Chapter 23
Cade’s blood ran cold when he found her hospital ward stripped bare and empty.
A brutal terror seized his heart, the sickening certainty that he had just lost something irreplaceable, and as he scanned the sterile room, he failed to grasp that what was truly gone could never be reclaimed.
“Aria!”
He burst into the adjoining washroom, but it was just as vacant, with not a single trace of Aria to be found.
Cade scoured every wing and floor of the hospital, but she was simply gone.
In a final, desperate surge, he demanded access to the hospital’s security archives, yet the footage revealed nothing. She had vanished with the calculated precision of a ghost, ensuring that no camera would ever witness her departure.
“Find her,” Cade bellowed into his phone, his voice a low, dangerous growl, “I don’t care what it takes, just find her!”
From the other end, Logan’s voice was a nervous tremor as he promised more men and a wider search radius, but it was at that exact moment the initial report came through.
They had located Aria.
More accurately, they had located her body, a canvas of violent, dark bruises.
A wave of apprehension washed over Logan, who had no idea how to deliver the news that would shatter his boss, how to articulate the death of the woman Cade loved.
He wrestled with the words, his courage failing, before finally making the call, his voice cracking, “Boss, we’ve found Ms. M… She… She…”
A cold sweat beaded on Logan’s brow, the grief he felt for her a bitter pill, yet he knew telling Cade would be like driving a blade straight through the man’s heart. All the money in the world couldn't buy back a single second of her life.
The raw panic in Logan’s tone only amplified Cade’s distress, causing him to grip his phone with crushing force.
“What’s wrong with her? Say it!”
“Boss, you should… you should just turn on the news.”
Logan tried, but the words wouldn’t form. There was no gentle way to report that Aria was dead, so after a choked pause, he deflected, telling him to see for himself.
Logan’s fractured sentence plunged Cade into a maelstrom of fear and irritation, and without losing a second, he swiped open the news app on his phone.
The top story was a live broadcast from a riverbank, where a vehicle had just been dredged from the water, and frozen on the screen was Aria’s face, unmistakably clear.
Cade’s mind refused to process what he was seeing, forcing him to pull the phone so close his eyes burned, desperate to prove himself wrong.
The old wounds on her face were still healing, yet they were now eclipsed by a fresh constellation of horrifying cuts, her arms bent at grotesque, unnatural angles, the disfiguring injuries smeared with blood that was terrifying in its finality.
His heart plummeted as his eyes snagged on the headline: “Socialite Aria Montgomery dead after vehicle plunges into river.”
She had been driving when she crashed, the car a mangled wreck just pulled from the depths, but the toll it had taken on her was infinitely worse, as evidenced by the brutal tapestry of scars covering her body.
Cade stared vacantly at the screen, his mind splintering under the weight of a thousand questions.
What does that headline mean?
How could she be dead?
And what are those people doing?
Why isn’t anyone helping her? why have they draped her in that disgusting white sheet?
No, he refused to see her beneath a white sheet.
He still owed her an explanation, owed them their second chance, their happily-ever-after, so how dare these people declare her dead?
Lies, all of it, absolute garbage! Which media outlet was this, he would shut them down!
He would burn every last media company spreading this poison to the ground!