It was three nights later, deep in the dark, before anyone pushed open the mansion doors again.
Bruno came home reeking of liquor. He shoved Irma off where she clung to him and kicked open the door to the child's room. "Ruth, how long are you going to keep up this act? Enough already!"
But all that greeted him was an empty bed.
His heart skipped a beat for no reason he could name.
Then he caught himself. "Fine. Very good! Grown so bold you'd actually run away from home! If you've got the nerve, then go die out there and never come back!"
He strode into the master suite and yanked open the lavish walk-in closet.
Every piece of her lingerie was still there. He let out a breath.
The next morning, with one sweep of his hand, Bruno summoned dozens of servants and moved Irma into the mansion in grand style.
In the days that followed, Bruno ruled the boardroom by day, cutting and ruthless, and squired Irma to glittering society dinners by night.
Everything ran like clockwork, yet his eyes grew darker by the day, his gaze fixed again and again on his phone, lost in some place no one could reach.
By the seventh day since I vanished, Bruno couldn't stand it anymore.
He dragged Rosie back from the old house and shoved the phone up to her mouth. "Say Mommy! Tell her to get her ass back here!"
Rosie shook all over in terror and burst into wailing sobs.
Bruno's eyes went red at the corners with rage. "Useless. Is crying all you can do? Can't even call her? What good are you to me at all?"
"Daddy, don't be like this. Is that... is that Mommy? I'm so scared..."
Bruno cut the recording short and sent it.
Then, after a moment's thought, he added a voice message. "Ruth, Rosie is in my hands. If you're not back here within half an hour, you can forget about ever seeing her again in your life!"
Irma had stood beside him listening in silence all this while. She sighed. "Bruno, there's no need for this. You know how Ruth is. When she comes back she'll understand how much you've gone through for her. It's just... it almost seems like Rosie doesn't matter all that much to her either..."
Bruno didn't take in a word of it.
He just glared, hard, at that screen that gave no flicker of a reply, then dialed my number again and again.
And through one unbroken stream of "the phone is turned off" tones, he suddenly snapped his arm up and smashed the phone against the floor, shattering it.
Irma went white with fright.
She had never seen Bruno, always so steady, always in control of everything, lose his grip like this.
"Bruno, since she's heartless enough to stay out of sight, then just file for divorce! With the Gilbert legal team, you could leave her without a penny, send her out with nothing. Why torture yourself like this?"
The word divorce drove into Bruno's strung-tight nerves like a blade pulled red from the fire.
He let out a cold laugh that bordered on madness. "She thinks she's worthy of saying that word to me?"
