“Infatuation.” He said the word with contempt, as if I’d insulted his mother. “You think my love is infatuation? That what I feel for you is – what – a crush? A passing fancy?” He laughed. The laugh was short, bitter, and had no air in it. “But the love that rich bastard has for you – a man who met you a week ago, who bought your brother’s illness like a coupon, who traded money for a wife – that’s genuine? That’s real?”
“Caelum didn’t-“
“Oh, my darling.” He crouched in front of me again. His hand reached for my face – I flinched, but the rope held me in place, and his fingers found my chin, tilting it upward, forcing eye contact. His touch was gentle. That was the worst part. “Don’t worry. Things will be okay soon. You’ll see. In time, you’ll understand that I’m the one who’s always loved you. Not Sterling. Not Caelum. Me. Since we were children. And when the dust settles – when all the noise is gone – it’ll just be us.”
His thumb traced my jaw. I wanted to bite it. I wanted to spit in his face. I wanted to scream until the walls came down. But the rope was tight, and the chair was bolted, and the warehouse was a cathedral of emptiness that would swallow any sound I made before it reached anyone who could help.
So I did the only thing I could do.
I looked him in the eye and said: “Caelum will find me. And when he does, you’ll wish you’d stayed the boy at the kitchen table.”
Dorian’s smile didn’t falter. If anything, it widened. And that – the smile of a man who isn’t afraid because he’s already prepared for every contingency – was the thing that frightened me most.
Caelum’s eyes opened.
Not gently. Not gradually. They snapped open the way eyes open when the brain receives a signal that something is catastrophically wrong and sleep is no longer an option. The world was a smear – smoke, glass, the crumpled dashboard, the deflated airbag draped over the steering wheel like a shroud.
Pain. Not localized – everywhere. His head, where a cut was sending blood in a warm line down his temple. His chest, where the seatbelt had locked against his ribs with the force of a punch. His hands, his wrists, his neck.
“Sable…” His voice was a rasp. He turned his head – the motion cost him, sending white sparks across his vision – and saw the back seat. Sable, stirring, her face pale, blood in her hair. And Rowan-
Rowan was unconscious. A shard of metal – jagged, dark – was embedded in his thigh. Blood pooled beneath it, black in the dim light.
And the passenger seat was empty.
The emptiness of that seat was louder than the crash, louder than the pain, louder than the ringing in his ears. He stared at it – at the buckled seatbelt hanging loose, at the cracked window where her head had been, at the absence that filled the space like a scream that wouldn’t stop.
“Marlowe!” He lunged sideways, the motion tearing something in his shoulder. The car door was already open – not from the crash. From the outside. Someone had opened it. Someone had reached in and-
“MARLOWE!”
The night swallowed her name and gave nothing back.
He clawed his way out of the wreckage. His legs buckled when they hit the asphalt, and he went down hard on one knee, then forced himself upright through an act of will so violent it felt physical, like gripping a rope and hauling himself up a cliff. He spun in the dark. Trees. Road. The shattered car, steam rising from its crushed hood. No Marlowe. No footprints. No sign of her except the open door and the vacancy she’d left behind.
Back at the car: Sable was conscious, pulling herself from the wreckage with the grim efficiency of someone whose body was in pain but whose mind had already prioritized. She saw Rowan’s leg and went white, but she didn’t freeze – she assessed, calculated, and acted. She pulled the shard free in one clean motion, muffling Rowan’s scream with the flat of her hand, then tore a strip from her own shirt and wrapped the wound with the speed of someone who’d been trained or was improvising brilliantly.
Caelum called the ambulance. His fingers were trembling so badly he misdialed twice. When the dispatcher answered, his voice was a stranger’s – flat, detached, the voice of a man who had separated his emotions from his actions because combining them would result in total shutdown.
The ambulance came. Took Rowan. Left.
And then the silence. The particular, devastating silence of a roadside at night, after the sirens have faded, when the only things remaining are the wreckage and the people who have to decide what to do next.
“Caelum.” Sable’s voice. Steady but thin. “Where’s Marlowe?”
He didn’t answer. He was staring at the ground near the passenger door, where something caught the moonlight – small, rectangular, familiar. He bent down. His hand closed around it.
Marlowe’s phone. Cracked screen. Still warm.
The dread settled into his body like concrete poured into the spaces between his bones.
“She didn’t leave on her own,” he said. His voice was hollow. A tunnel with nothing at the end. “She was taken.”
His own phone buzzed. Unknown number. He answered it the way you answer anything when the worst has already happened – without hope, without fear, with only the grim, mechanical need to know.
“Hello, Mr. Husband.”
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.