Corrupted Chaos: An Enemies to Lovers Forced Proximity Romance (Tarnished Empire)
Corrupted Chaos: Chapter 25

I was well aware that Lucas wouldn’t be coming into the office, but Izzy flat out didn’t show. I’d called my security for the last time Sunday night, and they’d confirmed her whereabouts. I’d received no update other than that she was safe. So I’d tried not to check my security on her.

Truth be told, I had fucking facial recognition notifications set up everywhere for her, I could hack her computer or her phone, and I contemplated doing all of it.

But she’d asked for time. She wanted privacy for her and her friend. I tried to understand it. I tried to give her that.

She deserved that after I saw the way she held her friend, after I saw the look of terror on her face. Babying her wouldn’t help. She didn’t want it anyway. She needed and wanted to feel like I trusted her to handle it.

I did. I had to. Or at least I was going to try to.

Except now she hadn’t shown up to work, and it was half past her normal start time.

I grumbled to my brother on the phone about it.

“Wait. You went to the hospital to drop off candy canes?” my brother asked again.

“You want me to hang up on you or finish the story?” I shoved away from my desk and wondered what the hell I was doing in a corporate office anyway. I could be at home where I had five screens set up instead of four and be getting much more done.

Especially considering all I was doing was walking out my damn office door to check to see if she’d shown up.

“Well, did you call her?”

“No.” I wasn’t going to either. I was becoming a goddamn stalker. I’d checked the fucking hospital records just to make sure I could ease the pain in her eyes instead of having her wait for the nurses to give her the update. Let’s be honest, those nurses weren’t giving updates fast enough in my opinion, anyway.

She needed time to digest her feelings for me, and I probably needed the same.

Bastian snickered over the phone, and then I heard him repeat everything to his wife.

“Why are you telling Morina about the candy canes?” I asked, my voice laced with anger. He was purposely trying to piss me off.

“Because you got it bad. Haven’t you been following Izzy around for years?” Then he muffled the phone again to tell Morina that indeed it was Izzy. I hated that everyone knew her from her undercover work, and now she was working directly under me, making my life a living hell.

“I haven’t followed anything she’s been doing.” That was a bald-faced lie. I was literally going cold turkey on checking her shit. “I don’t know why I told you any of this.”

“Because I’m your big brother and you’ve got no one else to tell.”

“I could have called Dante.” I threw out our cousin’s name because he would have listened to me be a pussy too.

“Yeah, but he would have told you the same thing I’m about to tell you, and it’s that you’d better stop fucking around if you like her. Which you do if you brought her candy canes, dumbass.”

“I’m going.”

“My wife says Izzy wouldn’t miss work. Call her,” Bastian demanded, authority in his voice now. “Don’t be an idiot, Cade.”

We’d been businessmen a long time, but the feelings we got sometimes, they had us breaking protocol, breaking the rules, and following our gut.

I hung up and gave in to calling her.

Of course, her phone was off.

I had half a mind to hack it and see what she was doing before it went dead. Instead, I went into my security monitoring system to check Liberty Greene Apartments. I’d been so damn proud when I turned her alert off after replaceing that indeed one of the wires for the apartment building had been frayed. The chief confirmed it with me, and it’d been a firm reminder that I didn’t need to stalk any girl, that I was getting too twisted up with her.

Yet, the black screen was there again.

This time, I swore fluidly at myself for ever being fooled. I called the security team I had following Izzy. “What’s the deal with Liberty Greene Apartments’ cameras?”

“Huh, boss?” He sounded half asleep.

What the fuck?

“Are you doing your job right now? Because it sounds like you’re just getting out of bed.”

The silence that stretched over the phone was too long.

“What the hell is going on?”

“So, we were going to tell you this morning that we lost her last night. She snuck out of the hospital, but we saw her in her apartment later that night, so we thought we’d get some rest with the cameras working and all, but now we’re noticing—”

It’s the fear that strikes lightning fast through a body when they realize they’ve potentially lost the one they care about that’s stifling. I’d had it before with family.

With Izzy, it was different. More fierce, more brutal, like a damn wrecking ball flying in and knocking the breath from me.

“You’re dead if she’s gone.” I hung up on him, not having the time to spare on the idiots that should have taken this job more seriously.

I only had myself to blame, though. I’d let someone do the job that should have only been mine. I’d let her sway me away from her when I should have been making the rules. She could have space from everyone else but not me.

That’s what I should have told her. There was no more privacy when it came to me.

I was her person from now on. I should have known that from the very beginning and I cursed myself for not getting my head right in the first place. I knew better than to listen to her, but she was my glitch, my downfall, and she’d spread like a virus, corrupting every part of me.

Love made a person stupid. And I loved her.

I’d been a damn fool the night before, turning off all my devices and trying to rid myself of my newest addiction of checking up on her. I went to work out. I didn’t bother going to my penthouse’s gym but instead ran through the streets without my phone. I didn’t need a distraction, and sometimes that was what all my devices were.

I enjoyed the fresh cool air and let the breeze clear my head and fill my lungs.

Now, as I sat there, I couldn’t seem to get any air at all.

If she’d been taken, it’d be on me.

Fuck.

I called her phone again. No answer. All bets were off then. It only took me five minutes to see that she’d gone back into her files. That someone was watching her every move. Cameras in her apartment building had been hacked, this time much faster and not as clean.

Lucas’s OD made sense now. Her cameras going out made sense.

Everything made too much damn sense.

And I’d been too focused on my emotions for her that I hadn’t noticed. Been too busy fucking her to see what was right in front of my face.

In another life, I would have welcomed the threat to our power. Albanians wanted to take over—as if they stood a chance. And they were deliberately moving that way in confidence behind our backs, like we wouldn’t be ready.

I called my brother and Dante as I skirted around my desk and sped out of the building. Both of them needed to know what was about to happen.

I informed them of the Albanians trying to hack the election and pushed the data as fast as I could through a secure text to them.

I commanded both of them on the phone. “I’m on my way to Izzy’s. You two need to work with the Stonewoods and the bratva to make sure the Albanians keep their shit in line for this election.”

Dante added, “What’s Izzy have to do with it?”

“She’s the one who found it.”

“Before you?” Bastian’s attention was piqued now.

“Fuck off. The cybersecurity was already in place. We’d have caught the issue, but Izzy stumbled upon it last week. For some reason, she didn’t inform me. And they’re watching her. Her friend OD’d, but it had to have been a hit.”

“Shit. Get over to her house and protect your girl then,” Bastian grumbled.

Dante halted the conversation. “His girl? What the hell does that mean? If you’re fucking around with Izzy, Cade—”

“Then what?” I got in my car and slammed the door harder than necessary. No one was going to warn me off my girl.

My girl? When had she become that?

“That’s my sister-in-law,” he bellowed into the phone. “Wet your dick somewhere else.”

“Watch your mouth. It’s not just that with her.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Dante swore while Bastian mumbled in Italian.

“I don’t have time for either of your shit. I just told you we have an election on the line and Albanians going against our alliance. She’s not safe until we set it straight. Especially because they think she’s the only one who knows.”

“I’ll need the records,” Bastian sighed. “They aren’t going to admit it right away. We’ll need a few days and—”

“If they have her, Bastian, they aren’t getting shit. Fuck.” I smacked the seat of the car as my Tesla drove me to Liberty Greene Apartments. “Give me a second. I’m here. I’ll call you back.”

I took the stairs two at a time and cursed the cameras as I ran down her hall.

Her door was wide open.

Her phone had been smashed and left on the floor.

No Izzy.

No sign of her anywhere.

The place wasn’t trashed, but the knocked-over table and crushed phone on the ground told me everything I needed to know. I heard a meow and looked down to see her black cat in the corner of the room. “Fuck me,” I grumbled before I swooped up the cat and stormed out.

I got back into my car, set the cat over on the seat in hopes it wouldn’t freak out. Instead, it just stared at me like I was a piece of shit. “I know I fucked up, okay? I’m going to get your mom back.”

I sighed and hacked the data from her phone. I was able to pull up the last moments on there before it had been destroyed, and thank God she’d had training.

It was her begging. And every second I listened, I lost a little more of my control.

“Please. Please. I’ll come willingly.” I heard the whimper and closed my eyes as I felt the true pain in her voice. “I’ve been sober nine years. I don’t need you to drug me.”

Izzy was strong. She went toe-to-toe with me and spat fire when she needed to. Here, she was broken. And when they laughed at her and spoke in Albanian, I saw red.

Black.

Fury I’d never felt.

One man shushed her and said, “It’ll be easier this way.”

And then I heard her crying, screaming, fighting. Then silence and rustling.

Silence.

It was probably a sound that would never comfort me again.

I remember how I let it seep in. I remember how I knew it changed me right there, right then.

That girl had been a nuisance and an enemy of mine. I’d embarrassed her and probably tortured her a little.

But no one made her beg or tortured her except me.

The bellow that ripped through me was loud and feral and her cat’s ears went back like the thing hated me. I hated myself too but couldn’t dwell on that now. I dialed my brother’s number back.

“Got an update on—”

I blurted it out. “The Albanians have her.”

“What?” he whispered. “That’s not possible. They’ve got to know she’s with us—”

“They don’t know she’s really with me, Bastian.”

“Is she?”

“Don’t fuck with me right now.”

“I’m not, brother. I’m not.” He sighed.

“They drugged her. She’s a recovered addict, Bastian.” I couldn’t hold back the shake of emotion in my voice.

My brother tried to calm me down. “Okay, look, we’ll handle—”

“I will handle it,” I corrected. “They’re mine now.”

“Cade, we agreed to be allies—”

“I didn’t agree to anything. You did. I never agree,” I reminded him. “And in my world, details matter. They didn’t want to figure out the details before they drugged the girl I love—”

“You’re in love with her now?” Bastian’s tone changed.

“Figure out how you want to cover up the chaos, brother. Because I’m about to unleash it.”

“Jesus Christ, Cade. I can’t cover up your shit. Can’t we wait a second and—”

“I’m not waiting. And get ahold of Dante and Lilah. They need to swing by my place and pick up Izzy’s cat.”

“I’m not dealing with a cat when you’re about to fuck up everything, Cade. You need to chill.”

“I am. And you better deal with it.”

I didn’t wait for him to respond as I hung up and pet the cat’s head. “You’ll see your mom soon. I promise you that.”

No one had authority over the world like I did.

And I intended to exercise that authority to the fullest in the next few days.