Chapter 6

After Isabella left, I never returned, and she received no news of me.

For some reason, a feeling like she had lost something vital pressed down on her, making it hard to breathe.

She dialed my number countless times, but it always went unanswered.

"Go! To the warehouse."

The driver had just stopped the car when a figure leaped from the tall building, crashing heavily onto the windshield.

From her angle, she couldn't see the face, only the white suit — the same Italian suit she had thrown at my feet.

"JACOB!"

Isabella's scream tore through the night. She threw open the car door before it fully stopped, stumbling toward the crumpled figure on the hood.

Blood was spreading across the shattered windshield like a terrible flower blooming. She grabbed the figure's shoulders with trembling hands and turned him over.

It wasn't me.

It was a stranger. A homeless man wearing a suit that looked like mine — same cut, same color, but a cheap knockoff.

Isabella collapsed against the car, hyperventilating, her hands covered in a stranger's blood. Her bodyguards rushed to her side.

"Ma'am! Ma'am, are you alright?"

"Find him," she whispered. "Find Jacob. Now. I don't care what it costs."

For three days, Isabella's entire network turned the city upside down. Every bus station, every train terminal, every airport was covered. She barely slept, barely ate, her phone clutched in her hand at all times.

Sebastian tried to comfort her. "He's probably just throwing a tantrum. He'll come back when he runs out of money."

"Shut up."

Sebastian flinched. Isabella had never spoken to him like that.

"If anything has happened to that boy, I will tear this city apart."

On the fourth day, they found me.

I was in a hospital forty miles south of the city. I'd collapsed at the bus station from internal bleeding — the kidney removal site had ruptured from walking all night in the cold.

When Isabella burst into the hospital room, I was unconscious, hooked up to machines, my skin the color of old paper.

She stood in the doorway, and for the first time in anyone's memory, Isabella Blackwood's composure shattered completely.

"Why didn't anyone check him when he came back?" she screamed at her bodyguards. "He was missing a kidney, and you let him walk around in the cold for hours?"

The doctors told her I was stable but weak. Severe malnutrition. Old fractures that had healed poorly. Scars consistent with prolonged abuse. A missing kidney.

"Who did this to him?" she demanded.

The doctor looked confused. "Ma'am, these injuries are at least several months old. Some older. Wherever this young man was before, he was... not treated well."

Isabella stood very still.

Devil's Island. The place she had sent me. The place where she'd ordered them to "keep me alive" — nothing more, nothing less.

She sank into the chair beside my bed and, for the first time, really looked at me. Not at Jacob the troublemaker, not at the heir who embarrassed her, not at the boy who had an inappropriate crush.

She looked at the nineteen-year-old who'd been tortured for a year under her name. Whose body was a map of suffering that she had authorized.

"What have I done?" she whispered.

She reached out and took my hand. It was so thin she could feel every bone.

"Jacob, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

I didn't wake up. The machines beeped steadily, indifferent to her tears.

She stayed by my bedside for three days. Sebastian called repeatedly. She didn't answer.

When I finally opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was Isabella, asleep in the chair, her hand still holding mine. There were dark circles under her eyes, and she looked like she'd aged five years.

I tried to pull my hand away. The movement woke her.

"Jacob!" She leaned forward, eyes wide. "How do you feel? Does anything hurt? I'll call the doctor—"

"Why am I here?" My voice was flat. Dead.

"You collapsed. Internal bleeding. Jacob, why didn't you tell me—"

"Tell you what?" I looked at her, and something in my eyes made her flinch. "That your people took my kidney? That they broke my bones for fun? That they made me lick floors and sleep in cages?"

The heart monitor spiked. A nurse rushed in.

Isabella sat frozen, her face white as the hospital sheets.

"You... you said you'd learned your lesson. You said you were fine."

"Because that's what they taught me to say."

The silence that followed was the loudest thing I'd ever heard.