“Fuck no, Nova. You are not going to throw something like that at me like a goddamn bomb and then refuse to talk about it.” I was breathing hard, my anger boiling so hot, a red haze grew around my vision. “Who told you that?” As soon as she spoke their name, the person who had dared to tell her such a ridiculous lie was dead.
“Are you denying it?” she shot back.
“Who?”
She pulled into Hannigans’ parking lot and turned off the car, refusing to answer me. “Have a safe flight,” she said with a sugary-sweet smile. “I guess I’ll see you around.”
“See me around?” I grabbed the back of her neck, jerking her toward me. “You think you’re just going to ‘see me around’? You are my fucking heart, Nova. You are my life. My soul. The world doesn’t revolve unless you are with me. I won’t be seeing you around—I will see you everywhere. And as soon as you’re eighteen, you will be beside me, day and night.”
I touched my lips to her ear and felt her shiver. Knowing I was making her body react to me, my cock nearly tore through the seam of my pants, I was so hard for her. “Beside me. Beneath me. On top of me. Day. And. Night.”
20
Ryan
The conference room was eerily silent despite every seat at the long table being occupied. The only sound was the heavy breathing of the men who sat nervously before Pop as he stood facing them all, his face set in hard lines.
“Six men are on duty on Sundays. Two of you manning the lobby, two patrolling the floors, and two of you watching the security camera feeds.” His hands slapped down onto the conference table, the sound like a crack of thunder just as lightning struck.
From where I stood in the corner with Zio, I watched every man at the table flinch, as if they had each been physically slapped, sweat beading on their foreheads. Only six of the thirty men had been on duty, but they rotated weekends in six-man intervals since a full crew had never been needed on the weekends.
Obviously, we had been proven wrong, though.
Someone had hacked our CCTV feed, so the two men watching the screens hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary when my office had been ransacked. The two men who had been stationed in the lobby, their desk facing the revolving front doors, hadn’t seen anyone come or go except for my personal assistant, who had come in for the files she’d forgotten the night before that she needed to prep for a meeting later in the week. And the two men who spent the entire shift walking each floor of the building had been a good ten floors below mine at the time.
No other employees besides those seven people—the security guards and my personal assistant—had even been in the building. So, either someone was lying and had gone frantically looking through my office for something…
Or they had helped them do it.
The only question was, which one?
But the craziest thing about the entire situation was that, despite all the destruction done to the office, everything was accounted for. And even if they had stolen something, there was nothing in any of the files in either CeCe’s office or my own that anyone would actually want. Especially not one of our enemies.
If they had wanted details on a certain employee, they would have gone looking in the human resources offices. If they wanted information on a construction project, past or present, they would have gone to that floor. Not mine.
The way things had been shredded and broken, the violent way everything had been upended and smashed, felt personal. Someone had been looking for something about me specifically, and my office was the only place they could have easily gotten it.
Until we found out what was going on, my family had added extra security measures to not only my detail, but my sister’s and cousins’ as well. I’d called Jet myself the night before and told him to keep Nova in sight at all times. If someone was out to hurt me, everyone knew the only way to accomplish that was through her.
While Pop continued to make the security guards tremble in fear, I went over my office again in my memory, looking for anything I might have missed. Given the chaos of the room, it was hard to figure out if anything in particular had been the focus.
The only personal items I had were two pictures. One from when Nova was younger that someone had taken at some Hannigan celebration I’d surprised her by showing up at. Her mom had snapped the picture of Nova jumping into my arms and emailed it to Mom, who had printed it out and framed it for me.
That frame had been shattered as if someone had thrown it against the wall and then stomped it with a heavy, booted foot. And the other picture…
“Fuck,” I muttered, squeezing the bridge of my nose as a headache began to pound behind my eyeballs.
“What?” Zio asked in a quiet voice.
“The picture of Ciana and me,” I muttered, dropping my hand and clenching my fingers into a fist. “It was missing. I didn’t realize it at first, but now that I’ve had time to absorb it all, I remembered that I hadn’t seen it. Not even the frame.”
My uncle’s entire body seemed to turn to steel, his blue eyes so like four of his five children looking cold as ice. “The one of you and her at her nursing school graduation?”
I nodded, thrusting my hands into my pockets. “Tighten her security even more.”
“I’m already on it,” he growled, stomping out of the conference room.
I watched him go before turning my gaze back to Pop. He lifted his brow, but I shook my head, letting him know I’d tell him when we were done here.
If someone were going to try to hurt me, though, why they would take the picture of me with Ciana and not the one of me with Nova was beyond me. Everyone who even presumed to know me knew Nova was my weakness. Yes, I was closer to Ciana than any of my other cousins, and making me her honorary twin when we were little kids had ensured a tight bond between us.
But Nova was my heart.
She could bring me to my knees with nothing more than a single tear.
Leaving her was always hard, but driving away from her the previous evening had been equivalent to torture. Nothing had been resolved between us. She was still angry with me, still hurting. But there was no time to explain, to tell her everything she needed me to say.
When I’d texted her once the jet had touched down at the airport, she hadn’t responded. Nor had she picked up when I’d called her that morning before she was to leave for school. Not getting to hear her voice or see her words on my phone was causing a tornado effect inside my head. Swirling everything around until nothing was where it should be, tearing my brain apart until I went mad from it.
And it hadn’t even been twenty-four hours since I’d seen her, damn it.
The meeting with the security guards lasted another hour, but no one cracked under the pressure of Pop’s vicious questioning. Frustrated, I returned to my office, where CeCe was still working on cleaning up the mess with three of our custodians. “Out,” I barked to the cleaning crew. “Return in two hours.”
As the last of the men exited the room, CeCe straightened and smoothed her hands over her black pencil skirt. The white blouse she wore was cut lower than she typically wore, her hair pulled into her typical knot at the back of her head that I was accustomed to seeing it in.