence that would normally be well earned, but there’s nothing about consuming way too many calories that appeals to me right now. There’s nothing that appeals to me right now period. There’s only the absence that Christian has left behind and the desperate need I have to bring him home.

“Come on, Ana,” Kate says dejectedly. “You have to eat. It’s not just you anymore, remember?” Her eyes move down to my stomach, and I feel a wash of blame sweep over me. I hang my head.

“He was right, I didn’t see this from his side.” 

“What?” 

“He’s terrified of losing me because it feels like this, and I haven’t felt this. This… this…” I lift my hands, like it’s even possible to demonstrate the enormity of this loss. Of this hurt. “He’s been living with this for days, and I… I ran away. He wanted to be home, I told him he couldn’t be there. He did come home, and I asked him to leave again. I didn’t see this from his side because if I did, I would have done everything I could to help him through this pain. I could have called Flynn. I could have assembled a team of experts. I could have bought a fucking hospital and just moved in for the next nine months, but instead… instead, I told him I needed space. That I needed to be away from him. Because I didn’t understand this pain. His pain… He was here because of me.” 

“Don’t do that to yourself, Ana. He could have done all of those things too, but he got a vasectomy instead. You didn’t know this would happen, and you don’t know that this had to happen here. Maybe it would have happened anyway, and maybe it would have happened where you and Calliope were…”

I narrow my eyes at her. “Do you know the only directive my security team has? Me first. Always me first. So while I was safe at home, behind my gates that are locked with codes no one else has, under the surveillance of my cameras that no one else can turn off, guarded by my entire armed security team, he was here. Without them. If he would have been home last night, Taylor wouldn’t have been alone. He would have had Evan, and Smith, and Harper, and Wyatt… I would have been there.”

“And they would have just taken you too.”

I turn away from her, scowling into the nothingness around me. “I think I would have preferred that. Any imminent threat of danger would be easier than this. Than not knowing what’s happening to him… or what will happen next. I can’t do this!”

“He’s going to be okay, Ana. We’re going to make a deal to get him. Eventually, it will come down to money. We’ll pay it, and we will get him back.”

“No, Kate. They’re never going to give him back.” I turn to her, and lay out the part of this she hasn’t seen yet. The parts I didn’t see until the phone went dead. The parts that keep her sitting upright, while I’m struggling to maintain the functions that are supposed to be done unconsciously. “Why would they give him back? They said they wanted Endurance destroyed and Christian is Endurance. He’s the creator. He’s the visionary. It’s all in his head.” And suddenly, the warning I took from my father makes sense, and it stirs the existential fear inside of me. “He doesn’t lose. He wouldn’t even lose to me, there’s no way in hell he’d let himself be beaten by the people who invaded his home and took the power from him that he put his entire life’s work on the line to get. He’ll just start from scratch and somehow end up with a product that’s better and more impressive than what he built the first time. And then they’ll come back. Or someone else will come…” I let the words trail off as my head hangs in misery. “They’re not giving him back, Kate.” 

As tears fall down my face, she hugs me again. “Annie…” 

“I can’t lose him, Kate. I can’t, I–” A ghost of the words he’s said to me over and over moves through my head, and I feel the weight of their poignancy. “His heart beats, my heart beats… not just correlation, sequential.” 

“Luke isn’t going to let you lose him, Ana. We’re going to find him. And the team of people who kept you safe are going to bring him home.” 

I take a trembling breath, feeling my entire body fill to the brim with pain. Because I don’t know if I believe her. I don’t know what comes next and every second I live in this torturous purgatory waiting for whatever terrible judgement fate plans to hand down gets harder and harder to bear. I can feel myself unraveling as it happens, but I can’t stop it. I spiral down and down until there’s nothing left but grief. 

Kate’s arms hold me together, and she stays there clinging to me until the sun comes up the next morning and my stomach starts to roil. 

I stumble to the bathroom, wiping tears from my face as I bend over the toilet to vomit. But nothing happens. I wretch and wretch and wretch, but I have nothing in my stomach to throw up. It’s painful, and starts a whole new wave of tears that brings Kate to the floor next to me. 

She passes me the bottle of anti-nausea meds that was in my purse. “You have to eat something, Ana. Please.”

I give her a helpless look, but once the contractions in my stomach stop, I nod and take her hand. She leads me out to the living room and we find everyone still spread out, restless and bleary-eyed. The police have left, but Ros is still here. Kim is in the kitchen stirring something on the stove, and Grace is on the sofa with Mia wrapped under her arm. Every pair of eyes around the room turns to me. 

“She wants to eat something,” Kate says, answering the unspoken question in their gazes. 

“Good,” my dad says. 

“I’m making oatmeal,” Kim calls. “I’ll bring you some.” 

I nod to her, numbly, then shuffle towards the empty place on the sofa that my dad creates for me. Mia gets up like she wants to come cuddle into my side, but she stops when a trilling jingle sounds from the other side of the room. Automatically, I look down at my phone, still on the coffee table, still plugged into the device the police gave me, but it’s silent. Ros is the one who dives into her bag, and when she looks at the screen her nervous eyes shift to Taylor. 

He pulls himself off the couch, groaning in pain but not letting it slow him down in the slightest, rips the device out of my phone, and brings it to Ros. He slips it into the charging port, then nods for her to answer the phone. 

My breath catches in my throat. 

“Hello?” Her voice is shaky and her eyes dart nervously back and forth, then widen very suddenly. “Christian?!” 

I launch myself at her faster than I think I’ve ever moved in my life. I watch her cringe as she listens to whatever he says, then shake her head as she answers. “No, she’s right here, she’s fine. Yeah, Calliope too. They’re both okay. They’re safe. What about you?” She pauses for a moment, listening very intently, but whatever is happening on the other end of the phone only seems to confuse her more. 

“Christian?” she suddenly calls in panic, and I react before I realize what I’m doing. My hand darts out and snatches the phone from her, and I bring it to my ear with the whispered pleas for him to be okay already tumbling from my lips. 

“Christian! Christian!” I call, but the line’s gone dead. There’s nothing but silence, and my wild eyes snap up to Ros. “What did he say?!” 

She shakes her head. “He said don’t do it. He asked if they had you or Calliope, and then he told me not to do a fucking thing. Then there was shouting and…” She cringes again and looks away from me, and I crumple to the floor under the weight of this whole new wave of pain. Both Ros and Kate bend down and place soft hands on my shoulder, whispering reassuring words… but the only thing that breaks through the sorrow is the voice of my former CPO. 

“I’ve got him,” Luke says, and when my head jerks up toward him, I see that he’s talking directly to me. He holds my gaze for just half-a-second, letting me feel the truth behind what he just said, then his eyes move around the room. “I know where he is, and I’m going to go get him. Who’s coming with me?”

Next Chapter

That night, I wake abruptly as though I’ve just escaped a nightmare. My heart is beating wildly in my chest when I sit up straight in bed. My breath comes too quick and shallow for me to calm myself. I try to grasp onto the remnants of my dream slipping away like wisps of smoke, but there aren’t any frightening images in them. I’d been dreaming of Christian and a summer day on our yacht in the middle of the sound.

A new fear moves to the forefront of my mind, and I reach down to my stomach in alarm. There isn’t any pain though, or even queasiness. I’m not bleeding. I’m not uncomfortable. I feel fine. The darkness around me is still, except for Kate breathing peacefully in the bed next to me, and nothing seems to be disturbed.

I glance over Kate to the alarm clock on Christian’s nightstand. It’s 2:37 AM, and I groan. As I fall back into the pillows, I reach over for my phone out of habit to check any notifications that might have popped up while I was sleeping. There’s a missed call and a voicemail from Christian he’d left just after 1 AM. With a cautious look at Kate, I press play on the message, and pull my phone to my ear.

It’s quiet, and it stays that way long enough that I think for a moment he must have butt-dialed me. My fingers moves to delete the message just as his voice comes through the phone and the sound is so rough and broken, it grates against my eardrums like sandpaper.

“You promised me forever,” he slurs. “All I’ve ever tried to do, all I’ve ever wanted, was to love you enough to deserve forever.  And now I’ve fucked it up and I’m going to lose you–No.” He changes direction quickly, and I can almost hear him shaking his head. “I won’t lose you. I won’t. Your heart beats, my heart beats.” Another long beat of silence. “I’ll make fucking sure of it.”

The message ends with a click and my heart starts beating violently in my chest. The morbid tone of his words lingers in my ears and brings goosebumps to the surface of my skin. I quickly dial his number and wait anxiously for him to answer, but I get his voicemail. 

I try to tell myself that’s a good thing. It means he’s gone to sleep and he’ll wake in the morning with a much clearer head. More painful, but definitely clearer. 

With a text to remind him how much I love him and a request for him to call me when he wakes up, I set my phone back on the nightstand and try to get back to sleep. It’s pointless though. The worry I feel over Christian’s voicemail plagues me through the rest of the night, pulling me down into constantly fluctuating waves of tears, until the sun comes up and the alarm clock chimes shrilly from the other side of the bed.

“Mmmm,” Kate moans, stretching her whole body before she even pries her eyes open. “Morning, Annie.” She turns to me, the ghost of pleasant dreams still present on her face. When she sees my puffy eyes and tear-stained cheeks, it all melts into concern. “What’s wrong?”

I reach up to wipe the moisture from my eyes and take a misery filled breath. “Christian called last night. He didn’t sound good.”

“How not good?”

I shake my head, and she frowns.

“Well, Elliot’s with him. If there’s one person who knows how to get Christian through his bullshit, it’s him.”

“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.” I pull back the covers and get out of bed, but stop when Kate calls my name. I turn inside the doorframe to the bathroom.

“What did he say?” she asks. 

“Nothing, it’s fine.”

But it’s not fine. Nothing about this is fine and I can’t do this anymore. This is going to end today. When Christian comes home from work, we’re going to have it out. And no matter how ugly it gets, I’m not going to run. I’m not going to back down. He’s going to see it my way if it kills him, because what we’re doing right now, is slowly killing me.

The gradual roll of my morning sickness begins to rear its ugly head, so I go to the medicine cabinet before I hop in the shower. I expect my nausea lozenges to be on the 2^nd shelf waiting for me, but they’ve been replaced by an orange prescription bottle. The label tells me it’s the medication Dr. Baker prescribed for me during my visit yesterday. I’d completely forgotten about it and hadn’t called Abby to have it picked up. Christian must’ve had Andrea do it, and holding that bottle in my hand makes me only more resolved about my plans for tonight.

We can do this. We love each other. There’s nothing we can make it through.

No matter what.

After my shower, I pick one of Christian’s button down shirts from his closet and tuck it into a high-waisted pencil skirt so that it billows over the top. It smells like the cleaners, rather than my husband, but I can almost feel his touch being wrapped in the fabric. Like the empty sleeves are the same as being held in his arms. The sense of comfort I glean from it gives me a reassuring kind of certainty that keeps my head held high while I move around Kate in the bathroom, then go get Calliope ready for the day.

When we get to GEH, there’s a tiny glimmer of hope in the back of my mind that Christian might be waiting for us. He hasn’t seen Calliope in over a day and that’s always really rough on him. But the only person who greets me once we step off the elevators on the seventh floor is the receptionist who mans the desk in front of Calliope’s daycare. She smiles and greets me the same as she always does, and Calliope runs to play with her friends the moment I set her on the rug of the playroom just like it was any other morning. I watch her for a few minutes while I try to call Christian again, then call her over for a kiss goodbye when I immediately get his voicemail.

“Mary,” I say to the receptionist as I come back into the hallway.

“Yes, Mrs. Grey?”

“If my husband comes down here to see Calliope, will you let me know?”

“Sure, you’re at Grey Publishing now, right?”

My face falls. Good news travels fast, I see. “Yeah.”

She smiles, despite my less than enthused reaction, and makes a note while I head for the elevators with my security team. My Phoenix team is already assembling for the meeting that’s now become part of our daily routine, so I let them know I’ll just be a few minutes and duck into my office. Christian’s phone once again goes straight to voicemail, so I start to compose an email just in case he’s without a phone charger but is checking his email on the computer at Escala. He doesn’t respond within the five minutes I give myself to check my other emails, so before I duck out for my meeting, I pick up my phone and call upstairs.

“Good morning, Christian Grey’s office. How may I help you?” It’s Andrea who answers, instead of Oliva, and her voice is disrupted by some kind of chaos going on in the background. 

“Hey it’s Ana. Can you transfer me to my husband, please?”

“Uh, I wish… he’s not here. I’ve called him like 50 times but his phone is off. We’re getting bombarded with calls and he’s complete M.I.A.”

My brow furrows. “Calls about what?”

“You didn’t hear? Mr. Grey has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics for the Endurance project.”

“What?!”

“Jacqueline is trying to get a statement, Ms. Bailey has been fielding calls from government officials and scientists all morning, and I can’t get the man on the damn phone.”

I blink in shock a few times, only slightly processing what she’s said. The Nobel Prize? The words run like a ticker through my head until I can absorb them properly, and for some reason, the realization makes me think of Carrick. Of all the times Carrick bemoaned his lost legacy when his son dropped out of his alma mater. Now that son could be a Nobel Prize winner.

Talk about a fucking legacy.

“Ana?”

“Sorry… I’m just, uh… shocked a little.”

She laughs. “Is that why I can’t reach your husband?”

“Maybe. He… had a rough night last night, I think he’s probably sleeping in.”

“Well, when you hear from him, please tell him to call me. We’re drowning up here.”

“I will. And if he calls you first…”

“Oh, I’ll yell at him.”

For what feels like the first time in days, a genuine smile crosses my lips and, if I could, I would reach through the phone and hug her. “Thank you, Andrea.”

“No problem. Talk to you later, Ana.”

She hangs up the phone and I have to take a breath to stall the new giddy fluttering of my heart. The rush of pride and amazement and sheer happiness I feel over this new piece of news is almost too much for me to handle, but in a way that gives me an enormous amount of relief. It’s a stark and forceful reminder of how much I love that man and how much he means to me, and it warms me from the inside like a fire crackling merrily through a snowstorm.

I pull out my phone and start a new text.

Congratulations! I love you so much and I’m so proud I can’t even put it into words. Call me ❤

I check my phone about every 15 seconds during my Phoenix meeting, which makes it difficult to follow everything my team is telling me. The general direction we’re moving in on Hailey’s book is exactly what I want, but there’s a palpable resentment shining through the window of the conference room with each and every glance from the GP team. It seeps into the conversation surrounding Phoenix until the former GSP team is engaging in nothing but trash talk about their new co-workers.

The silence from Christian makes their catty banter grating.

“Can we stop with the tribalism, please?” I ask, looking up from my phone again. “You’re all the same team now and I need you to act like it.”

Stevens rolls his eyes, while Jacki glares through the window at the persistently antagonistic stares. “They’re the ones making this difficult.”

“No, this is just difficult. It would be less so if we could act professionally.” I glance around the table with an accusatory stare that has each of them expressing some variation of guilt. Now properly chastened, my team picks up with the conversation about edits being done on chapter three, while I turn to look at a new commotion through the window. The bitter looks from the rest of my team have turned curious and moved to reception, where Ros is speaking with Claire. A second later, the phone in the conference room beeps.

“Hey, Ana. Ms. Bailey is here to see you.”

“I’m on my way out.” I push away from the table and ask my team to continue working, then step out of the room. There’s no sense of warm greeting from Ros as I approach reception. She looks annoyed.

“Hey, what’s up?” I ask.

“Is your husband planning on coming in today? Or, you know, responding to a fucking email?”

I frown. “You haven’t heard from him yet?”

“Have you?”

“No.”

She lets out an irritated huff and shakes her head with dismay. “We have an Endurance call with the Prime Minister of New Zealand in forty-five minutes and I do not know enough about the technology to step in for Christian. I need him to come into the office.”

“Okay, I’ll get ahold of him. Hold on.” Taking a few steps away, I once again pull out my phone, but this time, I call Taylor. It rings several times before finally picking up.

“I’m sorry, but the person you have called has a voicemail box that has not been set up yet…”

I hang up and feel a strange sense of foreboding come over me. Ros starts to speak, but I move past her. Several questing glances come my way as I move through the office. The only thing I focus on is the man sitting at the desk next to my door.

“Evan, have you heard from Taylor?” I ask.

He glances up at me, frowning, but not looking alarmed. “Not today.”

“Have any of you?”

The other members of my security team glance between one another, the no clear on each of their faces, and a chill moves up my spine. I turn back to Evan.

“I need you to take me to Escala.”

He looks as though he doesn’t believe me. “Escala? Are you… sure?”

“Yes. Now.”

There’s no argument. He picks up his jacket and follows me to the car, along with the rest of my security team. I promise Ros I’ll call her the second I find him, then wait until we’re in the car before I call Elliot. I get his voicemail, and Kate’s, which puts me in a kind of tailspin until I finally call Luke, just to have someone to calm me down.

“Hey, hold on,” he answers in a rushed voice that gets louder as he talks to whoever he’s with. “I need you animals to keep it down while I take this super secret, private phone call with the CEO’s wife.” The joke in his voice is met with the muffled sound of laughter.

“Careful though,” I hear Welch say in the background. “I’ve known Grey for years and there’s nothing that triggers that man more than someone coming onto his wife. Did you hear about the guy who got fired because he glanced at her ass when she was walking out of his office?”

“Did you hear about the eight billion times I got fired because she can’t keep her mitts off me?” He laughs as his attention returns to me. “What’s up, Ana?”

“Why wouldn’t Taylor be answering my calls?”

The merriment in his tone disappears like a snap of his fingers, turning heavy and serious with the very next word out of his mouth. “What happened?”

It takes almost the entire drive to Escala to get him caught up on everything that’s happened since I last spoke with him. He doesn’t say anything when I give him the bad news we’d gotten from the doctor or when I tell him about Christian’s tirade through our apartment the night before. He just listens until my car dips into the shadows of the parking garage, and I let my darkest fear escape.

“You don’t think he’d hurt himself, do you?”

“No,” Luke says, emphatically.

“I keep having this horrible thought that he got into his car while he was drinking and…”

“There’s no way. He loves that car way too much.”

“Luke…”

“Ana, I’m sure he’s fine. He would never do anything that would separate himself from you, no matter how low he got. He’d never leave you.”

“Yeah.” The word comes out in a breath, but it’s firm. I believe him, and I cling to that belief as we pull into a parking spot and Evan turns the key out of the ignition. “We’re here, I’ve gotta go.”

“Keep me updated, okay?”

“Yeah. Bye, Luke.” I hang up and toss my phone back into my purse as I follow my security team through the garage. Christian’s Lamborghini is parked exactly where it should be, which at the very least, assuages the worst of my fears. It’s the not knowing what I’m about to walk into that plagues me the entire ride up the elevator.

But the uncertainty turns out to be so much better than the reality.

At first, I think the scene that greets us through the opening elevator doors is just a horrible, PTSD flashback. The table in the center of the foyer has been knocked over and is now lying in a pool of water, surrounded by broken china and scattered flowers. There’s a body shaped indentation in the drywall opposite from us, and on the metal edge of the elevator, there’s a smudged, bloody handprint. As though someone had tried to cling to the wall and had been dragged inside.

The truth of what’s in front of me sinks in only when my security team starts to react. Evan shouts orders to get me back to the car and several hands reach out, either for me or for the elevator buttons. In a panic, I fight through them all and run into the apartment.

“Christian!” My voice echos through the empty foyer, but I hear a weak groan respond from the living room. My heart thuds with relief and I sprint towards the sound. The thud dies when I find it’s source is Taylor.

He’s beaten. Badly. The bruises on his face are dark enough that they have to be several hours old and the blood on his face and shirt has dried, making his appearance shockingly more gruesome. His right wrist is handcuffed to the breakfast bar, and his body lies lip against the wall.

I run to him just as the calls of alarm from my security team echo behind me. He groans when I take his battered face in my hands, but there’s life in his eyes.

“Where’s Christian?” I manage to say. He turns to look at Evan, now towering over me, moaning with pain at each movement. The word he barks out is barely recognizable.

“Cameras.”

With a nod, Evan and Smith move back into the foyer towards the security office, while Harper and Wyatt start administering first aid for Taylor. I watch them in a daze, my mind repeating the same question over and over again.

Where is he?

“Christian!” My voice doesn’t echo this time, but it sounds hollow. I scramble back to my feet and move toward our bedroom, frantically pulling back the blanket on the bed even though it’s clearly empty, before tearing through our closet and bathroom. He isn’t in his office, he isn’t in the library, he isn’t in the bathroom, or the laundry room… He isn’t anywhere. I call his name again and again as I move through the downstairs, but there’s no answer. I’m just about to start upstairs when I hear a distant call of triumph from the security office.

“Found it,” Evan says, and I start at a dead run for the foyer. I skid through the door to find Smith seated behind the main display screen for the security cameras, rewinding through the footage.

“What is it?” I ask, panting slightly as I come up behind his chair.

“Someone put the override code in at 2:26 this morning,” Evan explains, and the moment he does, the footage stops. I watch in horror as the elevator doors shown in the stream from the foyer roll open and a group of six men, all dressed in identical black with masks covering their faces, file into my apartment. We can follow them through the 2^nd second camera in the living room, where they break into two groups. Three of them head upstairs, the other three are confronted by Taylor.

He’s not ready for them. He’s barefoot and dressed in a t-shirt and flannel bottoms. There isn’t a gun in his hand. Against the three hulking figures, dressed in tactical gear and fully prepared for the fight, he never stood a chance, and the fight isn’t pleasant to watch. They surround him almost immediately and the blows he takes are horrifying. The brutality continues for over a minute, until the other group rejoins the first, and they all drag Taylor to the breakfast bar where he’s currently handcuffed

Once they have him secured, the six of them move together into the hallway that leads to my bedroom.

There aren’t any cameras in our room, so I have no way of knowing what happens to Christian until several minutes have passed and they’re dragging him into the hallway. He looks dazed and unsteady as he tries to get the men off him. But once he sees Taylor, something changes in him that makes him more alert and more coordinated. Maybe it’s fear, maybe it’s adrenaline, maybe it’s fury, but as Christian starts to fight the scene devolves into an absolute nightmare.

I’ve seen Christian angry. I’ve seen Christian fight. But I’ve never seen him in a rage like he is on the screen before me. The violence between him and his attackers is terrifying and almost too sickening to watch. They try to overwhelm him in the same way they did to Taylor, but he moves quicker and avoids being closed in. Somehow, he manages to maneuver in a way that keeps the match-ups one on one, and in those scenarios he has the upper hand. As they adapt though, the match-ups start becoming more and more uneven until it’s just six on one.

The harder he fights back, the harder they do. And it makes what they did to Taylor look kind.

The crack on the wall I’d seen when we came in happens when Christian grabs one of the men trying to subdue him and launches him against it. But while that man falls unceremoniously to the floor, another man comes up and grabs Christian from behind. They struggle with one another until another masked man takes advantage and punches Christian, hard, across the jaw. He stumbles into another man who shoves him roughly further into the foyer, sending him tumbling over the table I’d seen lying on the floor.

Christian rolls through the broken bits of the vase, bloodied and clearly in pain. It doesn’t stop them. Two of the men grab him by the arms and wrench him off the floor enough to drag him back to the elevator. With a last, desperate effort, he grabs hold of the metal edge on the elevator and clings to it for dear life. But his hands are slick with blood, and they slip when the men holding onto him yank harder.

Then the elevator doors close, and he disappears.

I only realize after I nearly collapse on the floor that I’d been holding my breath. 

“Mrs. Grey,” Evan says, moving to grab onto me while I wobble unsteadily in front of the monitors. I can barely feel his arms around me. Barely hear the calls he makes for someone to bring me something to drink. 

Still unsteady on my feet, I turn to Smith, and blink at him. “What do we do now?” 

“I-uh…” 

“We find out where they took him,” an unexpected voice interrupts from behind me. I turn and see Luke hovering in the doorway, looking ashen faced as his eyes practically beg for me to understand how much he feels the pain I’m still too numb to experience, and that he’s here to do whatever he can to stop it. 

“Sawyer,” Evan says, mirroring my surprise. I find my balance as Luke moves into the room, so Evan’s hands fall from my arms and we part to make room for my best friend. He looks down at Smith. 

“Get out of the way.” 

“Sawyer, you’re not–”

“Get out of my fucking way.” Smith blanches under the threat in Luke’s voice, but he doesn’t move until Evan intervenes. 

“Let him in,” he says. With a slightly resentful roll of his eyes, Smith gets up from his seat and Luke slides in to replace him. He doesn’t hesitate. His fingers start to fly over the keyboard, and boxes pop-up on the screen in front of him that fill with code that he seems to understand more than I do. 

“They got the footage in the garage,” he says robotically, so focused on what’s in front of him that I can’t be certain if he’s communicating with me or just mindlessly parroting what he sees. “They had the code for the elevator, so that probably means they have access to the security systems Escala has in place. And if they do, they know she’s here right now.” 

“Then we’re in code black,” Evan says. He turns to me. “Mrs. Grey, I’m going to need you to return to the main residence immediately.” 

He waits for me to respond, but I don’t. Not even when he calls my name three more times. While Luke continues whatever he’s trying to do through our system, I stare at the paused security footage that has just unravelled my entire world. It’s not the elevators that represent the last place I saw him, or even the trail of blood that leads there that has my attention so captivated. It’s the time stamp in the bottom right hand corner.

2:37 AM.

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