LOGINIris’s POV
The priest began to speak, and the words washed over me in waves. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. I had heard these words a hundred times at a hundred weddings, but they felt different now like an accusation disguised as a blessing."Iris," the priest said, turning to me. "Do you take this man to be your husband? To love and cherish, in sickness and in health, for as long as you both shall live?"I looIris's POV I woke up in a bed that wasn't mine, and for a long moment I just lay there with my eyes closed, trying to piece together how I had gotten here. The mattress beneath me was impossibly soft, the kind of soft that came from expensive sheets and a frame that didn't creak, and the pillow cradled my head like it had been designed specifically for the shape of my skull. I could smell fresh coffee and something baking, and somewhere in the distance I heard the soft hum of classical music playing from a speaker I couldn't see. The blindfold was gone. The restraints were gone. I lifted my hands in front of my face and flexed my fingers, half expecting to find fur-lined cuffs still wrapped around my wrists. But my skin was bare and unmarked, and someone had dressed me in silk pajamas that felt like they cost more than my first car. I sat up slowly, taking in the room around me. It was beautiful. Not beautiful in the way h
Marcus's POVThe list my father sent me contained four names, and I knew two of them by reputation alone. The first was a security consultant who had been on Victor's payroll for over a decade, a man named Gerard who specialized in what my father euphemistically called "sensitive acquisitions." The second was a former intelligence officer who had traded government secrets for private sector money and never looked back. The third and fourth were lower level operatives who handled logistics and surveillance, the kind of people who knew everything about an operation but had no stake in its outcome.None of them were answering their phones.I stood at the edge of the crash site while the police finished their preliminary investigation, my phone pressed to my ear and my father pacing behind me like a caged animal. Iris's parents had been taken to the station to file a formal report, and her mother had gripped my arm before she left with a desperation that made my chest ache. "Find her," sh
Marcus’s POV I couldn’t believe what I just heard. No wonder Iris stood no chance against him."She told you she was done and you decided to abduct her. That's not love, Dad. That's a crime." I stepped closer, close enough to see the lines around his eyes and the tension in his jaw and the faint sheen of sweat on his forehead that betrayed the panic he was trying so hard to hide. "You've spent months telling yourself you were protecting her. You drugged me on my honeymoon and followed her across the country and bought her publisher, and you called all of it love. But love doesn't run people off the road. Love doesn't hire men to intercept a woman on a dark highway. Love doesn't stand in the wreckage and pretend it had nothing to do with the disaster.""Marcus...""I'm not finished." My voice was steady, steadier than it had any right to be, and I realized somewhere in the back of my mind that I was no longer afraid of him. He had spent my whole life looming over me, an impossible sta
Marcus’s POV I had been sitting in my office at the company headquarters, a building I had not set foot in since the tabloid story broke and my face became synonymous with humiliation. But bills needed paying and work needed doing, and I had decided somewhere in the haze of the past few weeks that I would not let my father's sins drive me out of my own life. The voicemail had arrived as I was reviewing quarterly reports, her name appearing on my screen for the first time since I walked out of our house and didn't look back.I almost didn't listen. I had deleted every message she sent without opening it, had forwarded every text to a folder I never looked at, had trained myself to stop hoping her name on my phone meant something other than another apology I wasn't ready to hear. But something about the length of this one made me pause. Forty-seven seconds. Most of her messages were under ten, brief and broken and full of words she couldn't quite get out. Forty-seven seconds meant some
Iris’s POVI could feel my consciousness returning in stages, like a swimmer pushing toward the surface of a dark lake, and the first thing I felt wasn't fear or confusion but a hot pulse of fury because I knew exactly who was responsible for this. The blindfold pressed against my eyelids and the restraints circled my wrists and the cold concrete floor seeped through my clothes, but all I could think about was Victor sitting in that coffee shop with his hands folded on the table, telling me I was rewriting history while he was already planning this."Victor!" My voice scraped out of my throat and echoed off the walls, and I didn't care who heard me because I wanted him to know I wasn't going to make this easy. "I know you can hear me. What is this? You couldn't convince me to stay with your words so now you're going to force me? This is low, even for you."The silence after that was thick and heavy, the kind of silence that felt like it was listening. I strained against it, waiting f
Victor’s POV "Start making calls," I said. "Reach out to every contact you have, every informant, every source. Someone knows something. Someone saw a vehicle on that road, someone heard something, someone talked to the wrong person at the wrong time." "I'm already on it. But Victor, there's a chance this isn't about her. It could be about you. Someone trying to send a message by taking something you care about." The thought had already occurred to me, and it made my blood run cold. I had enemies. A man in my position always had enemies. Business rivals I had crushed, partners I had betrayed, competitors who had spent years looking for a weakness they could exploit. Until Iris, I had no weaknesses. Until Iris, I was untouchable. She had changed that simply by existing, by becoming the one thing in the world I couldn't afford to lose. "If someone took her to get to me," I said slowly, "they'll reach
Marcus's POV Maya was already in the booth when I walked in, her hands wrapped around a cup of coffee that had stopped steaming a long time ago. She looked up when she heard the door, and her face did something complicated, a flicker of relief that I had shown up followed immediately by the kind o
Marcus's POV The bell above the door chimed when I walked in, a soft jingle that felt entirely too cheerful for the way my stomach was knotting itself into something unrecognizable. The bookstore smelled like old paper and fresh coffee, the kind of smell that used to make Iris close her eyes an
Marcus's POV The house had never felt this empty before Iris started leaving. I noticed it first about a month after the wedding, when she flew to New York for some publishing thing and I came home to a dark kitchen and a sink full of dishes I hadn't dirtied. The silence wasn't the peaceful kind
Iris's POVWe didn't make it to the bed. We barely made it past the door before his hands were in my hair and my back was against the wall and his mouth was on my throat with that familiar, devastating pressure that always made me forget where I was and who I was supposed to be. The weeks of silen







