CHAPTER 5
POV: Cassian
The Oregon house looked exactly the same.
I parked in the circular drive and sat for a moment with the engine off. Fog clung to the cliff edge the way it always did. The exterior lights came on at my movement. Everything still worked. Everything still looked like money and order and a life that made sense on paper.
I had not been here in four months.
The front door recognized my code. Inside, the air was still and faintly metallic, the way houses get when no one has moved through them in weeks. I walked straight through the main room without turning on lights. My phone was already in my hand. Habit.
The studio sat thirty yards from the main house, connected by a covered walkway of glass and steel. I had designed it that way so she could work without coming inside if she didn’t want to. At the time it had seemed considerate. Efficient. A clean separation of spaces.
The door was unlocked.
I pushed it open and stopped.
Crime scene.
That was the only phrase that fit.
Clay dust covered everything in a fine gray film.
Shelves stood empty. The floor was a minefield of shattered black and white forms—pieces I vaguely remembered seeing on the rare occasions I had glanced through the windows.
The kiln door hung open. Tools were gone from the wall rack.
And across the far wall, in thick red letters that had dripped before they dried:
You were never meant to be seen.
My breath left my chest in one hard push.
I stepped inside. My shoes ground porcelain into finer powder. The sound was too loud. I turned in a slow circle, cataloguing damage the way I catalogued quarterly losses—amount, pattern, point of origin. This was not random. This was targeted. Methodical. Someone had taken their time.
I pulled out my phone and called Vivienne.
It rang.
Four times.
Five.
Voicemail.
Her voice, calm and brief: “Leave a message.”
I hung up and called again.
Same result.
A third time.
Nothing.
The silence on the other end of the line felt personal.
I left the studio and walked back to the main house faster than I needed to. The kitchen was dark except for the pendant light over the island. Something small and metallic caught the light on the counter.
Two rings.
Her wedding band. The diamond I had chosen in twenty minutes between meetings seven years ago. They sat side by side, perfectly aligned, as if someone had placed them there with care.
I stared at them.
The floor tilted.
Not metaphor. Actual physical sensation—like the foundation of the house had shifted half an inch under my feet. I put a hand on the edge of the counter to steady myself. The stone was cool. Solid. It didn’t help.
Seven years.
I tried to remember the last time I had looked at those rings on her hand. Really looked. The memory would not surface. There were meetings. Flights. The fire. Sienna’s hiring. A hundred other things that had seemed more urgent.
I called her again.
Voicemail.
I sent a text. Three words: Call me. Now.
No reply.
I walked the house. Master bedroom empty.
Closet still full of her clothes, but gaps showed where things had been taken.
A black duffel was missing from the top shelf.
The safe was closed. I opened it. Diamonds still there.
Jewelry still stacked in their velvet boxes.
She had left the expensive things and taken the ones that smelled like clay.
The Oregon property deed was gone from her desk drawer.
I stood in the center of the living room and felt the tilt again, stronger this time.
My pulse had climbed without my permission.
I could hear it in my ears. The billionaire mask—the one that kept my voice even in boardrooms and my hands steady on earnings calls—slipped for one full second.
Underneath it was something raw and unregulated.
She was gone.
Not for a weekend. Not for a cooling-off period. Gone.
I went back to the studio because I didn’t know what else to do.
The red message was still there. The dust still hung in the air.
I pulled up the security system on my phone.
The alert from three nights ago sat unread in a buried folder.
I opened it now. Motion detected. Door forced.
No further details. My team had logged it as low priority.
I had scrolled past it the same night I announced Sienna as CSO.
A car door closed outside.
I stepped out of the studio as my head of security walked up the path. Marcus. Ex-military. Reliable. He carried a small black flash drive between two fingers.
“You’re going to want to see who paid the man who did this,” he said.
He held it out.
I took it.
The floor tilted once more, and this time it did not correct.