Chapter Sixteen

Jake. 

I can’t sit still.

The gala is over, but my head is still buzzing, my body pacing like a caged animal. The glass of scotch in my hand is untouched, the ice long since melted, the amber liquid as flat as the pit in my chest.

Eleanor.

Her name keeps clawing at me, dragging through every nerve ending, refusing to let me rest. Five years. Five years of mourning her. Of cursing her memory. Of building a life without her. And tonight she just walked in like a ghost deciding to bleed back into the living.

I slam the glass down on the desk, the sharp crack reverberating through the study. My chest is heaving, my palms clammy.

I can’t make sense of it. None of it.

She looked the same, only sharper somehow. The Eleanor I buried was soft, fragile, warm in ways that cracked me open. Tonight’s Eleanor was steel. And yet her eyes. Those eyes still held the same storm. The same fire I used to drown in.

“Damn it,” I mutter under my breath.

I yank my phone from my pocket and scroll to the only number I trust in situations like this. The line clicks after two rings.

“Mr. Donovan,” a familiar, steady voice answers.

“Grayson,” I bite out, my tone clipped. “I need you on something. Urgent.”

There’s no hesitation. “Say the word.”

I drag a hand down my face, pinching the bridge of my nose, trying to corral the mess in my head into something resembling order. “Eleanor.” The word feels like a curse on my tongue. “I saw her tonight. Alive, she was at the gala.”

There’s silence on the other end, then a sharp inhale. “Eleanor Donovan, like your wife, the one we think is dead?”

“Yes,” I snap. “Eleanor Carter. My wife. The woman the world declared dead five years ago.”

Another pause. “That’s… impossible.”

My jaw clenches. “Don’t tell me what’s possible. I saw her with my own eyes. She’s back, Grayson. And I need to know where the hell she has been all this time.”

My voice cracks with an edge I rarely allow anyone to hear. But Grayson has been with me long enough to know I don’t bluff when it comes to Eleanor.

“I want everything,” I continue, pacing the room. My free hand grips the back of the leather chair, knuckles whitening. “Every step she’s taken in the last five years. Where she has lived. Who she has spoken to. What name she has been using. Every cent spent, every shadow she has walked through. I don’t care how deep you have to dig or who you have to pay off. I want a trail of everything she has done since that night she disappeared five years."

“Yes, sir,” Grayson answers calmly. “But if she was presumed dead, her paper trail may have been deliberately erased. It’ll take time.”

“I don’t care how long it takes,” I snap. “But you start tonight. Do you understand me? I want reports every morning until you have answers.”

“Understood.”

I pause, pressing my palm flat against the desk. My voice lowers, raw. “And Grayson this stays between us. No leaks. No whispers. No one else needs to know what I’m asking until I decide.”

There’s a low hum of affirmation. “You have my discretion.”

For a moment, the silence on the line presses heavy, filled only with the ragged sound of my breathing. I drag my gaze to the framed photo on the desk the one I couldn’t bring myself to put away. Eleanor smiling, sunlight in her hair, my arm slung around her shoulders. A photo that has haunted me like a relic from another lifetime.

She was gone. She was gone.

And now she isn’t.

“I buried her,” I whisper hoarsely, almost to myself. “I grieved her. Do you understand what I’m saying, Grayson? For five years, I believed she was dead.”

“I understand,” he replies carefully. “But if she lived, someone went to great lengths to make you believe otherwise.”

His words hit me like a blade. Someone lied. Someone covered it up. Someone made me bleed for half a decade thinking she was gone.

I grit my teeth. “Then find them too. Whoever helped her vanish, whoever forged the story of her death I want names. I want motives. I want every rotten piece of it dragged into the light.”

“I’ll handle it.”

The line clicks as he disconnects, leaving me in the suffocating silence of my own rage.

I collapse into the chair, elbows braced on my knees, head falling into my hands. For a moment, I let myself crumble, the weight of it pressing down so heavy it steals my breath.

Eleanor. Alive.

The image of her face tonight burns behind my eyes sharp jaw, trembling lips, those eyes like thunderclouds. She looked at me like she hated me. Like she feared me. Like she wanted to shatter me in the same breath.

And maybe she already has.

I drag in a deep breath, my chest rising and falling with determination that tastes like blood.

If she thinks she can come back after five years of silence, five years of letting me rot in grief, five years of stealing from me the one person who ever truly belonged to me then she’s wrong.

I will find out where she’s been. I will uncover every secret, every betrayal, every shadow she’s tried to hide in.

And when I do, She will have to face me.

Not the broken man who buried her. Not the grieving husband who clung to ghosts.

But me now. Harder. Colder. More dangerous than the man she left behind.

The clock ticks in the corner of the room, steady and merciless. I lift my head, staring at the city lights glittering through the window like they’re daring me to break.

I whisper it into the darkness, a vow I know I’ll keep.

“I’ll find you, Eleanor. And this time you don’t get to run.”