Page 78 of Bought to Bear Bratva Heir

I shook my head. Sweet Jesus, my thoughts and feelings were a mess. Even now I went from hating her to loving her so quickly that I felt like I was giving myself whiplash.

One second I thought this was revenge, that she was working with someone else to bring me to my knees, and the next I thought about it and realized how ludicrous that was.

Whatever was happening here, the rush of emotions warring inside of me was making it impossible to think clearly.

"What is it?" My eyes narrowed as my driver strode toward me.

"This." He lifted something in his hands, and I stared at it in shock. "I went back to the hospital to try and retrace her steps, and I found this."

Dropping it to the desk, he stepped back.

The bag was blue, with brown leather straps. Designer. I knew that because it was mine. I had packed some of Daisy's clothes and dropped them into the hospital only last night.

If she had run, why would she run without clothes? Why would she have just left the bag on the sidewalk?

Fuck, this was making less and less sense.

Except it kind of did, and I was just a blind fool who hadn’t seen the reality right in front of my face.

"You think—" raggedly I let out a breath. Reaching up, I tugged at my hair, yanking it at the roots so it stood on end. "You think someone took her?"

Why hadn’t I thought of that before? Why had my brain gone straight to her betraying me? It made sense if someone had taken her. In fact, her and Alec being kidnapped made more sense than any other thing that I had been mulling over.

Fuck.

I had so many enemies that it was shocking that it hadn’t happened before.

He stared at me for a second before nodding. "There’s something else. I checked the hospital security footage."

My head snapped up. "And?"

"She walked out on her own but," he took a deep breath, "a nurse walked into her room half an hour beforehand."

My eyebrows lifted in question. "So? Nurses were in and out all the time." I didn’t understand why that was such a big deal. It was a hospital; nurses were everywhere.

"I asked around. She wasn’t a nurse. No one had ever seen her before."

I fell back into the chair. My chest was rising and falling rapidly. Had I spent the entire day searching for her, thinking that she had run from me? When in reality, something else had happened to her?

If that was true, and I knew deep down it was, I had wasted hours and hours looking in the wrong directions. Anything could have happened to them in that time.

I didn’t even want to imagine what they were going through. The thought made me feel sick.

I had been so blind to what was right in front of my face, so sure that she was always to blame that I had not even realized what was really happening.

"Find her," I snapped, all the anger I was feeling towards myself aimed in the innocent man’s direction.

"Already on it." He paused. His eyes searched my face. "There’s something else."

I sighed. Of course there was. There was always something else. "What?"

"I went to Alexander’s school."

My head snapped up at that. "Why?"

"To ask some questions." He met my gaze steadily. "Important questions."

I sat up a little straighter, steepling my hands together on the desk. "And?"