Chapter 43
Morning sunlight cut through the curtains in jagged shards, slicing across the quiet house.
Everywhere was too quiet.
I stirred, head throbbing from the late-night vigil I hadn’t realized I’d fallen into.
I rubbed my eyes, expecting to see Versace sprawled across the couch, scrolling lazily on her phone, or teasing Asvika for being overdramatic. But the house was empty.
There was no sound. No movement. Only the faint hum of the city and the distant footsteps of servants moving like ghosts down the hall.
I frowned and swung my legs out of the couch.
Where was she?
I ran through the rooms like someone trying to catch a thought before it slipped.
Doors were locked. Curtains were down. Her room was empty. The living room was empty. The kitchen was silent, her food untouched.
My throat tightened to a dry, sharp ache. The house, which usually breathed with noise and small wars and gossip, felt like a held breath.
“Asvika!” I called, voice higher than I meant. Panic settled in like a stone.
She came practically flying down the corridor, out of breath, cheeks flushed, eyes wide. “Sanaa, you haven’t seen Versace, have you?”
“No,” I whispered. The word thinned in the air. “She should be here. She—” I stopped, my voice catching on the last plan she’d said aloud the night before.
That was when Versace’s mother appeared, silk robe haloing around her like a flag. She moved faster than she looked. Calmness abandoned her face and something raw and sharp took the wheel.
Her fingers closed on my arm like an anchor. “Sanaa, Asvika… she’s not in her room. Not anywhere. Where is she?”
“My calls to her bodyguard went straight to voicemail,” Asvika gasped. “Mayami hasn’t heard from her either.”
My skin prickled.
The corners of the house suddenly felt violent.
Versace had planned to meet Aurelio today, an image I kept trying to place. So where was she now?
The front door slammed open like a hand smashing a clock. Aurelio pushed through, anger and fear stiff in his posture, eyes moving like they were trying to burn through walls.
“Where is she?” His voice was a blade. Real worry made him ugly. I hadn’t expected that vulnerability.
“We don’t know.” My voice cracked and fell apart in my mouth. “She’s not here.”
Something in me snapped. I dialled Dominic before my brain could tell me not to. It was muscle-memory.
When danger smells like metal and teeth, he moves faster than the rest of us. The house seemed to hold its breath while the call connected.
Dominic arrived like a storm.
He didn’t walk in; he took up the room. His shadow folded the edges of everything, and when he spoke the air tightened. “Get everyone ready. I want every team member on this. Now. No exceptions. Versace is missing, and I want eyes everywhere.”
Asvika grabbed Aurelio’s sleeve. “We need to move,” she hissed.
He hesitated, looking like a man trying to find himself in a map he’d never drawn. The hesitation broke something in me. He looked small, like someone in a suit borrowed from a life that didn’t fit him.
Versace’s mother shot ice at him with her eyes, expectation and disappointment braided together.
Dominic’s hand was on his phone already, calling, commanding. No theatrics. Just action. His voice was clipped, efficient. “Everyone mobilizes. Check cameras. Traffic cams. Hospital lists. Every contact, now.”
Versace’s mother seized Dominic’s hand, the silk tremor in her fingers. “Please… bring her back safely.” Her voice cracked. It was the sound that made people move from cold competence to terrified, human frenzy.
“I’m coming,” I heard myself say. My feet moved before my brain could catch up. I would go with Dominic, be the shadow at his shoulder, the one running maps and calling favours. We didn’t have the luxury of thinking. Our whole life has become a series of responses and lists.
Aurelio lingered. His jaw tightened. He looked at Dominic like a man accounting for an enemy in a mirror.
I felt pity, then a flicker of anger. He had stood in Versace’s orbit for weeks and still didn’t know where she disappeared in an instant. That ignorance made him dangerous in his own way.
Dominic was the better cousin.
Dominic barked out orders again. “Get your teams moving. Do not waste time.” His eyes snagged mine and there was a promise and a threat in the same glance. He was dangerous when angry, it woke something active and precise in him. We needed that.
I followed him to his car, heart banging like a drum I could not silence. The leather smelled like the man himself; calm, dangerous, steady in the way a loaded gun was steady.
“Wear your seat belt,” he said without looking at me. It was half command, half soft caution, and the way he said it landed in my chest like both an order and a comfort.
The click of the belt felt like permission to move. I buckled and let the world speed into focus.
I tried to stop the tears from coming.
I laughed once, a brittle sound that broke into a sob before the breath left my body. The car smelled like diesel, Dominic, and something steadier than panic. I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes until my vision went black around the edges.
“Maybe…maybe karma’s finally catching up to me.” I said the words out loud because thinking them was easier than the feeling of this whole nightmare.
The thought hit me with the peculiar sting of guilt. If I had never faked my death, if I hadn’t chosen to hide truths, maybe none of this would have happened.
Versace would’ve never returned to the mafia, no enemies resurfacing. The mind found ways to stab itself when it was scared.
“D-do you think it’s him?” I whispered.
Dominic’s jaw worked. He was not a man of many wasted words. When he spoke, it was action. “Which other bastard would dare?” he spat. “It has to be him. But I can’t go and knock on his door and ask nicely, so we find her ourselves.”
I knew who he was talking about, the same bastard who made me stay dead for three years.
His hand on the wheel tightened until the leather creaked, and the car felt like a canister of held-up force. “God help me if her shadow isn’t doing his fucking job and protecting her,” he muttered, and there was a personal venom in it that made me tighten around grief.
My sobs traded into a steadier breath, the kind you force when you have to be useful.
“We will find her, Sanaaya,” he said, no mercy in the phrasing. It was not a promise so much as a war plan. “Even if we have to turn the flipping mafia world upside down.”
Something small and stubborn inside me unclenched. Hope was stupid but necessary. I let it sit there like a foreign coin warming in my palm.
“Don’t hold back,” I said. “If we have to burn things down to get her back, we’ll do it.”
He glanced at me, and I read everything in that look—rage, fear, the cost. He didn’t need to say it; we would go all the way. He drove faster then. The city blurred into streaks of neon and smog.
“Asvika with Aurelio. You and me. We split. We call in favours. We shake every friendly and unfriendly hand until someone coughs up a lead,” he said, crisp and without hesitation.
My mouth tasted like rust. The plan snapped into place around us and steadied the panic into movement. We were machines. Action was a kind of prayer.
“Promise me something?” I blurted, voice rough.
He didn’t answer instantly. His jaw ticked, thinking in angles. Finally, he said, low and lethal, “If I find them first, I’ll make them wish they’d never been born.”
The words landed like a verdict. I gripped my seatbelt until it bit into my skin. “And if I find them first?”
“You call me,” he said. He didn’t have to finish. I heard the unspoken, ‘you don’t finish this alone’.
We drove on.
The city didn’t know yet that we’d declared war.
Its people were getting coffee, hailing cabs, scrolling on their phones. To them it was a normal morning, but to us it was every hour of our lives stacked into dangerous, necessary minutes.
The car skimmed past intersections. A motorbike cut us off and Dominic’s eye tracked it like a hawk cataloguing movement. We were looking for one silhouette among millions.
I pictured Versace laughing, rolling her eyes at Dominic’s theatrics, the way she’d snap a pen when she was annoyed. The image steadied me. It was small but fierce, a talisman. I held onto it.
Dominic’s voice, when it came, was softer but still whole. “Ara is strong, she won’t go down without a fight, and we will find her before she goes down.”
I released a breath. Panic was contagious but so was resolve. The plan was ugly and necessary, and it felt right. We would stop at nothing.
The car slid into traffic and the hunt began.
“We have to.”