Chapter 33
The Flame
A few days went by, and Silas stayed by my side the majority of the time.
Whenever he wasn’t with me, he was always watching me on the cameras, making sure I was safe.
Safe from what, considering his home was a fortress, I couldn’t be sure. But I was beginning to recognise his paranoia where I was concerned. And I was so used to cameras at this point, it didn’t even occur to me to protest against them.
I stopped messaging Luca. Sure, I would have preferred to cut ties with him a bit cleaner.
I hated that he could potentially think I’d pick up where we left off once I escaped here.
It hurt Silas, though. That much was obvious.
So I left the phone on my bedside table, exactly where Silas had placed it, and didn’t bother using it again.
What use did I have for it anyway?
Silas stopped wearing the mask whenever we were together in my room. If we were anywhere else in the manor, he had to wear it, he had to have something to hide behind. But when it was just us two, alone together, the mask came off and he let me in.
We fell into an easy rhythm. I began to explore the house and the grounds on my own.
Every inch of Silas’s property was heavily guarded, with thick, dense trees and bushes around the perimeter.
I wasn’t going to be spotted here, and Silas knew I wasn’t planning on leaving, so he allowed me my freedom to come and go as I pleased, especially in the moments he needed to leave for whatever reason.
I did find it weird that I had never run into his grandfather during my explorations.
I would have assumed I would see him—and if not him, at least some sign that he’d been around.
I knew he smoked and Silas didn’t, so maybe even the lingering smell of ash, or a lighter left on a table.
But there was nothing. When I’d asked Silas, he’d simply chuckled under his breath and gone back to massaging my legs for me whilst I watched Game of Thrones on my laptop.
Which felt like another betrayal to Luca, since that had been our thing, but it is what it is.
I had to stop beating myself up over every detail and realise that life had moved on.
It was strange, and I’m sure some people may think I was crazy, but I was happy here.
Silas and I didn’t have the most conventional relationship, but he cared for me.
He attended to my every need. And he’d never once harmed me.
That was more than some women could say—even if I was setting the bar ridiculously low for myself.
The only thing I wished for was for Silas to talk to me. I was dying to hear his voice. I’d heard muttered words enough times during sex to know that he could speak, he was just choosing not to. And I had to hope that one day he would trust me enough with the last piece of himself.
It was on a Sunday that Silas disappeared. Almost a week to the day since he had first taken his mask off and revealed himself to me. As usual, he didn’t tell me he was going, and I had no idea when he would be back.
When he hadn’t returned by evening, I was mildly concerned. When he didn’t join me in bed, I was slightly panicking.
Logically, I knew this was normal. My dad had often disappeared for days on end. But it wasn’t normal for us. And that’s what was concerning.
When two days passed and he still hadn’t returned home, my anxiety was through the roof.
He wasn’t dead. Of that, I was certain. Silas had a reputation, and if he was dead, it would be breaking news. I never turned the TV off, so I would have seen the announcement. But something was keeping him from me. Something was preventing him from returning home.
And rather than sit panicking over it a moment longer, I decided to do something about it.
Old Isabelle would have spiralled. She would have sunk into a depression and figured there was nothing she could do about it. But Silas had taught me that there was so much I could do, even if it wasn’t a physical search. So I walked straight over to Silas’s office and changed the roles.
I was now the watcher.
Okay.
I may have been a bit premature with my declaration.
I most certainly was not the watcher, because I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing!
Silas’s office was nothing like my father’s. His was all leather sofas and a single desk with one computer on top.
Silas’s, on the other hand?
This was fucking madness.
I looked around, my jaw slacking as an overwhelming feeling settled over me. He had one desk stretching the length of the entire wall. Above the desk were twelve monitors, and then along the desk were three computer screens.
Who the fuck needs fifteen different screens?!
I pressed a button on the remote, and the monitors on the wall turned on, showing me surveillance cameras.
On the remote were presets, allowing me to choose the location.
As I flicked through them, I saw the docks, various different casinos, a horrific-looking dungeon setup that I rapidly looked away from, cameras around Adrien’s property, as well as a whole bunch of others.
Of course, there were also presets relating to me. There was my bedroom back at my father’s, a preset for the entire house, as well as my bedroom here.
I took note of the cameras in my current bedroom, deciding once Silas returned home it would be fun to cover those cameras and hide from him without an unfair advantage for once.
I grinned wickedly, thinking of the delicious punishment he would dole out once he caught me—because I had no doubt that he would.
And then I sat down at the computer, deciding to turn off the other two monitors at the switch and focus just on the middle one.
If Silas were to walk through the door right now, I knew he wouldn’t be angry with me. In fact, he’d be curious as to what I was doing. He would encourage me in his own way to dig, to explore the questions in my mind, to satisfy my curiosity on my own.
Silas and Luca were similar like that. They liked me to think for myself.
Which made sense. Luca had once told me he knew Adrien’s guards.
And I had no doubt that Luca was somehow responsible for the casino fire that had dragged Adrien and my father away from dinner.
It made sense that Luca had picked up one or two habits from Silas.
It would make sense for Silas to have similar men around him—especially if Luca was one of Silas’s men, which is what I was beginning to suspect.
Feeling pretty proud of myself and my own deductions, I impatiently waited for the computer to boot up.
And when I did, I was surprisingly taken aback by how ordinary it seemed.
Considering the sheer amount of surveillance equipment surrounding it, I had expected something straight out of a Bond film.
Perhaps a giant red button labelled launch missiles, or at the very least a dramatic black screen filled with green code slowly scrolling down it.
Instead, it looked like every other computer I’d ever used.
The desktop was organised into folders, all carefully labelled and arranged in neat rows that told me everything I needed to know about Silas before I’d even opened a single one.
He was organised to an almost frightening degree.
There wasn’t a single file out of place.
Everything had a purpose. Everything had a home.
I clicked on one of the folders.
Numbers.
Blah. Next.
More numbers.
Blah times two. Thank you, next.
Even more numbers.
“Right,” I muttered. “I’m starting to understand why you’re so quiet. This is ever so thrilling.”
Whatever Silas actually spent his days doing, it apparently involved spreadsheets. Lots and lots of spreadsheets.
I cringed as I closed the folder, glancing around the office as though someone might have witnessed me insulting what was probably a very important criminal empire. I was glad to see that the room remained empty.
Good.
Because at this point, I was absolutely snooping. A tiny voice in the back of my mind suggested that perhaps I should feel guilty about invading his privacy.
I ignored it. The man had cameras in my bedroom, for fuck’s sake. Privacy didn’t exist in our world. If anything, my snooping like this was long overdue. This was about equality.
My eyes drifted toward the search bar at the bottom of the screen.
Curiosity immediately reared its ugly head.
Before I could stop myself, I typed my own name, immediately being bombarded with page after page of news reports.
Apparently being engaged to a billionaire tycoon and then later disappearing without a trace came with a disgusting amount of media coverage.
I clicked the first article and immediately found myself staring at a photograph of me leaving some charity event nearly a year ago.
I barely recognised myself. The girl smiling back at the camera looked carefree.
Effortless. She looked like somebody whose biggest concern was deciding what dress to wear to an event rather than whether the man she’d been kidnapped by and was currently playing house with was currently alive.
Quickly, I looked away from the picture and focused on the article instead.
There wasn’t much there that I didn’t already know.
Most of it was speculation dressed up as journalism.
Anonymous sources claimed I had been abducted.
Others insisted I had fled the country voluntarily.
One particularly imaginative publication suggested I had secretly entered a rehabilitation facility and my family were attempting to protect our reputation.
I rolled my eyes. Because of course this is what they reduced me to. A vapid, nothing existence. A young woman who had no worries other than drinking and partying that had quickly spiralled into an addiction.
The internet truly was a disgusting place.
There were even some generated images of me looking worse for wear, holding up a police identification placard.
Assholes.