Chapter 2 - The Woman Who Took Her

By the time Callum reached the room where Eilidh had been dressing, the wedding had become an incident.

His mother was downstairs with guests who had not yet been told whether to leave. Malcolm Campbell had shut himself into a private room with his son and two advisers. Callum's father had already asked, twice, where Eilidh was.

Callum had the same answer both times.

He didn't know.

He stepped past the abandoned flowers and looked at the chair where Eilidh's coat should have been. Her phone was gone too. Good. At least she had taken it.

"Preserve whatever shows how she left," he told venue security. "Sequence only. No search for her."

Sinclair Group security could answer the same question from the evidence already available.

That distinction cost him.

He gave them one limit: establish whether Eilidh had acted under her own control, then stop.

He ended the call before anyone could mistake urgency for permission.

On the dressing table, a glass of water sat untouched beside a row of hairpins. Nothing in the room looked like violence. No broken lock. No scattered belongings. No sign that anyone had dragged Eilidh through a door.

He knew that proved very little.

He also knew what he had seen.

His sister had been in the back seat. She had not been restrained. Ailsa Fraser had been outside the car, holding the veil Eilidh had apparently discarded. When Callum had shouted, Ailsa could have climbed in and left with her.

She had stayed.

You're the woman who took her.

I'm the woman who opened the door.

At the time, the distinction had sounded like self-righteous wordplay.

Ten minutes later, it was beginning to irritate him for a different reason.

His phone rang.

"Callum." His father's voice carried none of the noise surrounding him. Alistair Sinclair could make a crisis sound like an agenda item. "Malcolm wants an answer."

"So do I."

"He wants Eilidh back."

Callum looked at the empty chair.

"If she left voluntarily, I can't have her delivered to the altar."

A pause.

"I didn't say delivered."

No. Alistair rarely said the ugliest version of a thing aloud.

"Give me twenty minutes," Callum said.

"You have ten."

The line went dead.

Callum was CEO of Sinclair Group. He could move legal teams across time zones, stop a transaction before breakfast, and have a security report in his hand before most people found the correct person to call. None of that changed the fact that his sister was an adult who had driven away from her own wedding.

Power was useful until it encountered a decision it did not own.

His phone vibrated again. This time it was his chief of staff.

"The Campbell side has told their advisers to pause work on all matters currently involving both families," she said. "Two directors are asking whether today's situation affects the Group."

"It affects the Group because Malcolm wants it to."

"At the moment, that's enough."

Callum closed his eyes for half a second.

"Tell the directors I'll speak to them tonight. No statement naming Eilidh. No speculation about where she is," Callum said.

"And the press?"

"What press?"

A beat of silence.

"Already outside the front gate."

Of course they were.

"Use one line. The ceremony will not proceed today. Nothing about cause."

He ended the call and checked the time.

Six minutes of his father's ten were gone.

A security officer appeared in the doorway carrying a tablet. Callum took it and watched the service-corridor footage without sound.

Eilidh came into view first, still in the dress, moving quickly. Ailsa walked beside her, not in front of her. At the final door, Eilidh stopped.

Callum leaned closer.

Ailsa turned toward her. There was no audio, only the cold geometry of the corridor and two women facing each other while the seconds advanced in the corner of the screen.

Then Eilidh answered something.

She moved first.

The next camera showed her crossing the pavement. Ailsa opened the car door. Eilidh got in by herself.

"Anything before this?"

"We have Ms. Fraser arriving alone forty-three minutes before the ceremony," the officer said. "She was admitted after the bride confirmed she was expected."

Callum looked up.

"Confirmed how?"

"Venue staff called the dressing room. Your sister told them to send her up."

Whatever had happened, it had not begun with a stranger slipping through a side entrance.

"Keep the footage," Callum said.

His own security team called before he could hand back the tablet. They confirmed Eilidh had contacted Exit before Ailsa arrived.

"Can you establish coercion?"

"Nothing we've seen supports it."

Callum's grip tightened around the phone.

"That wasn't my question."

"No. We cannot establish coercion."

The answer was clean enough to close one line of attack, and he disliked it.

He dismissed the officer and stood alone in the room for the first time since Eilidh had disappeared.

His sister had contacted Exit.

His sister had asked for Ailsa Fraser.

His sister had walked to the car.

He still did not know why.

That mattered. People made decisions in panic. People could be influenced. They could be convinced that one terrible hour represented an entire life. Ailsa Fraser ran a company built around leaving; Callum was not prepared to assume she entered a wedding without an opinion.

But he could no longer tell himself she had simply taken Eilidh.

His phone lit with Eilidh's name.

For one irrational second, relief hit before he had even opened the message.

I'm safe. I contacted Exit. I left because I chose to. Don't come looking for me. I'll talk when I'm ready.

Callum read it twice.

The message gave him no explanation and no location. It did one thing clearly: told him where his authority stopped.

He typed, Are you sure?

Then deleted it.

He typed, We need to talk.

Deleted that too.

Finally he wrote, Tell me if you need anything.

The message delivered.

No reply came.

Outside the room, footsteps approached with the hard, impatient rhythm of people who believed Callum should already have solved this.

He put the phone away.

Ailsa Fraser had not answered his accusation with fear, apology, or an attempt to flatter him into calm. She had corrected him. Worse, the evidence was correcting him too.

She had opened the door.

Callum still wanted to know what had happened on the other side of it.

He walked out of the dressing room.

His father's ten minutes were up. Malcolm Campbell was furious. Sinclair Group was already absorbing consequences from a wedding that had not lasted long enough to begin.

Callum could not order Eilidh back.

But he could question the woman who had made leaving possible.

He took out his phone and asked for the address of Exit.

Then he went to find Ailsa Fraser.