Chapter 11

The VIP room’s lighting was just dim enough to blur imperfections—perfect for the fantasy Jayden was attempting to construct tonight. The girl perched awkwardly on his lap, her body rigid with nervousness. She’d heard all the gossip about Jayden Charlemet’s spectacular downfall. The whispered version circulating through Boston’s nightlife scene painted a modern Greek tragedy: golden couple Jayden and Agatha torn apart when he inexplicably fell for her plain-Jane half-sister. Then the engagement party from hell, Agatha’s social exile, and Jayden’s subsequent descent into this self-destructive pattern of booze and Kimberly look-alikes.

The girl couldn’t help wondering what kind of supernatural hold this Kimberly must have had over him. What sorcery could make a man like Jayden Charlemet torch his entire life and end up here—drunk at 2 AM, paying women who vaguely resembled his vanished obsession?

Oblivious to her analysis, Jayden tilted her chin up with his index finger. His eyes, though bloodshot from alcohol, studied her features with the detached precision of a jeweler examining a suspect diamond. The clinical inspection made her skin crawl. Desperate to break the uncomfortable silence, she summoned her courage and slid her arms around his neck.

Jayden didn’t stop her. His moral compass had long since shattered. Since Kimberly vanished, he’d been trying to reconstruct her from these fragments—a smile here, a gesture there, tiny pieces of the woman who had somehow become the axis his world now revolved around. But this particular girl made a fatal miscalculation. Leaning in close, her lips brushed his ear as she whispered what she thought was a seductive role-play: “Miss me, brother-in-law?”

The effect was instantaneous. The alcohol fog evaporated from Jayden’s eyes, replaced by razor-sharp clarity and ice-cold fury. He shoved her off his lap with enough force to send her sprawling across the floor.

Chapter 11

“What the fuck did you just call me?” He towered over her, every muscle tensed like a predator about to strike. He might be drunk, he might be broken, but he wasn’t so far gone that he couldn’t distinguish between fantasy and reality. These women weren’t Kimberly. They could never be Kimberly.

“I—I just—they said you liked—” the girl stammered, scrambling backward on her hands and knees before fleeing the room in terror.

Something vital inside Jayden deflated. The emptiness that had become his constant companion expanded, threatening to consume him entirely. He yanked at his tie, suddenly desperate for air. The walls of the VIP room seemed to be closing in, the bass from the club below hammering through his skull like a physical assault.

As he stumbled down the corridor toward the exit, a flash of movement from another private room caught his eye. A girl with long dark hair was sitting in a booth, wearing what looked eerily like a Boston Conservatory uniform. Her head was tilted at that specific angle Kimberly always used when she was listening intently. She was leaning into some guy’s shoulder, nodding along as he drunkenly sang to the music.

For one heart-stopping moment, reality fractured. Jayden’s pupils dilated, his breath catching as desperate hope surged through his system like a drug. Without conscious thought, he shoved the door open, crossed the room in three long strides, and physically yanked the man away from her. Before anyone could react, he pulled the girl into a crushing embrace.

“Kim!” The raw desperation in his voice would have been unrecognizable to anyone who knew him before. His arms locked around her like iron bands, as though she might disappear if he loosened his grip. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you. How could you be here with—with him? I should fucking kill you for this.”

Beneath his hold, the girl went rigid with fear before frantically struggling against him. “Let go of me! I’m not Kimberly! HELP!”

Jayden couldn’t hear her through the rushing in his ears, lost in a hallucination born of grief and bourbon. The boyfriend lurched up from where he’d fallen, grabbed a bottle of Grey Goose from the table, and swung it with all his strength against the back of Jayden’s head. Glass exploded with a sickening crack. Screams erupted from every corner of the room.

By the time the club owner made it upstairs, Jayden had regained his senses, along with a vicious headache. He sat alone on the black leather sofa, gauze hastily wrapped around his bleeding scalp. Between his fingers, he twisted the half-finished scarf Kimberly had been knitting him when her world imploded. In the harsh club lighting, he looked like something feral—a wounded apex predator, more dangerous for his injuries.

Kimberly’s roommate had given him the scarf after her disappearance. “She was making this for you,” she’d said, disgust evident in her voice. “God knows why, after what you did to her.”

Since that day, he’d carried it everywhere—a tangible piece of her he couldn’t bring himself to let go of, even as he destroyed himself trying to forget her. The tabloids had field days with his public breakdown. Some said he’d snapped after Agatha’s betrayal. Others speculated he was playing the devastated lover as a PR stunt to distance himself from the scandal. Jayden never bothered correcting any of it. He couldn’t explain what he himself didn’t understand—this hollow ache that had consumed him since watching that warehouse footage, since realizing exactly what he’d set in motion with his careless cruelty.

His entire relationship with Kimberly had been built on revenge. For two years, he’d methodically manipulated her most vulnerable emotions, all for Agatha’s satisfaction. He’d orchestrated her public humiliation, her physical torture, her complete isolation. And the day before she left America, he’d looked a kidnapper in the eye and said her life meant nothing to him.

What must have gone through her mind in that moment? What does a person feel when the man they love hands them over to monsters without a second thought?

Chapter 11

Jayden slammed his head back against the wall, grinding the heel of his palm into his eye socket hard enough to see stars. Physical pain was the only thing that temporarily drowned out the suffocating weight of self-loathing that had become his constant companion.

In the quiet aftermath of his latest public meltdown, a sudden clarity cut through his alcohol-soaked brain—a plan so outrageous it might actually work. He grabbed his phone and dialed, not bothering with pleasantries when the call connected. His voice carried the unmistakable authority of someone accustomed to getting exactly what he wanted:

“I need to be in a Breaking Dawn Project field location as a communications specialist within 72 hours. I don’t give a shit what strings you have to pull or how many people you have to bribe. I’ll burn through my entire fortune if that’s what it takes.”

His fingers tightened around Kimberly’s unfinished scarf. “I’m going to find her if I have to search every godforsaken war zone on this planet.”