Page 72 of Iridescent
My throat tightens. I turn away before the guilt can swallow me whole. Action. I need action now. Standing here drowning in remorse will not bring her back.
I text flight ops and have the jet readied for immediate departure. Withinthe hour, I’ll be in the air.
I will find her. I will tell her everything I should have told her from the beginning. And if I have to get on my knees and beg for the chance to make this right, I will.
Losing Yara is not an option. It would be the end of everything.
I’m about to head out when my phone starts ringing. For one stupid second, hope cuts through the panic strangling my chest.Yara.
But one look at the caller ID is enough to kill it.
Unknown number.
The same one that has been hounding me for days.
Until now, it has limited itself to messages. Receipts. Proof that someone out there knows exactly where to put the knife.
It texted again this morning, and as soon as I got to the office, I had Bastien run it down. He handles my security personally. If there had been a trail, he would have found it.
He didn’t.
Neither did the telecom specialists he pulled in after.
No name. No fixed origin. Nothing clean enough to trace.
Just a ghost slipping through every net I cast.
Very few people have this number. Fewer still know enough to use it against me.
Which leaves only two possibilities: someone got close enough to breach my perimeter, or someone already inside it opened the door.
The phone keeps ringing in my hand.
I answer and lift it to my ear. “Speak.”
Static crackles through the line.
My grip tightens. “Who is this?”
When the voice finally comes through, it is low and distorted, blurred just enough to make it impossible to place. Male, I think. But even that could be deliberate.
“You’ve been hard to reach.”
Every muscle in my body goes taut. “I’m not in the mood for games.”
A faint sound comes through the line. Not quite a laugh. Something else.The satisfaction of someone who already knows they have my attention.
“This isn’t a game, Xavier.”
Hearing my name in that voice does something ugly to the air in my lungs.
“What the fuck do you want?”
A beat passes.
Then, almost lazily, “Look at your phone.”
A message alert cuts through the line before I can answer.
