JULIAN POV
The penthouse feels empty.
Julian stands at the window of his office on the seventy-fifth floor and stares at the city. Three days have passed since she left. Three days since he woke up and she was gone. Three days since he realized that the only real thing in his life disappeared while he was sleeping.
Her name is Evelyn. He learned that much before she vanished.
But everything else is a mystery.
He doesn't know her last name. He doesn't know where she lives. He doesn't know anything about her except that she felt real and she fit perfectly against his chest and when she looked at him, he believed in something he thought was dead inside him.
Now she's gone.
His secretary buzzes his office. A meeting with investors. Board members waiting. Important business. Julian tells her to cancel everything.
"Sir?" his secretary says, confused. "These are meetings you've been planning for months."
"Cancel them," Julian repeats.
He hangs up without waiting for her to argue.
He calls his best friend Evander. Evander arrives within the hour, looking concerned.
"You look like you haven't slept," Evander says.
"I haven't," Julian says. "I need you to find someone. A woman. I met her at Nocturne three days ago. She wore a silver mask. She had brown eyes. She was beautiful and broken and real."
Evander sits down slowly.
"You're talking about a woman you met at a nightclub," Evander says carefully. "A woman you don't have a name for."
"Her name is Evelyn. That's all I know."
"Julian, there are probably thousands of women named Evelyn in this city."
"I know," Julian says. "But she's different. She's the one. I can feel it."
Evander looks at his best friend like he's lost his mind. Maybe he has.
"What do you want me to do?" Evander asks.
"Find her. I don't care how. Check with Nocturne. Find out who paid cash that night. Find out what cameras they have. Find out who works there. Find her."
Evander nods and leaves. Julian goes back to the window. He doesn't sleep. He doesn't eat. He just stands there and thinks about her.
He thinks about her voice. The way it sounded like she was speaking from underwater. The way she told him things she probably shouldn't have told a stranger. He thinks about how she trusted him even though she shouldn't have trusted anyone.
He thinks about the way she felt in his arms.
By day five, his entire office staff knows something is wrong. Julian snaps at his assistant. He yells at his business partners. He closes deals aggressively and without his usual calculation. He's falling apart and everyone can see it.
Evander shows up at his apartment that night. He looks frustrated.
"The club doesn't keep records of masked guests," Evander says. "It's part of the appeal. Nobody has to be real there. Nobody has to have a name."
"There has to be something," Julian says. "Security footage. Payment records. Something."
"I checked. She paid cash for everything. She came alone. She left alone. Well, she left with you, but then you both disappeared."
Julian feels something crack inside his chest.
"There's more," Evander says. "I checked the gossip blogs. There's a story about a girl at Nocturne that night. A poor girl who left with you. A girl from a family that just publicly disowned her."
Julian's entire body goes cold.
"What?" he says.
"There are photos of you two together. The internet is saying you seduced her. The blogs are calling her a gold digger. Some news outlet did a feature on how she's trying to trap you into a relationship."
Julian feels like he's drowning.
"Where is she?" he asks.
"I don't know. But her family released a statement saying they don't know her anymore. The paparazzi was following her. Then she just disappeared."
"She ran," Julian says quietly. "She ran because of me."
"Julian, you don't even know her."
"I know her enough to know that I hurt her," Julian says. "I know her enough to know that my existence in her life destroyed hers."
He goes to Nocturne that night. He goes to the bar where she sat drinking wine like it was poison. He sits in the exact spot and tries to feel what she was feeling. He tries to understand the girl who felt so broken that she needed to escape into a club full of strangers.
The bartender recognizes him.
"You're the guy from the news," the bartender says. "You came here with that girl. The one everyone's saying you seduced."
"I didn't seduce her," Julian says. "She saved me."
He leaves without drinking anything.
By week two, Julian has hired three private investigators. He's checked passenger lists for every flight leaving New York. He's contacted every major airport. He's called in favors from people he's done business with. Nothing.
She's a ghost.
She wore a mask. She paid cash. She left no trace of herself behind.
Except in his mind.
He can't stop thinking about her. He can't stop replaying the night over and over. He can't stop wondering where she went. He can't stop wondering if she's okay. He can't stop wondering if she thinks about him at all.
His business partner calls to tell him they're losing deals. Julian doesn't care. His company is falling apart and he doesn't care because the only thing that matters is finding her.
"You're obsessed," Evander says during one of his visits. "You need to move on."
"Move on to what?" Julian asks. "Move on to pretending that night didn't change everything? Move on to being the machine I was before she made me feel something real?"
"You knew her for one night."
"I know her better than I know anyone in my entire life," Julian says. "I know what she was running from. I know that she was broken. I know that she trusted me and I failed her."
By week three, Julian is no longer sleeping. He's barely eating. He's lost weight. He looks like he's dying from the inside out.
His business partner Marcus comes to his apartment and tells him the truth.
"You're destroying yourself," Marcus says. "You're destroying this company. You're destroying everything. Whatever happened with this girl, it's not worth losing everything you built."
"I don't care about what I built," Julian says. "It's all empty. It's all meaningless. She made me believe that something could be real and then she disappeared and now I'm right back where I started. Empty. Alone. Numb."
Marcus leaves and doesn't come back.
By month one, Julian has given up.
He stops searching. He stops calling the investigators. He stops checking passenger lists. He accepts that she's gone. She's disappeared. She's chosen to exist somewhere he'll never find her.
The only thing he has left is the memory of her.
The smell of her hair. The way her eyes looked when she trusted him. The way her body fit against his like they were designed to be together. The way she said his name like it was a prayer.
He throws himself into work. He buys companies and destroys them. He makes brutal business decisions that leave other people in ruins. He becomes colder than he was before because at least being cold means he doesn't feel the ache of her absence.
Three months pass.
Julian is in a meeting with board members when his assistant interrupts. She's apologetic. She knows he hates being disturbed. But this is important.
A news alert. A story from London. A new tech company has appeared out of nowhere. Sterling Industries. The CEO is a woman named Evelyn Grace. She's twenty-three years old. She's building something revolutionary.
The article has a photo.
It's her.
But it's not her. She's different. Harder. Older. Stronger. There's something behind her eyes that wasn't there before. Something that looks like survival. Something that looks like pain transformed into power.
Julian reads the article three times. He searches for more information. He finds her company's website. He finds her LinkedIn profile. He finds everything except the truth.
She's alive.
She's in London.
She's building an empire.
And she hasn't looked back once.
Julian feels something shift inside him. Relief and devastation at the same time. She made it. She survived whatever happened to her. She didn't break.
But she's gone. Really gone. She's built a new life in another country and she never looked back.
He closes the article and goes back to the meeting like his entire world didn't just shift.
What he doesn't know is that Evelyn Grace is sitting in a small flat in London holding a newborn baby. What he doesn't know is that the baby has his eyes and his mind and his genius for strategy. What he doesn't know is that the woman he couldn't find has been carrying his child across the ocean while he was obsessing over her absence.
What he doesn't know is that he has a son.
And that son is going to change everything.