CHAPTER 7: The Empty File

Caspian's POV

I don't chase.

I want to be clear about that, even if the only person listening is me. Men who chase are men who have already lost. They run after a thing with their hands open and their chest exposed, and the world takes one look and knows exactly where to put the knife.

My mother taught me that before I was old enough to spell it. You don't reach. You acquire. You take the thing apart until you understand every screw, and then you own it, and then you are safe.

So this… this wasn't chasing.

This was a problem on my desk, and I solved problems on my desk.

"Everything you can find," I had told the man two days ago. He was the best in the country at finding things, paid enough to forget he ever looked. "Anastasia Voss. All of it. The boring parts especially."

He was good and he was quick. By Thursday night the file was in front of me, a plain folder on a black desk, and I poured myself two fingers of something old and opened it like a man opening a gift.

I expected the usual.

A childhood. Schools. The names of men before me, so I would know what she was used to and how to be more. A messy breakup, maybe, because women who drink like she had drunk that night are running from something with a face and a phone number. I expected a whole life, laid flat, so I could read her the way I read everything.

I started at the top.

Anastasia Voss. Born twenty-four years ago. Parents deceased, a car accident, when she was small. Raised by a family friend. College on her own money, three jobs, a degree in marketing and business. Good. Strong. The kind of climb I respected, because it was mine too, in a different city with a different mother.

Then the page ran out of her.

That is the only way I can say it. The life climbed and climbed and then, around two years ago, it just stopped giving me anything. The jobs ended. Nothing.

Two years where a young woman should be building a career, dating, living loud the way the young do, and instead there was a flat gray space where the facts should be.

I turned the page and the next one was worse.

“This is wrong.”

I sat forward and I read it again, slower, the way I read a contract. And the more carefully I looked, the worse it got.

There was no apartment in her name for those two years. No car. Barely a bank account, and the one that existed had almost nothing moving through it, like a woman who had been kept rather than living. No coworkers to call. No landlord. No trace of where she slept or what she did or who she did it with.

And no marriage.

I stopped on that because I had seen her shy from money like it had teeth. I had seen her hold her chin up in a way you only learn by needing to. Somewhere in those two missing years was a man, I would have bet the company on it, and yet the public record gave me nothing. No license. No certificate. No name beside hers anywhere.

Either she had never married.

Or someone had made very sure it couldn't be found.

I set the glass down without drinking from it.

“Someone scrubbed this. Someone who knew exactly which threads to pull.”

Because that is the part the file got wrong in a way that made the back of my neck go cold.

It wasn't just empty. Empty is a woman who keeps to herself. This was worse than empty. This was clean. The records that should have existed and just didn't.

You don't get a life this quiet by accident. You get it when a person with money and reach decides a woman should disappear from the page.

I knew that, because I had done it to people. And I knew exactly what it cost and exactly what it looked like.

And it looked like this.

I picked up my phone and called him. He answered on the first ring, the way men do when they are already afraid of the question.

"The Voss file."

"Mr. Strauss."

"It's thin."

There was a pause. The wrong kind. "I noticed that too, sir. I want you to know it isn't my work. I pulled every database we have access to and a few we don't. There should be more. On a woman her age there is always more." He chose his next words carefully, and a careful man made me lean in. "It's like… pieces were lifted out. Not hidden. Removed. Someone got there before me."

I went very still.

For the first time in longer than I could remember, the ground under me wasn't where I had left it.

I am always three steps ahead. That isn't pride, it is just the arrangement of my life. I see the move before the man makes it. I know the answer before the question is fully out. I have built everything I own on being the one who already knows. And now I was holding a folder about a woman who had walked into my conference room, looked me in the eye, and told me she didn't remember a night I haven't stopped reliving, and the folder was telling me I didn't know her at all.

She declared herself single without blinking. HR had told me that, laughing, the day she was hired.

What did you have to bury, Anastasia?

Or who buried it for you?

I stood up and walked to the glass. The floor below was dark now, the desks empty, the whole building gone home while I sat in here turning a stranger over in my hands.

I looked at the dark where her desk was.

"Who is she hiding from?"