✓ WICKED VOWS| JAKE (Book II )

56-Void Of Emotions

Another month passed.

Jake's pov

Days flowed into weeks, and weeks to months, each an unremitting assault against my sanity. It was a living nightmare that I couldn't wake up from. Anastasia's absence ripped through the seam of reality that held me together, leaving a hollow, raspy shell of what I once was a man. 

The air was heavy with dread, thick from the weight of questions left unanswered, of festering wounds that refused to heal. Every step I made felt wrong as if I were trying to negotiate a labyrinth through darkness without a solution. Yet, the need to find her, to possess her again- drove me forward, some sort of twisted mix of love, obsession, and that silver cord deep inside me, which urged me toward survival. I couldn't let her slip away, not like this.

"Inna," I said hoarsely after she finally picked up, her voice as exhausted and strained as my own.

"Have you found her?" I forced out the question, though I knew the answer, the dread pooling in my gut like poison.

"No," I breathed admission of a knife to my chest-"I was hoping, hoping against all odds you might have heard something, anything."

"Jake," Inna's voice shook, one corded thread pulled taut to breaking point. "If I had, you'd be the first to know. Anastasia isn't your wife; she's my sister, my blood. I'm scared for her."

"Anything from Sin? Mikhail?" I asked, desperation scratching in my gut. Inna's husband was as entrenched in the underworld as I was there was a whisper of Anastasia, he would have heard it.

"Nothing," Inna's sigh was a heavy, sorrowful thing, like a dying breath. "It's as if she's been swallowed by the night. We've been searching, Jake. We've got people scouring every corner, every dark alley where she might be. But there's no trace, no clue even Jude, Keith, and her bodyguards don't know a thing. It's like she's a ghost, one that knew exactly how to vanish, even from us."

Anger welled a storm of violence inside me. I raked a hand through my hair, trying to clear my head, to think clearly. "It doesn't make any sense, Inna. She wouldn't just up and disappear like this. Not without a reason. Not without leaving some sort of sign."

"Jake," Inna said, her voice low, a bare murmur above the deafening thud of pulse in my ears. "Did you do something? Anything that might have driven her away?"

The words hit like a blow. I fisted the phone, my knuckles white, my mind a maelstrom. "How the hell can I answer that when I don't even fucking remember that night?" My voice cracked raw and desperate, a plea for anything shard of memory that could make some sort of sense of this chaos.

Inna fell silent for a very long time; her thoughts weighed in through the phone. "Jake. if Anastasia doesn't want to be found, she won't be. I know my sister she's cunning, and she's careful. Perhaps. perhaps we should wait for her to come back on her own terms. If she believes she's protecting you, she'll stay hidden until she thinks it's safe."

Her words hung there in the air, a curse, a cold and dark truth from which I couldn't hide. Anastasia had been fierce forever, willing to burn the world for those she loved. Believing such a thing remaining was putting me in harm's way would have her running. But there was more to this-there had to be.

I hung up and slumped back in my chair, staring at the ceiling as though the answers rested there. Seven months of agony, each bleeding into the next, and I was no closer to finding her. My memory of that night was a shattered mirror, reflecting only fragments, none of them whole. But one thing was seared onto my mind forever-Anastasia was at the center of it all. I had to remember. I had to piece it together, no matter what it took. I needed her back, and nothing, not even the darkness now surrounding me, would ever stop me.