Chapter 3 - THE KING’S FURY AND THE DESPERATE SEARCH THROUGH THE SHADOWS OF AN EMPIRE
Roman stood in the middle of his office,
the walls lined with books he had never read and awards he had bought with influence.
His head of security,
a man named Elias who looked like he was carved from granite,
stood at attention near the door.
"What do you mean she's gone?"
Roman’s voice was a low,
dangerous rumble,
like the sound of tectonic plates shifting.
"The car is gone,"
Elias reported,
his face a mask of professionalism despite the sweat on his brow.
"She bypassed the main gate,"
"and she knew the blind spots of the cameras."
"She didn't do this on a whim,
sir."
Roman swept his arm across his desk,
sending a laptop and a gold pen set crashing to the floor.
"She is eight months pregnant!"
"She is out in a blizzard,"
"and you're telling me she outsmarted my entire security team?"
Elias didn't blink.
"She's been planning this for a long time,"
"Mr. Carter."
"We found a burner phone in the trash behind the garage,"
"and it looks like she had help."
Roman turned to the window,
his reflection staring back at him,
haggard and sharp.
He thought of Claire,
of the way she had laughed when he told her Savannah was "taken care of."
He felt a surge of loathing for the woman he had spent the night with.
She was a distraction,
a toy,
and now that toy had cost him the only thing that gave his life meaning.
He didn't love Savannah in the way most men loved their wives;
he loved her as a possession,
as the purest thing he owned,
the one part of his life that wasn't stained by the blood on his hands.
And now the purity was gone,
fled into the filth of the world he had tried to protect her from.
"Call the hospitals,"
he ordered,
"check every clinic,"
"every private doctor,"
"every midwife in the state."
"If she goes into labor,
I want to know before she even hits the delivery room."
"And find out who she's been talking to."
"Start with Margaret."
The interrogation of the housekeeper had been brutal,
not in physical violence,
but in the psychological pressure Roman excelled at.
He had sat across from her in the kitchen,
the smell of burnt cookies still in the air.
"Where is she,
Margaret?"
he had asked,
his voice deceptively soft.
"I don't know,
sir,"
she had replied,
her hands trembling as she wiped the counter.
"She didn't tell me where she was going."
"She just said she couldn't stay."
"Why?"
"Why couldn't she stay?"
Margaret had looked up then,
her eyes meeting his with a spark of defiance he hadn't expected.
"Because she saw you,
Mr. Carter."
"She saw the truth,"
"and a woman like Savannah can only live a lie for so long."
Roman had left the room before he did something he would regret.
He wasn't a man who hit women,
but the urge to destroy everything around him was overwhelming.
He paced the hallway,
his mind racing.
She would need money.
She would need medical care.
She would need a place to hide.
He started thinking like a predator,
tracing the steps a prey would take to escape.
But Savannah wasn't prey;
she was the person who knew him best.
She knew how he thought,
how he hunted,
and how he leveraged power.
She wouldn't go to her friends,
because he owned them.
She wouldn't go to her family,
because they were gone.
She was alone in a city of millions,
and yet,
she had managed to vanish like smoke in a gale.
He pulled out his phone and dialed Claire.
"It's over,"
he said,
not waiting for her to greet him.
"Roman,
darling,
what are you—"
"Don't call me,"
"don't come to my office,"
"don't exist to me anymore."
"If I find out you had anything to do with her leaving,"
"I will make sure you never work in this city again."
He hung up,
feeling a grim satisfaction at the silence that followed.
But the satisfaction was short-lived.
He looked at the empty nursery again,
the silence of the house pressing in on his ears.
He realized,
with a sinking feeling in his gut,
that Savannah hadn't just left him.
She had erased him.
And Roman Carter,
May you like
the man who feared nothing,
was suddenly terrified of the dark.
Related Stories
