AARONTime doesn’t move the same when someone you love is missing.There. I said it.I was hopelessly in love with Venus Sinclair.My contract wife.Minutes stretch like scars across your soul. Hours turn into warfare—battles against guilt, rage and hope. Sleep? A luxury I couldn’t afford. Not while Venus was still out there. Somewhere.Every day started the same: cold coffee, stale silence, and another dead end.Billy and Dain had given all they could, which wasn’t much. Every hour we grilled them, every threat we dangled, led to the same ugly truth:Martha drugged her.Her own mother.A Judas in silk gloves.Dorian had vanished off the grid. Jane said he was cooking something with Caroline and Richard. Either he was running scared or already buried by his own schemes. My gut said the former. That snake was too smart to die early.We found Venus’ car abandoned in a scrapyard on the city’s outskirts. Doors locked. No blood. No prints. Her purse was still in the trunk, zipped up tight—
VENUSDarkness didn’t greet me gently, it dragged me from unconsciousness like I owed it a debt.I gasped.It was involuntary. My lungs seized as if they’d forgotten what air tasted like. My throat—God—my throat was a desert of splinters. Every breath scraped through me like razor blades dipped in ash. My tongue clung to the roof of my mouth, dry and cracked like sun-scorched clay.The air smelled different.Sterile.Like bleach and fabric softener, a cruel contrast to the rot and rust I’d grown used to. The concrete that scraped my spine was gone. In its place: soft sheets. Not cotton. Egyptian. I knew the weight, the smoothness. The irony choked me.Luxury, wrapped around me like a coffin.I blinked, but the darkness didn’t lift. No, this wasn’t pitch-black. This was worse. Dim. Intentionally so. A single amber bulb flickered overhead, casting long, soft shadows across the room. Just enough light to make out shapes. Movements. If you stared long enough.And I did.Something tugged a
VENUSThe room was a tomb. Still. Stale. Stifling.Thicker now, the scent of rot and rust hung like a noose around my lungs. The air didn’t just sit, it suffocated. Each breath tasted of decay and metal, and each time I exhaled, it felt like a small surrender.But I wasn’t dead.Not yet.The ropes had left my wrists in ribbons. Torn skin, crusted blood, veins screaming from lack of circulation. My ankles weren’t better. Swollen. Purpled. As if they were slowly forgetting they belonged to a body still alive.Food had been dumped hours ago—greasy, wrapped in a crumpled paper bag that smelled more like oil than anything edible. No water. Nothing clean. But when I was sure no one was watching, I forced a few bites down. Not because I wanted to survive. But because I refused to die like this. Not here. Not in this dungeon made of mold and madness.I curled onto my side—knees pulled to my chest, back to the wall. That was the only position that didn’t scream.That’s when I felt it.The chai
AARONThree days. One hundred million. No cops.It wasn’t a ransom, it was a challenge. A fucking dare. And I was ready to break every rule in the book to end it.We moved fast. I wired the funds from three separate accounts through four shell corporations. No red flags. No digital fingerprints. Cleaner than God’s conscience. The cash was already being packed into matte-black duffels by men whose hands had known war. Connor managed it with surgical precision. Colton oversaw the decoys.Jane’s face was tight with fury as she slammed her laptop shut. “Signal bounced through five proxies in Eastern Europe. Burner. Call lasted ten seconds. Untraceable.”“Fuck,” I muttered, jaw clenched.“But there’s a pattern,” she added, tapping furiously. “Time stamps. Pings. A five-second lag between tower hops. They were still in the city when the call went out.”“Good,” I said, turning to Connor and Colton. “We prep the drop. Full perimeter lockdown. Use drones, thermal scans, dogs—hell, bring satell
VENUSTwo Days LaterTime doesn’t pass here. It dissolves.The days bled into each other, long and cruel, like a bruise that keeps spreading under the skin. I had no clock, no sun, no shift in light to mark the hours. Only that damn bulb, still flickering like it was mocking me.I stopped counting after 7,100-something.My lips were splitting. My tongue was thick, too dry to swallow. My throat had become a graveyard of words I could no longer speak. The ache in my limbs had turned to numbness. The kind of numb that wraps itself around your bones and whispers, this is it.Sleep came in strange flashes—hallucinations that danced on the edge of memory and nightmare. I saw Aaron’s face, sharp and furious. Then soft and pleading. I heard my mother humming lullabies from years I’d long buried. I felt my brother's hand curled around my wrist—not cruel, but the way he used to walk me across the street when I was five?.It was all fake, of course. I didn't have a brother. They were Illusions c
AARONTwo days.Forty-eight fucking hours of silence.No movement. No pings from her car tracker. No hits on facial recognition. Her phone? Dead. Credit cards? Untouched. No social media activity. No CCTV sightings. Venus had vanished, like the universe decided to swallow her whole, and I—Aaron Sinclair—was unraveling thread by thread.The only thing keeping me tethered was motion.Screens lit up every room in the penthouse. Surveillance footage played on loop. Colton worked nonstop, analyzing border entries, private airfield departures, traffic cameras. My private security team scanned underground networks. Jane hadn’t slept since yesterday. We swept every goddamn inch of the city. Nothing.Connor went to get Sabine and Gianna the second they landed from London. If anyone could draw out a clue from her past, it’d be them. I had eyes on her mother 24/7 in case guilt chewed through her spine and made her do something halfway decent. But even that lead had gone quiet.Nothing but ghost