Yasmin was a bookish student; she wasn’t capable of standing up to a professional killer. Hell, she was right. She’d barely made it a dozen steps out of his condo in London before she was captured.

Fuck, how had things gone so wrong?

Your fault, a voice whispered in his head.

His conscience… not something that usually spoke to him.

But with Yasmin, he cared. He wanted to be the better man she expected him to be. From their first meeting, he’d constantly fucked up. Given her reason after reason to not want to be with him until he was forced to kidnap her to keep her in his life.

And now his family was going to destroy her and he was entirely responsible. He had to get to her in time. There was no other choice, because he couldn’t live knowing she’d perished, along with their unborn child.

He’d abandoned his whole fucking life on that island. He deserved whatever happened… but Yasmin didn’t. He was going to get there in time, and he was going to be the man she needed him to be. He couldn’t live with any other ending to their story.

He did the only thing he could do. He flew straight into the storm.

Chapter Forty-Four

Four hours.

Yasmin’s head was pounding from the desperate ache in her neck and shoulders. She was cramping all over the place. She had to move or she was going to fall. A sob escaped her lips.

She shouldn’t have put the fire extinguisher in the Fendi bag. It was too heavy and growing heavier with each passing minute.

The men were now angry, shouting at each other across the house with enough volume that she could catch the occasional phrase. They questioned whether she was really there, but concluded she had to be. They’d found her unmade bed and her torn wedding dress on the floor of the bedroom.

The longer they searched the more aggressive they became, carelessly destroying whatever they touched. She heard something heavy fall in Defne’s room, then shattering. There was no point to the destruction as far as she could tell.

She craned her head, looking for a path out of her current predicament, but decided she wouldn’t make it to the roof. Which left down. There was no one in the pool area, so maybe she could climb down and run to the beach. There was no place to hide on the beach though. She’d be a sitting duck when they went for another look.

She jumped when the balcony door next to her hiding place was jerked open and one of the men stepped out, muttering, “Where the fuck is this bitch?”

The door below her opened and she froze, not daring to breathe.