A Call Part I
“We can’t just leave!” Thisbe protested.
Gulliver wanted to strangle his sister because she wasn’t listening or even trying to hear his words. “We need to regroup. I do not want to see my men shot by some townies who think they’re heroes and I don’t want to end up killing all of the people who protected my wife over the last eight years. It would only make her hate me more if I came in with an army and took them all out, Thisbe. We need to sit down, formulate a plan and come at it from a different angle. We were all taken by surprise today. The last fucking thing I was expecting was for her to be your jewelry designer.”
“Do you think she knew? I mean, I’ve never interacted with her at all, and her manager Lottie is the only person I’ve ever emailed or talked to. Do you think though that she knew I was buying up her jewelry for resale?”
“She seemed stunned to see you, Thisbe. I’m going to go out on a limb and say no.” he rubbed the crease between his eyebrows and took a steadying breath. All these years apart and she loathed him because she’d heard him and Thisbe the morning they’d had their fight. He was a fucking idiot. He should have just married her and kept it on the downlow from his family while he sorted out the shit with the Ziogas family. Instead, he thought he was protecting her by pretending she was nothing bu a lover he would one day tire of. Only his brother, sister and
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< A Call Part I
Ford had known the truth that he’d loved her desperately and of those three people, only one of them knew why he played the game he’d played.
For the last eight years she knew he was not her legal husband. His heart splintered with the notion. It didn’t make sense how quickly they were able to move though. He’d gone to her parents‘ house personally that afternoon looking for her and they were all gone. The house was completely packed up and a sold sticker on a for sale sign he’d never seen before mocked him.
“Where did she go?”
The question fell from his lips and he turned to look at Thisbe. “She went somewhere, either on or off campus in the middle of a class. You and I had our argument roughly ninety minutes after the guard lost track of her. So, she skipped class and did what for ninety minutes before coming home?”
“Maybe she was sick?” Thisbe questioned. “If she’d been feeling unwell and went to the bathroom or something and then came home because she was sick and heard our argument. She went straight back to her parents‘ house and then vanished?”
“But they checked the bathrooms. Every single one of them on campus looking for her. We lived fifteen minutes from campus. We picked the location before I even met her because we were in New York for your education. Where did she go?”
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< A Call Part I
“We checked the cameras at the school and there was no trace of
her.”
He grimaced, “those fuckers in the FBI must have tampered with it too to hide her fucking tracks. Jesus Christ!” he punched the seat furiously. “Who the fuck does she know in the FBI? It had to be them hiding her.” Things were rolling in his head, words from their conversation in the boutique, “her uncle worked for the organized crime unit at NYPD, so he probably had connections with the feds. Obviously her father must have maintained connections with a friend or a colleague who got them out. Motherfucker.” He grabbed his phone preparing to make a call to the IT guy who’d notified him on Monday they’d spotted her. He shot Thisbe a look, “what’s the name of the shop?”
“Sterling Heart.”
“The name she designs under?”
“Sterling Javier.”
“Javier?” He made a face in disbelief. “Javier. Janvier. French for January. She had a French grandmother.” He couldn’t believe she’d been under his nose this whole time. He dialed out
the call.
“Hey boss.”
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“Get me everything on Sterling Javier. It’s a pseudonym for my wife. Since she was leaning in her mother’s heritage direction, see if you can find anything on January Fulton. I’m betting my entire fucking empire that the feds got them new identities using her mother’s name. If it’s not Fulton, try her grandmother’s maiden name. If my memory serves me right, when I first saw her and we did a pull on the family, it was Lacoste. It’s one or the other.”
“On it.”
He ended the call and looked back at his sister. “I can’t believe
she relocated to Vermont and started a studio here. She’s hiding here,” he waved at the town sign they passed on their way out, “in the middle of nowhere as if she were terrified I was going to
murder her.”
“I mean, if the feds are feeding her lines about how dangerous you are.”
“I am dangerous, but not to her. Never to her. She was my entire world, and she needed to know that. God. She was the only person I ever felt truly myself with. I didn’t need to be CEO in training or vovoi in training. I was always only her Gulliver, and she was my January and now she looks at me like I skinned her dog alive and ate it in front of her.”
“The fact you came up with that analogy scares me a bit, Gully.”
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< Second Chance for the Mafia Prince
