Chapter 265

Christian ended the call with his lawyer, and stared at the phone in his hand.

For several seconds, he didn’t move.

The screen had gone dark, reflecting a faint, distorted version of his face. He could still hear his mother’s voice in his head, each word delivered with the same cool finality she used when dismissing an employee or announcing a business decision she expected everyone else to accept.

"You are no longer a Sinclair." She had said through his lawyer’s phone. "You will not be attending your grandfather’s funeral."

His grandfather would be buried in two weeks, and his lawyer had called to inform him that he wasn’t welcome.

Christian lowered the phone.

He had spent too many years allowing his mother to decide what his life should look like. He wasn’t about to begin again simply because she had found another way to make him feel like a boy who had disappointed her.

Still, the rejection had landed somewhere he hadn’t expected.

He had told himself that walking away from the Sinclair fortune would be easy. He had enough money of his own, enough companies, and enough influence to build whatever life he wanted without asking anyone’s permission.

What he hadn’t anticipated was how much it would hurt to discover that she was willing to use his grandfather’s death to punish him.

Christian exhaled through his nose and set the phone on the desk.

For a moment, he considered pouring himself a drink.

Instead, he looked at the clock.

Kylie had gone out to get something.

Gummies, if he remembered correctly.

He had been in the middle of his call when she left. He remembered hearing the faint sound of her bedroom door opening somewhere beyond the guest room, followed by the soft click of the front door a few minutes later.

He hadn’t thought anything of it.

Christian rubbed a hand over his face, stood, and walked towards the guest room door. He needed to get out of the room.

The walls were beginning to feel too close, and he had no intention of spending the rest of the afternoon thinking about his mother.

He would check on Kylie, perhaps steal a few of her gummies, and find something else to occupy his mind.

Something that didn’t involve his family, or death.

Something that didn’t involve the growing suspicion that every time he thought he had finally escaped his past, someone found another way to drag it into his present.

He opened the guest room door, and stepped into the hallway. His eyes moved instinctively toward Kylie’s bedroom.

The door was closed.

He walked toward it.

He had learned to recognize the different kinds of silence that followed Kylie around.

There was the silence she used when she was plotting something mischievous, usually accompanied by an expression of exaggerated innocence.

There was the silence that came when she was concentrating, her brows drawn together as she studied something she didn’t want anyone to know she was struggling with.

And then there was the silence that came when she was hurting. That one he had learned to approach carefully.

Christian stopped outside her door and knocked twice. "Blue?"

There was no answer.

He waited.

He knocked again.

"Kylie."

Still nothing.

He frowned.

It wasn’t unusual for her not to answer immediately. Sometimes she was in the shower. Sometimes she was on a call with Emilia, and the two of them could talk for so long that the rest of the world ceased to exist.

But she wasn’t in the shower.

He hadn’t heard the water running. And if she were on a call with Emilia, he would probably have heard her laughing.

Christian tried the handle.

The door opened.

He looked inside.

The room was empty.

His gaze moved over the bed, the armchair near the window, the dressing table, and the shoes scattered beside the wardrobe.

Nothing appeared out of place.

The bed was still made. Her handbag wasn’t on the dresser. A top she had worn the previous evening lay folded over the arm of the chair, and one of her books was open facedown on the bedside table.

Christian stepped inside. "Blue?"

He didn’t expect an answer.

He called her name anyway.

The bathroom door stood open. He checked it, then the wardrobe, even though he knew perfectly well that Kylie wasn’t going to be hiding inside it.

He came back into the bedroom and took out his phone. There was no message from her.

He opened their conversation.

The last exchange was from earlier that morning, when Kylie had sent him a picture of a ridiculously expensive pair of shoes and asked whether he thought they were worth buying.

He had told her that if she needed one, he would get it for her. She had responded with a string of laugh.

Christian stared at the conversation for a moment, then locked his phone.

He was being ridiculous.

She had gone to the store.

That was all.

He knew which store she meant. It was a short walk from the building, and she had gone there before. She knew the neighbourhood. She wasn’t a child who needed someone following her around every time she stepped outside.

He had no intention of becoming that man. But he could still check how long she had been gone.

Christian returned to the living room and glanced at the clock.

Then he looked at it again.

Something about the time bothered him.

He couldn’t immediately identify what it was, and that made the feeling worse.

He remembered Kylie standing near the door, her phone in one hand and the little earpiece she liked to use in the other.

He remembered her saying she was going to get gummies.

He remembered smiling at her, and remembered returning to his call.

Christian took out his phone again and checked the time of his lawyer’s call.

He had been speaking to him for nearly an hour. He looked toward the front door.

An hour.

She had been gone for an hour.

The store wasn’t far enough away for that to make sense.

He called her.

The phone rang three times.

Christian waited, staring at the screen. The call went to voicemail.

He lowered the phone.

A small, uncomfortable feeling settled in his stomach.

He called again. This time, it rang for longer.

Still, there was no answer.

"Come on, Blue."

He wasn’t sure whether he was speaking to her or to himself. He ended the call and sent her a message.

Christain: Where are you?

He stared at the screen.

There was no reply.

He sent another.

Chistain: You okay?

There was still no response.

Christian walked to the window and looked down at the street.

Cars moved through the traffic. People walked along the pavement, some carrying shopping bags, others speaking into their phones. A delivery rider manoeuvred around a parked vehicle while a woman near the entrance of a building argued with someone over the phone.

He tried calling her a third time.

The call didn’t connect.

Christian stared at his phone.

He called again.bThis time, the number was unreachable.

His entire body went still. "No."

The word escaped him before he could stop it.

He immediately redialled. He got the same result. He lowered the phone slowly.

His first instinct was to dismiss the fear. Perhaps her battery had died. Perhaps the network was bad. Perhaps she had entered the store and put her phone away while she paid for her things.

There were a dozen explanations.

He could name every one of them. None of them stopped the cold feeling spreading through his chest.

Christian walked toward the front door.

He opened it and looked down the corridor, as though Kylie might appear around the corner, holding a packet of gummies and wearing that triumphant smile she always wore when she knew she had gotten away with something.

No one was there.

He stepped back inside and shut the door.

Then he called one of his men.

"Where are you?"

"Sir?"

"Where are you?"

There was a brief pause.

"Outside the building, sir. We returned few minutes agi after steoing away during oir time off."

Christian closed his eyes.

He had instructed his security team to stand down whenever he was in the house with her.

His men knew the arrangement. When he was home, they stayed out of sight unless he requested them.

Kylie had gone out while he was in the guest room. The men had been outside the building, and had stepped away too.

They had not been stationed at her door.

"Did you see Kylie leave?"

"No, sir."

Christian’s grip tightened around the phone. "You did not see her leave?"

"Yes, sir. But I feel she came through the main entrance."

"Where did she go?"

"I didn’t see, sir. She turned toward the main road."

Christian looked at the wall.

He forced himself to take a breath.

"Get someone to check the store near the building. Now. Find out whether she got there."

"Yes, sir."

"And check the street. Every shop, every entrance, every security camera you can access. I want to know which direction she took and whether she came back."

"Understood."

Christian ended the call.

For a second, he stood perfectly still. Then he began moving.

He went back into Kylie’s room, picked up the cloth from the chair, and dropped it again when he realised he had no idea what he intended to do with it.

He checked the bathroom a second time.

He checked the balcony.

He checked the guest room, the living room, and the kitchen, his eyes moving over every corner as though he might somehow have overlooked the possibility that she was there.

He returned to the hallway and shouted her name.

"Kylie!"

The sound came out louder than he intended.

It disappeared into the empty apartment.

He stood there, listening. His pulse began to pound. He knew how to function when something went wrong.

He knew how to make decisions under pressure.

But there was something uniquely terrifying about standing in a place where someone should have been and finding only the evidence that they had been there before.

Kylie’s room still smelled like her perfumes. Her book was still open. Everything remained exactly as it had been when she left.

Everything except Kylie.

Christian called her again. It was unreachable.

He dragged a hand through his hair and began pacing. "Come on, baby."

He didn’t know when he had started using the word. He only knew that he couldn’t stop.

"Come on. Pick up your phone."