Page 10 of Thirty-Two Calls

"Who else?"

"Evander Foster. Her brother. He was one of our top encryption specialists in the subterranean labs. His data is gone, too. In fact, looking at the architecture of this backdoor... he's the one who built it. He used our own proprietary firewalls to shield the deletion process. By the time he executed the final command on Friday night, they were already ghosts."

Lance stared at the cascading green code on the black monitors. He was a man who appreciated ruthless efficiency and brilliant execution. Under any other circumstance, he would have promoted the architect of such a flawless system immediately. But standing there, staring at the absolute eradication of the woman he loved, he felt nothing but a hollow, paralyzing terror.

Evie hadn't just left the company. She hadn't just run away. She had deliberately, methodically, severed every conceivable tie to him, ensuring he could never follow her. The cage he had been so carefully dismantling to let her inside had been empty all along.

The Thirty-Two Calls

Lance dismissed the IT team with a sharp wave of his hand. When the heavy oak doors clicked shut, leaving him entirely alone with Connor, the last remnants of the untouchable billionaire finally shattered.

He walked over to the floor-to-ceiling window, bracing his hands against the cool glass. The city sprawled below him, millions of lives, millions of people. And she was gone.

Why? The question echoed in his mind, a torturous loop. For the last month, she had been perfectly normal. She had smiled at him in the penthouse. She had kissed him. She had listened to him complain about Camille's family and the board. She had been playing a part, performing a flawless pantomime of love while counting down the days until she could escape him.

His mind violently rewound through the last six weeks, searching for the fracture point.

And then, it hit him.

The memory struck with such force that Lance physically stumbled back from the window, his breath catching in his throat.

Six weeks ago. The night of Theodore Deacon’s heart attack.

Lance remembered standing in the penthouse three days after the incident, pouring a scotch, exhausted and irritated. He remembered Evie standing in the center of the room, looking terribly pale. He remembered her asking, in that soft, fragile voice, why he hadn't texted her.

He remembered his own response. The cold, corporate lecture about optics. The casual, cruel reminder that she wasn't family.

But what he remembered most vividly now—what made a sickening wave of nausea crash over him—was the number she had spoken.

Thirty-two calls, Lance. Was it really impossible to find just five minutes?

Thirty-two.

Lance’s hands began to shake. A woman doesn't call her lover thirty-two times because she wants to say goodnight. She doesn't call thirty-two times because she's mildly worried about a news report. Thirty-two calls meant sheer, unadulterated desperation. Thirty-two calls meant panic.

He had never asked her why she called.

He was a monster. He had been so entirely consumed by his own crisis, so deeply entrenched in the arrogance of his own empire, that he had dismissed her desperation as neediness. He had lectured the woman who meant everything to him, shutting her out when she had clearly been begging for a lifeline. He was a horrible, arrogant, abysmal lover. He hadn't protected her; he had abandoned her.

"Connor," Lance said, his voice completely devoid of its usual booming authority. It was a raw, broken rasp.

Connor stepped forward instantly. "Yes, Mr. Rothwood?"

Lance turned around, his dark eyes hollowed out, carrying a frantic, desperate grief that stripped away a decade of his ruthless veneer.

"Six weeks ago," Lance ordered, his voice shaking. "The night Theodore was admitted to the hospital. A Thursday. I need you to find out exactly where Evie was that night."

Connor frowned slightly, sensing the dangerous shift in his boss's mental state. "Sir, her digital footprint is gone. How do you want me to—"

"I don't care how you do it!" Lance suddenly roared, the sound tearing through the quiet office like a gunshot. He slammed his fist onto his mahogany desk, the wood vibrating under the impact. "Hire private investigators. Bribe the telecom networks. Pull the CCTV footage from every street corner between here and her apartment. Check the precinct logs, the hospital admissions, the emergency dispatch scanners!"

Lance sank heavily into his leather chair, burying his face in his hands. The silence that followed was heavy and tragic.

"Just find out what happened to her that night, Connor," Lance whispered into the quiet room, the terrible, crushing weight of his failure finally breaking him. "Find out what I let happen to her."

Chapter Nine: The Structure of Ruin

The silence in Lance Rothwood’s executive suite was no longer the quiet of a sanctuary; it was the suffocating vacuum of a grave.