Page 79 of Damián

…A mood that lasts until I finish my delicious croissant.

And to make it worse, there is nothing I can do and nowhere to go. I can’t visit the Harknetts without setting a plan, and I can’t visit my home or my family.

Fuck…

So I go back to my boring apartment and change into a pair of pants. Full of energy, I drop to the floor in the large, sunlit living room of the penthouse and start my ab workout.

Crunch, twist, and hold.

I do rep after rep, sweat dripping down my chest, but my eyes keep darting to the phone resting on the glass coffee table.

You know what…

I will call him.

How about that?

I sit up, grab the phone, and open Oliver’s contact.

I type: Heeeey. Just checking in—I stare at it… Too eager. I erase it.

I type: Mission update?—Mmm… Too cold. I erase it.

I type: Are you alive?—Too dramatic. I erase it.

Ahhhh! ¡Maldición!

Every single text I write is so bad it makes my skin crawl.

Fuck it.

I hit the call button and lift the phone to my ear. It rings exactly zero times before a click sounds.

“Your call has been forwarded to an automated voice messaging system—”

Oliver’s phone is off… Why is it off?

I am one hundred percent sure nothing bad has happened to Oliver because Alexios has a lot of tips that would alert us immediately if something happened to him or anything related to the mission. And so far, everything is okay.

Besides, Oliver is way too smart to get caught.

He is a survivor.

But if he is okay, then what the hell is happening?

Fuck… Maybe he really is with someone else.

No! Stop thinking about that, Damián.

I close my eyes, running through every single second of our date at the Golden Dragon, at the hotel, the park, the movies, and that last time in the parking lot when we touched like that for the first time.

He is never uncomfortable. In fact, he always looks happy and eager to work on the case. He’s even eager to touch each other… And then, a memory hits me: the drinking game

That day, when we were playing Twenty-One Questions, I asked him about when he had his last sexual partner, and Oliver drank.

He refused to answer the question, which probably meant he had been seeing someone else.

I freeze, the phone still gripped tightly in my sweating hand.