Chapter 6 The Car In The Dark

• The message was still displayed on her phone screen as Rania sat on the edge of her own bed, far from the luxury of the room she had woken up in two days before. Keep this phone with you from now on. Don't contact anyone until I call. Don't tell anyone about us. I'll come to pick you up tomorrow evening. Don't go anywhere.
• No sender's name. No signature. Yet every word felt like an order that could not be refused, as though the man already knew her answer before Rania had even had the chance to decide anything. She read the message over and over, trying to find some other tone beneath it besides the absolute firmness that had always been the hallmark of that voice—a voice that still echoed clearly in her ears even though the face of its owner remained hazy in her memory, clouded by that night's alcohol.
• She set the phone down on her study desk, trying to calm the heartbeat that still hadn't steadied since morning. Her eyes wandered around her own room, a room that had always been her safest place, now feeling foreign, as though every corner held the shadows of the events that had changed everything. She looked at the mirror in the corner of the room, staring at the faint marks on her neck that were beginning to fade but hadn't fully disappeared, real reminders that that night wasn't just a nightmare she could simply forget.
• A soft knock on her bedroom door broke through her reverie. Maria Wilson, her mother, entered with a pale face and eyes that looked exhausted from holding back tears since the night before. Her hair, usually neatly kept, now hung disheveled, and her shoulders, usually held straight, now slumped as though carrying a burden far heavier than she could bear.
• "Rania," Maria's voice trembled, "your father… this morning two men came to the house. They said if the company's debt isn't paid off within seven days, this house will be seized."
• Rania's world, already cracked since that engagement night, now felt like it was collapsing even further. She stood up, embracing her mother tightly, trying to be a steady support even as her own chest held nothing but fragments she hadn't yet had the chance to put back together.
• "How is Father?" Rania asked softly.
• "He's shut himself in his study since morning," Maria answered, wiping her tears with the back of her hand. "He says he'll find a way out, but Mother knows, sweetheart… Mother knows he's already run out of options. The company your grandfather built, the one your father guarded for thirty years, will be lost just like that because of the betrayal of someone he trusted most."
• Rania's uncle. Everyone in the family knew, though no one dared say it aloud, that Rendra Wilson, Anton's own younger brother who had been his right hand in running the company all this time, was the one who had forged documents, diverted assets, and disappeared without a trace the moment everything came to light. This betrayal hadn't come from a stranger, but from their own blood, and that was what made this wound feel so much deeper than an ordinary business loss.
• After her mother returned to her room, Rania stood at the living room window, watching the street grow quiet under the falling dusk. Something caught her eye that made the hair on the back of her neck stand up—a dark-colored sedan, not the luxury model like Aleksander's, parked silently a few houses from her gate, beneath the shadow of a tree that blocked part of the streetlight. No movement from inside. Only stillness, as though it were waiting.
• She blinked, telling herself it was just a neighbor's car. But when she closed the curtain for a moment and opened it again, the car had vanished without the sound of an engine she might have heard, as though it had never been there at all. Rania closed the curtain tightly, her heart pounding for a reason entirely different from the pounding that usually came whenever she thought of Aleksander—this was pure, cold, unfamiliar fear.
• On the other side of the city, on the highest floor of a glass tower rising above everything else, Aleksander sat alone in his office, his laptop screen displaying the Wilson company's financial report his team had just sent at his own request. His eyes moved carefully over every figure, and the longer he read, the deeper the line between his brows grew. A collapse this large, this fast, with such a neat and systematic pattern of asset diversion—this wasn't an ordinary bankruptcy caused by a family's management mistakes. He had seen a pattern like this before, years ago, in records he had kept locked away tightly in the darkest corner of his memory.
• He picked up his phone and typed a short message to his head of security. Watch the Wilson family's house starting tonight. Report anyone who approaches.
• He wasn't entirely sure why the instinct felt so strong, why that small detail in the report made his chest tighten with a wariness he hadn't felt in a long time. But one thing he knew for certain—if his suspicion was right, the woman who had become his the night before might be standing at the edge of a danger far greater than she realized.