Lover at Last (Black Dagger Brotherhood #11)(156)
Author: J.R. Ward

"Hola. This is Sola’s grandmother. I am trying to reach…an Assail…please?" Assail stopped dead in the middle of his living room. "Please call me back now? Thank you – "

With a feeling of dread, he cut the message off and hit Call Back.

One ring. Two rings –

"¿Hola?"

Indeed, he didn’t know her name. "This is Assail, madam. Are you all right?"

"No, no – I am not. I found your number on her bedside table so I call. There is something wrong."

He gripped his iPhone hard. "Tell me."

"She is gone. She came home, but then she leave out the door right after she arrived – I hear her go? Except all of her things, her backpack, her car, it is all here. I was sleeping and I hear downstairs, someone is moving. I call out her name and no one answered – then I hear this hard noise – loud sound – and so I come down. The front door is open, and I fear she has been taken – I do no know what to do. She always told me, we do not call the police. I do not know – "

"Shh, it is all right. You did the correct thing. I’m coming directly."

Assail ran to the front door without bothering to communicate with the twins; nothing was on his mind except getting over to that little house as fast as he could.

A second was all it took to dematerialize, and as he resumed form in the front yard, he thought that of all the scenarios he’d run through in his mind for coming back, this was not it.

As the grandmother reported, the Audi was parked on the street at the end of the walkway. Just where it had been. But what was of note? There was a scramble of messy footfalls disturbing the snow, the trail crossing the lawn to the street in a diagonal pattern.

She’s been kidnapped, Assail thought.

Goddamn it.

Jogging up the squat steps, he hit the doorbell and stamped his feet. The idea that someone had taken his female –

The door opened and the woman on the other side was visibly shaken. And then she seemed further taken aback as she took him in with her eyes. "You are…Assail?"

"Yes. Please let me in, madam, and I shall be of aid to you."

"You are not the man who came before."

"Not that you saw, madam. Now, please, let me in."

As Marisol’s grandmother stepped aside, she lamented, "Oh, I do not know where she is. Mãe de Deus, she is gone, gone…."

He glanced around the tidy little living room, and then stalked out into the kitchen to look at the back door. Intact. Opening it wide, he leaned out. No footprints other than those he’d left a week ago. Closing things back up and locking the dead bolt, he returned to her grandmother.

"You were upstairs?"

"Si. In the bed. As I said, I was asleep. I hear her come in, but I was half-awake. Then I hear…that sound, of someone falling. I say I come down, then the front door opens."

"Did you see a car drive off?"

"Si. But it was very far away, and the license plate – nothing."

"How long ago?"

"I called you fifteen, maybe twenty minutes after. I went to her room and looked around – that is where I found the napkin with your number on it."

"Has anyone called?"

"No one."

He checked his watch, and then grew concerned about how pale the elderly woman was. "Here, madam, sit down."

As he settled her onto the floral couch in the living room, she took out a dainty handkerchief and pressed it to her eyes. "She is my life."

Assail tried to remember how humans addressed their superiors. "Mrs. – ah, Mrs…."

"Carvalho. My husband was Brazilian. I am Yesenia Carvalho."

"Mrs. Carvalho, I need to ask you some questions."

"Can you help me? My granddaughter is – "

"Look into my eyes." When the woman did, he said in a low voice, "There is nothing I will not do to bring her back. Do you understand what I’m saying."

As he sent his intention out into the air between him, Mrs. Carvalho’s eyes narrowed. Then, after a moment, she calmed and nodded once – as if she approved of his means, though there was a good chance they were going to be violent. "What do you need to know?"

"Is there anyone you can think of who would want to hurt her?"

"She is a good girl. She works at an office nights. She keeps to herself."

So Marisol hadn’t told her grandmother anything about what she really did. This was good. "Does she have any assets?"

"Money, you mean?"

"Yes."

"We are simple people." She eyed his handmade, tailored clothes. "We have nothing but this house."

Somehow he doubted that, even though he knew little of his woman’s life: He found it hard to believe she hadn’t made some cash doing what she did – and she certainly didn’t have to pay taxes on the kind of income she’d been bringing in from the likes of Benloise.

But he feared that a ransom call was not going to be forthcoming.

"I do not know what to do."

"Mrs. Carvalho, I do not want you to worry." He got to his feet. "I shall handle this promptly."

Her eyes narrowed again, belying an intelligence that made him think of her granddaughter. "You know who did this, do you?"

Assail bowed low as a measure of respect. "I shall bring her back to you."

The question was how many people he was going to have to kill to get that done – and whether Marisol herself was going to be alive at the end of it.

The mere thought of bodily harm to that woman had him growling in his throat, his fangs descending, the civilized part of him shedding as the skin from a cobra.

Whilst Assail left the modest house, he had a feeling what this was all about, and if he was right? Even just twenty minutes into the kidnapping, he might well be too late.

In which case, a certain business associate of his was going to learn new lessons in pain.

And Assail was going to be the man’s teacher.

Chapter Eighty

Layla stayed in the Mercedes. It was warm in the interior, and the seat was comfortable, and she felt safe within the confines of the great steel cage around her. And she had a landscape of sorts to ponder: The headlights shone brightly in front of the car, the beams reaching out into the night quite some distance before fading.

After a while, flurries began to float downward through the illumination, their lazy, circuitous routes suggesting that they didn’t want their descent from the clouds above to end.

As she sat in silence, cycling the engine on and off as Qhuinn had taught her to do during cold weather, her mind was not blank. No, her mind was not empty at all. Although she stared straight ahead and took note of the silent snowfall, and the straightaway of the road, and the peaceful farmland…what she saw was that fighter. That traitor.