Chapter Twenty-Six
The deliveries started before sunrise and didn’t let up.
A box truck idled out front while another backed in behind it, engines rumbling.
Pallets appeared as if by magic, containing yoga mats wrapped in thick plastic, stacks of pristine white towels bound with twine, and cartons of soaps and shampoos labeled with minimalist fonts that promised eucalyptus calm and spa-level serenity.
Furniture followed: desks, chairs, filing cabinets, and a sofa Chloe vaguely remembered approving at two in the morning while half-asleep and mildly delirious.
She stared at the couch, trying to remember what possessed her to choose cream instead of charcoal, and decided it was a mystery best left unsolved.
Chloe stood in the middle of the front lobby, tablet in one hand and her phone in the other, checking items off as they arrived.
It felt surreal. Yesterday, she’d been standing in the cold watching a house burn to the ground.
Today, she was deciding whether the bamboo shelving should go to the left or to the right of the locker room sinks.
Life, apparently, did not believe in easing up.
Every so often, Kayne would lean in to murmur a quiet question or confirm a delivery count. His voice was low and calm, and for a moment, she could forget the world was actively trying to shake her apart and this was just logistics, not survival dressed up as routine.
She clung to that calm more than she wanted to admit.
“Locker room B gets these,” she said, gesturing to a stack of boxes marked organic cotton towels, then paused. “No—wait. A gets those. B gets the gray ones.”
“Already switched,” Kayne said easily.
She blinked at him. “You didn’t even argue.”
He gave her a faint smile. “Figured you’d change your mind again.”
She did not dignify that with a response, mostly because he wasn’t wrong.
She kept moving, kept cataloging, kept making decisions because if she stopped, her brain would circle right back to fire and the fact that Sandy and her husband had been confirmed dead, and there was nothing she could do about it.
And Danica.
Still no word. No call, text. No dramatic entrance demanding attention or reassurance or money. The silence gnawed at her in a way she couldn’t quite name. Danica was chaos, but she was family. She hadn’t known her for long, but her absence felt wrong.
Chloe checked off another delivery and forced herself to breathe.
“I need to hire a manager,” she said suddenly. “Like yesterday.”
Kayne glanced at her. “You’ve been muttering that all morning.”
“Have I?” She huffed a quiet laugh. “I guess that’s obvious.”
“You’re trying to be everywhere at once,” he said. “That works until it doesn’t.”
She looked around the space. Her vision was coming to fruition. The equipment gleamed shiny and new, waiting to be used for the first time. It would be ready to open soon, and she still didn’t have a staff in place. She was dragging her feet about offering Oliver Pearsall the job.
“I can’t keep doing this alone,” she admitted softly.
“You don’t have to,” Kayne said, no hesitation or qualifiers.
Another delivery truck pulled up, brakes hissing. Chloe straightened her shoulders and lifted her tablet again, slipping back into motion. Work she could handle. Lists she could control.
But underneath it all, worry pulsed steadily and stubbornly. Robin and Sandy were dead. Danica was missing. Everything felt one spark away from going up in flames.
Through it all, Kayne stayed solidly beside her. He was a reminder that even when everything arrived too fast and burned too bright, she wasn’t standing in it alone.
#
Cold came first. It wasn’t the stinging kind that bit and scorched, but the slow, seeping kind that crawled into her bones and settled there as if it owned the place.
The floor beneath her was concrete or something pretending to be.
It was so hard and unforgiving. Her cheek pressed against it, skin numb enough that she wasn’t sure she’d feel it if it started bleeding.
She tried to move, but pain answered in a bloom of agony.
A dull throb behind her eyes made her stomach roll.
Her wrists were bound in front of her, chains biting just enough to keep circulation sluggish and remind her not to test them again.
Her ankles were chained too. Someone certainly did not want her getting away.
A blindfold covered her eyes. Cloth, not plastic. Someone had been considerate enough to make sure she could still breathe.
That thought didn’t help.
She swallowed and tasted fear, dust, and the metallic tang of hunger that told her she’d been here longer than she wanted to admit, longer than she could afford.
Okay, Danica, breathe. Panic wasted oxygen.
Her own advice, once given to Chloe during a meltdown over late leggings shipments, echoed back at her now with a bitter edge. Funny how wisdom always sounded better when it wasn’t being tested on a cold floor.
She focused on sound. There was nothing obvious.
She couldn’t hear any traffic or voices, or even any hum of machinery.
Wherever she was, it wasn’t anywhere people casually wandered past. But every once in a while, she heard a heavy metallic thump overhead and wondered if the roof was going to cave in on her.
Reality slid into place with horrifying clarity. She had been taken.
She squeezed her eyes shut beneath the blindfold, hoping to rewind time and put her back in her apartment. Or Chloe’s office. Or even the damn gym she hated at first but was slowly starting to appreciate.
Fear enclosed her in an icy grip. This wasn’t how it was supposed to end.
It wasn’t supposed to end at all.
It had all started so small. A flicker. A spark she’d told herself was justified.
Jealousy had always lived within her, tucked away like a bad habit she refused to quit.
It grew with Chloe’s success, fed on headlines, subscriber counts, and on the way people looked at her stepsister as if she were sunlight incarnate.
From the clothing line to television commercials to billboards and millions of followers, that jealousy festered.
The gym, gleaming and modern, would soon be full of people who adored her.
People never looked twice at Danica.
That truth settled heavy inside her, as familiar as the cold.
Their father had followed Chloe’s life as if it were his own private religion.
He watched videos of her and saved every article ever written about her.
He talked about her accomplishments with a softness he never used at home.
Oh, he was careful and never said Chloe’s name in front of his wife, but Danica always knew.
She saw it in the way he smiled at his phone. In the pauses when Chloe’s name hovered unspoken in the air.
Danica had learned early what it meant to be second best. Or worse, invisible.
Chloe hadn’t even known. That was the cruelest part. She’d grown up loved and supported by her adopted family, blissfully unaware of the resentment fermenting in the shadows of a life she never asked to intrude on.
Danica had known, though. And she’d hated her for it, slowly at first, then all at once.
The photo she’d left on Chloe’s car had been her first attempt to rattle that unflappable composure. Her fingers had trembled as she altered it, scrawling die bitch with a satisfaction that made her stomach flip. She told herself it was just a warning. Fear was deserved, wasn’t it?
What had Chloe done? She’d blown it off as if it were nothing.
Then came another bruising, brutal gut-punch: Kayne Serruto.
The jealousy had sharpened the moment Chloe introduced him. Boyfriend.
Danica had not been prepared for that. For him. The way he filled the room without trying. His quiet, competent confidence. The lethal calm wrapped in Southern charm. One look and she’d been knocked off center. It was a humiliating rush that felt too big for a man she’d just met.
She told herself it was attraction, simple, shallow, and temporary. Surely it would pass.
It didn’t.
Because once again, Chloe had everything.
Success. Loyalty. The effortless goodness.
And now him, that gorgeous, protective boyfriend who looked at Chloe as if she was something worth guarding with his life.
Danica had watched them together and felt the heat of it, the inevitability.
She’d flirted shamelessly, pushed boundaries, and smiled too wide, hoping, just once, that something might choose her instead.
Nothing ever did. Not their father, not fate, and not him.
The realization burned worse than the cold seeping into her bones now. It hadn’t just been envy. It had been grief for a life she thought she might finally touch. For a man she never had a chance of stealing. Chloe hadn’t even known she was winning. She never did.
After that, it escalated.
A memory of the night she’d tried to run Chloe down surged up vividly. The burst of adrenaline. Screaming tires. The split second where everything narrowed to a single, vicious thought.
Take it away. Take her shine. Take her certainty.
She’d missed but tried again and misjudged the angle, the timing, and Kayne’s reflexes.
Danica hadn’t been thinking clearly. She’d been blinded by rage.
The crash had been brutal, metal screaming against metal, her body snapping forward as the seatbelt wrenched her back into place. The car she’d paid a thousand dollars cash for was too old for airbags. Even now, her ribs ached with phantom pain.
She’d walked away somehow, furious and shaking. She was untouched enough to convince herself she’d just been unlucky, not unhinged, that she was still under control.
Breaking into Chloe’s apartment had been child’s play. Easier than it should’ve been.
Danica had laughed afterward when she told Chloe she knew the spare key was hidden inside the light sconce by the door, as if it was some sisterly secret she’d stumbled onto by accident. Chloe had smiled, unsurprised, trusting as always.