Chapter 5 - The Empty Apartment
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Damian kicked the door of Charlotte’s Brooklyn apartment so hard the deadbolt splintered the wooden frame.
He burst into the small, cozy space, his gun drawn, his eyes scanning for any sign of a struggle. But there was no chaos. There was only a haunting, deliberate emptiness.
Her favorite coffee mug was still in the sink. The bed was unmade. But her closet was half empty, and her toothbrush was gone.
“Charlotte!” Damian roared, his voice echoing off the cheap walls.
Silence answered him.
His men filed into the apartment behind him, spreading out to search the rooms.
“Boss, she’s gone,” his top lieutenant, Marco, said gently. “Her laptop is here, but she left her phone on the counter. The SIM card is destroyed. She doesn’t want to be found.”
Damian stared at the shattered pieces of plastic near the sink. She had heard him. She had heard the words he used to protect her, and she had believed them. He had broken her heart to save her life, and in doing so, he had lost her completely.
“Check the security cameras on the street,” Damian commanded, his voice shaking with a terrifying, contained rage. “Check the subway stations. Check the bus terminals. I want every camera in a ten-mile radius pulled and analyzed.”
“Damian, if your father finds out we are tearing the city apart for a school teacher—”
“I don’t give a damn about my father!” Damian shouted, slamming his fist into the kitchen counter, cracking the cheap laminate. “Find her, Marco. Put every man we have on the streets. If anyone hurts her, I will burn this entire city to the ground.”
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Marco nodded slowly, recognizing the dangerous desperation in his boss's eyes. “We’ll find her, Dom.”
But as Damian stood in the empty apartment, smelling the lingering scent of her vanilla perfume, a dark sense of dread settled over him. He was the most powerful man in the city, but all his money and influence couldn't undo the one sentence that had driven her away.
