Something uneasy settles in my gut.
“Rose?”
I call her name as I walk down the hall, checking the other rooms. I call her name again, but there’s no response, so I take the stairs two at a time again, speeding through the downstairs rooms. I almost run into Lachlan as I round a corner.
“Aiden? What’s wrong?”
I ignore him and walk into the library. “Rose?”
The chair is empty. No books lying out.
I keep searching, vaguely aware of my brothers calling her name too.
But she’s not here. Rose isn’t here.
She’s gone.
It feels like there’s fire in my lungs. My heart pounds so hard I can feel my pulse in my neck, hot and fast. Standing in the entryway, the windows illuminated by the sun, I’m nearly blinded by the light and the fear that suddenly invades me.
Rose has been taken.
She’s gone, stolen, and I know exactly who the fuck did it. That fucking son of a bitch Dmitri.
I’m going to kill him.
“We need a plan,” Lachlan says shortly, walking around the corner from wherever he was looking. “All of us, now.”
“We can’t go to the Assembly,” Connor says, pushing a hand through his hair. The marks on his skin from the attack the other night have faded a bit, but they’re still visible. “They just exonerated Dmitri.”
“If we go after him and kill him, we’ll be defying the Assembly,” Finn adds uneasily. “They won’t stand for that.”
“We could lose everything. Our empire and our lives,” Lachlan murmurs.
“I don’t care.” I stare at the front door and imagine what it must have been like for Rose.
Was she asleep when they came?
She was supposed to rest. She would have been resting, waiting for me. Maybe she was waiting to eat too. Maybe she was just lying down, one hand on her stomach, thinking about the future the same way I did. Maybe she was smiling to herself. Maybe she was thinking about baby names.
And then Dmitri’s people came in and stole her. They took her from me.
“My wife is in danger,” I say quietly. The rage is like poison in my voice, dripping dangerously as I speak. “I’m going to protect her. I’m going, damn the consequences. She’s my wife.”
My brothers are quiet.
We all know what this could mean. We know the reality, the consequences. If we do this and we’re condemned, we’ll have to run. If we even survive, we’ll have to run so far they can never find us.
“Then we go,” Connor finally says. I knew he would be the first. I know he likes Rose. He has a soft spot for women in need, maybe more than the rest of us.
Finn nods. “We go.”
Lachlan glances between the two of them before turning his gaze to me, and then he nods once.
“We all go,” he says, his voice steady. “We protect our own. Rose is one of ours. So we’ll do whatever we have to.”
She’s family. She is my woman, my wife. It’s not a question. This happens now.
“Thank you,” I say. It’s all that needs to be said, a hundred things contained in those two words.
