Chapter 194: Eve Is Gone

Nonna was making coffee, still in her pajamas, unaware of the catastrophe that had just occurred.

"Where is Eve?" Dimitri’s voice was raw. Desperate.

Nonna’s expression shifted from peaceful to concerned in an instant.

"I have not seen her since she came home from work," Nonna said carefully, studying his face. "I went to bed early. Dimitri, what happened? Why are you...."

"She’s gone." The words felt like they were being torn from his chest, leaving him bleeding. "Her suitcase is gone. She left."

He pulled out his phone with shaking hands, dialed Eve’s number.

It went straight to voicemail.

Then again. Same result.

Her phone was switched off. Not dead...switched off.

A choice.

Dimitri stood in the kitchen of his penthouse, holding his phone, feeling the world tilt on its axis.

Then he called Mike.

His best friend answered on the third ring, his voice groggy with sleep.

"It’s 3 AM," Mike said. "This better be...."

"Eve is gone," Dimitri said, and he heard the panic in his own voice. "She overheard me talking with Marco about The Covenant. And now she’s gone."

There was a pause.

Then: "Where would she go?"

"I don’t know," Dimitri said, and the admission felt like a failure. Like proof that despite everything, despite months of claiming her and building something with her and swearing she was his....he’d lost her. "That’s the problem. I don’t fucking know."

***

An hour later, the penthouse looked like chaos disguised as control.

That was the only way Dimitri could describe it as he stood in the center of his living room at 3:47 AM, watching his carefully built empire of order dissolve into something raw and desperate.

Mike had arrived thirty minutes ago, right around the time Dimitri had realized Eve was actually gone. Not coming back in five minutes. Not in another room. Gone.

Now his best friend stood near the floor-to-ceiling windows, his expression a mirror of Dimitri’s own controlled panic. Marco was on his phone with the security team that covered Eve’s movements. And in the corner, three members of Dimitri’s IT team hunched over laptops, their fingers flying across keyboards as they tried to trace her location.

The scene itself should have felt efficient. Professional. Exactly the kind of rapid response that Dimitri had built his organization on.

Instead, it felt like watching everything fall apart in real time.

"Nothing yet," Marco said, ending another call. His voice was carefully neutral, but Dimitri could see the tension in his shoulders. "The tracker in her phone shows it was switched off at 3:15 AM. Last location was the Peninsula Hotel in Brooklyn, room 847."

The Peninsula.

Where she’d gone to think. To breathe. To decide whether she could forgive him.

And he’d let her go there alone.

"Security footage?" Dimitri asked, his voice absolutely quiet. Dangerously quiet.

"Reviewing now. She paid cash, used a false name. But the car, she took a car service. We’re tracking the vehicle now."

Dimitri nodded once and turned away from the room, needing distance from everyone’s careful professionalism. From Marco’s urgency. From Mike’s barely concealed fear.

He couldn’t afford to feel what they were feeling.

Because if he let himself feel the full weight of this, the fact that Eve was out there, unprotected, unreachable....he would lose the ability to think strategically. And he needed to think strategically right now.

He needed to think like the Devil.

Not like a man who was terrified that something had happened to the woman he loved.

***

POV: MIKE

Mike watched his best friend’s shoulders tense as he turned away from the group.

He’d seen Dimitri in a lot of states over the years. Angry. Calculating. Cold enough to freeze blood.

But this....this was different.

This was a man barely holding it together.

"Dimitri." Mike moved across the room, came to stand beside his friend at the window. "We’ll find her. She’s smart. She wouldn’t...."

"She’s alone in New York at three in the morning with no security detail because I fucked up," Dimitri said quietly. His voice was steady, but Mike could hear the edge underneath. The barely suppressed rage. "And now she’s exactly where every enemy we have would want her to be."

"That’s not...."

"Lorenzo. Dante. My father. They all know about her. They all know she matters to me." Dimitri’s hands were curled into fists at his sides. "And now she’s outside the penthouse, away from Me, away from security, completely vulnerable."

Mike understood the fear underneath his best friend’s anger. Because it was the same fear he’d feel if something happened to Eve. She wasn’t just Dimitri’s girlfriend. She was his own sister. And in their world, family was the most dangerous vulnerability you could have.

"The IT team is pulling her location as we speak," Mike said carefully. "And she wouldn’t have left without thinking it through. That girl has more sense than half the soldiers we employ. She knew where to go. She knows how to move."

"She’s not trained for this." Dimitri’s voice came out like a knife. "She shouldn’t have to be trained for this. She should be sleeping in a bed feeling safe, not running from her own boyfriend like he’s something to escape."

And there it was.

The guilt underneath the rage. The knowledge that whatever had happened between them....the lying, the sex, the intensity of it all, had pushed Eve to a breaking point.

"You didn’t push her away," Mike said, reading his brother carefully. "She left because she needed to think. There’s a difference."

"Is there?"

Mike didn’t have an answer for that.

The laptop screen across the room flickered, and one of the IT team members...a kid named Davis who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, looked up with something in his expression that might have been a breakthrough.

"We have her," Davis said. "The car service dropped her at the Peninsula Hotel at 3:52 AM. From there, she would have had to....." He paused, fingers flying over his keyboard. "She’s in room 847. Paid for three nights."