Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 208

Chapter 208

“I’ve got you.” Her voice came out barely a sound. “I’m here. I’ve got you.”

Monica did not lift her head. She pressed harder against her father’s chest.

“He saved me, Mum.” Her voice came out broken and small and direct, like she needed Lucia to understand this specific fact above all others. “He came for me and he saved me.”

Lucia held her tighter.

Alexander was on the other side of the room. She heard his voice before she could see through her own tears, heard him saying Lena’s name, heard Lena saying Dad in a voice that cracked completely on the single syllable. She heard the sound of him pulling his daughter in, heard Lena finally stop being the person holding everything together because someone else was there to do it now.

The paramedics came down the stairs behind them.

One of them knelt beside Marco. Checked. Looked up at his colleague. A small, almost invisible shake of the head that Lucia saw from across the room and felt like something physical.

Gone. Already gone.

“Ma’am.” A gentle hand on her shoulder. “We need to assess your daughter.”

Lucia loosened her hold on Monica only enough for the paramedic to check her. She did not let go entirely. She could not.

From behind her came the sound of handcuffs and Margaret’s voice beginning.

“I didn’t want this.” Margaret’s voice climbed as the officers pulled her to her feet. “I didn’t want any of this to end like this. He wasn’t supposed to be here. He wasn’t supposed to get in the way.”

Nobody responded.

“She drove him to this.” Margaret’s voice was rising toward something that didn’t sound entirely like a person anymore. “Lucia destroyed his life. She destroyed our marriage. She turned his own children against him and he was so broken and desperate that he followed me here and put himself in front of a gun.” Her voice broke on the last word and then kept going. “That is on her. That is Lucia’s fault.”

One of the officers took her arm toward the stairs.

Margaret pulled against it. Her eyes found Lucia across the room.

“You did this.” Her voice came out shaking and certain. “Every single thing that happened in this room is because of you. Your revenge. Your need to take everything. You broke him. I just finished it.”

“Margaret Hart.” An officer’s voice, flat and professional. “You are under arrest for kidnapping, assault, and the murder of Marco Hart. You have the right to remain silent.”

“He was my husband.” Her voice cracked through the words. “He was my husband and I loved him and she took him from me the same way she took everything. Look at what she made me do.”

They got her to the stairs. Her voice kept coming down from above as they moved her through the building, growing fainter as distance took it. Still blaming. Still insisting. Still building the story she needed to survive what she had done.

Then she was gone.

The basement went quiet.

Monica had finally lifted her head from Marco’s chest. She was looking at his face with an expression that was too complicated and too complete for any description to hold. Her cheek was still bruised. Her wrists were raw. Her hair was matted. She looked like six days of everything. And she was looking at her father’s face with an expression that said she was memorising it.

“He smiled at me,” Monica said to no one in particular. Her voice was almost steady. “Before he went. He found his smile.”

Lucia pressed her lips to her daughter’s hair and could not speak.

On the other side of the room Alexander sat on the concrete floor with Lena in his arms, his chin on her head,

312

Five days.

Alexander stood at the window of the sitting room and looked at the garden without seeing it. Five days si Monica and Lena had walked out of the house with shopping bags and bodyguards and come home to nobody. Five days of FBI agents in his study, phones ringing at all hours, leads dissolving into dead ends, resources deployed across the city that had found nothing except an empty warehouse and a television

screen.

Five days and his daughters were still gone.

Behind him, the room was full of people who were trying. Agents with laptops open on the coffee table. David coordinating with investigators on his phone in the corner. Two detectives from the precinct sitting across from each other with files spread between them.

All of it producing nothing.

Alexander turned from the window and looked at Lucia.

She was curled on the couch with her knees pulled up, Lena’s sweater in her arms, Monica’s small jacket pressed against her chest. She had found them yesterday in the girls’ rooms and brought them downstairs and had not put them down since. Her eyes were swollen past the point where crying looked like anything specific. They were just swollen. Red and raw and staring at the carpet with the fixed attention of someone whose mind had gone somewhere the body couldn’t follow.

Ria was sitting on the floor beside the couch with her back against it. She had stopped talking much three days ago. She answered when spoken to directly. Otherwise she sat with her phone in her lap refreshing news feeds that never carried the right news, her face carrying something Alexander recognized as the expression a person wore when they were too exhausted to feel anything new but not exhausted enough to stop. Lucas was in the armchair across the room, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, hands clasped, jaw locked. He had not cried in front of anyone since the first night. Alexander could see what that was costing him in the set of his shoulders and the way he blinked too deliberately when someone said his sisters’ names. Alexander looked at his family falling apart across the furniture of his sitting room and felt the specific weight of having promised them safety and not delivered it.

He had resources that most governments didn’t have. He had contacts in law enforcement, intelligence, private investigation, across twelve countries. He had spent five days throwing everything available at this and his daughters were still in a room he could not find, with a person he could not identify with certainty, and he did not know if they were cold or hungry or hurt or worse.

He was failing them.

The thought lived in him now like something with weight and teeth. Not the sharp grief of the first day. Something slower and more permanent. The quiet, grinding understanding that he had stood in this house and made promises and the promises had not held.

One of the agents, Morrison, was talking again. Alexander turned back into the room and made himself listen. “The IP trace from the warehouse television has come back through three separate servers in two different countries.” Morrison’s voice was level and professional and Alexander appreciated that even as it told him nothing useful. “We’re still working through the routing but it’s going to take time.”

“We don’t have time,” Alexander said. His voice came out quiet.

“Sir, I understand…”

“My daughter cuts herself when she’s frightened.” He said it plainly, without framing, letting it sit in the room the way it needed to. “She has been managing that for months with therapy and medication and the specific safety of knowing where she is and who is with her. She has been in an unknown location for five days.” He looked at Morrison steadily. “I need you to understand what five days means for her specifically. Not as a statistic. For her.”

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