The voice on the phone was calm. Not the calm of a person at peace – the calm of a person in control. The difference was surgical.
“Wrong question, Mr. Trillionaire.” A chuckle – soft, performative, the kind of laugh designed to demonstrate power rather than express amusement. “The real question is: why did I call you?”
Caelum’s hand tightened around the phone until his knuckles turned white. He could feel the hairline crack in the screen pressing against his palm. “I don’t know who you are,” he said, and his voice was quiet in the way that pressurized things are quiet – the moment before the valve gives. “But my wife is missing, and I’m not in the mood for games.”
“Whoa, whoa.” The voice sounded delighted, as though Caelum’s desperation were a dish that had been served exactly to order. “If I were you, I’d lower the temperature, friend. Getting angry with the person who has what you want – that’s bad negotiation. And I hear you’re supposed to be good at negotiation.”
“Tell me where she is.”
“Hang up and you’ll never find out.”
Caelum’s finger – already hovering over the end-call button – froze. The threat wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be. It had the quiet, irrefutable authority of a fact.
“Good,” the voice said. “Now that I have your attention – check your messages.”
The phone buzzed against his ear. He pulled it away, swiped to messages. An unknown number. A video file. His thumb hovered over it the way a finger hovers over a switch that you know, with absolute certainty, will detonate something.
He pressed play.
The image was dark, shaky, lit by a single bulb that swung on a wire and painted the scene in slow, nauseating arcs of light and shadow. And in the center of the frame – tied to a chair, mouth sealed with tape, eyes wide with a terror so pure it had gone past expression and become something physical, something that changed the shape of her face:
Marlowe.
The sound that came out of Caelum was not a word. It was something from below language – a sound that men make when the thing they’re most afraid of stops being hypothetical. He watched the video for three seconds. Four. Five. Each second was a blade. Each second showed him a new detail: the rope cutting into her wrists, the blood dried on her temple, the way her chest moved in quick, trapped-animal breaths.
“What have you done to her?” His voice cracked. Shattered. The composure he’d built over a lifetime of boardrooms and negotiations and the practiced performance of authority – gone. Stripped. What was left was the raw, unprotected sound of a man in extremis. “WHERE IS SHE?”
The voice on the phone laughed. The laugh was cold and hollow and echoed in Caelum’s ear like a sound bouncing around an empty room.
“All in good time, Mr. Husband. All in good time.”
The line went dead.
Back in the warehouse, Dorian was kneeling beside me.
His fingers worked at the tape on my mouth – not roughly, but with a deliberateness that made it worse, as though this were an act of care, as though removing the gag were a kindness rather than a strategic adjustment. The adhesive tore at my skin. I gasped – air, finally, raw and cold and tasting of rust and concrete.
“Curse you.” The words came out in a rasp. “You monster. You absolute-“
He stood. Wiped his face where my words had landed with my spit – casually, the way you’d wipe rain. He walked to a sink I hadn’t noticed in the corner, ran the water, washed his hands. The domesticity of the gesture was obscene – a man washing up in the middle of a kidnapping, as though tidiness were a priority.
“This,” he said, turning back to me, drying his hands on his jeans, “is what I love about you. The fire. The defiance. Even tied to a chair, bleeding, exhausted – you fight. You spit. You curse.” His smile was almost admiring. “You’re a tigress, Marlowe. But don’t worry. Every tigress can be tamed.”
“You will never have me.” I said it with everything I had – every ounce of energy, every remaining scrap of the girl who’d slapped billionaires and fought security guards and carried her dying brother down a staircase. “When Caelum finds me – and he will find me – you won’t be able to imagine what comes next.”
Dorian’s grin widened. He stepped closer. His shadow fell over me like a curtain.
“Oh,” he said, “I’d love to see him try.”
Miles away, on a dark road beside a wrecked car, Caelum’s knees hit the asphalt.
Not a collapse – a surrender. His body, which had been running on adrenaline and terror since the crash, simply stopped. The phone slipped from his hand and clattered against the road. His arms hung at his sides. His head bowed. The posture was not defeat – it was the body’s honest response to a weight it could no longer carry: Marlowe, gone. Taken. Tied to a chair in a room he couldn’t find, held by a man whose face he hadn’t even seen.
“Caelum!” Sable’s voice. Close, sharp, cutting through the fog. She was kneeling beside him, her hands on his shoulders. Blood was crusted in her hair and her left eye was swelling shut, and she was gripping him with the fierce, unsentimental strength of a woman who understood that now was not the time for gentleness. “What happened? Talk to me!”
“Marlowe…” The word was barely audible. “She’s been kidnapped.”
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.