My Stepbrother's Dirty Little Secret novel Chapter 580

Chapter 580

“Gianna?”

She’d fallen asleep in strange places before. Her closet. The room in the Void. Once on the couch in the living room with a book over her face.

Maybe she was in the bathroom.

I crossed the room and pushed the bathroom door open. It was empty, the light was off, the towels were untouched.

I checked the walk-in closet, nothing. The balcony, nothing. My eyes swept over every corner of the room again

I pulled my phone from my pocket and opened the tracking application. The necklace. A blinking green dot appeared almost immediately.

It was in this bedroom.

I frowned. That didn’t make sense. I looked around the room. The dot remained perfectly still, right here.

My thumb zoomed in.

Exactly here.

My breathing changed, one breath, then another. My chest expanded harder than before. I lifted my head and slowly turned in a circle, following the signal.

The application pointed toward the dresser.

No.

She wouldn’t… I walked over and opened the top drawer, second drawer. The tracker continued pointing downward.

My movements became quicker, in the third drawer, I found her jewelry. I dropped to one knee and pulled it the whole thing open.

There.

Resting neatly in a velvet casing… was my mother’s necklace.

I stared at it. For several seconds, my brain refused to process what I was looking at, then I picked it up, popped open the tiny compartment behind the diamond.

The tiny tracker blinked softly beneath the clasp. She had taken it off.

My fingers tightened around the chain, “Gianna…”

A strange pressure spread through my chest. It was not pain, not exactly. It felt as if every muscle around my ribs had tightened at the same time. My pulse became loud, much louder than it should have been.

I looked around the room again. A thought crossed my mind. A ridiculous one, “Ballerina…” my voice came out quieter than I expected, “If this is one of your games…”

I opened the closet again, looked behind the hanging dresses. I checked beneath the bed.

I was simply trying to convince myself that the worst possibility wasn’t already true.

No.

Think.

Gianna wouldn’t disappear. She had to be somewhere inside the estate. One possibility came to me immediately.

Hazel… maybe she’d fallen asleep beside her mother again. She’d done it before.

I turned and broke into a run. My bare feet hit the hardwood floor hard enough to echo through the hallway.

By the time I reached my father’s wing, my lungs were already working harder than they should have been.

I didn’t knock politely. I pounded my fist against the door. The door flew open after a minute. My father stood there in a dark robe, still tying the belt around his waist.

His eyes immediately narrowed, “Raphael?”

I didn’t answer. I stepped around him so quickly that his shoulder bumped mine.

“Raphael-”

I was already inside. My eyes swept across the bedroom.