The first thing Adrian Vale noticed after his wife disappeared was that she had taken nothing he had ever bought her.

Seven hours after the confrontation in the office, Adrian returned to the house from a emergency midnight meeting with his legal team.

He had solved the Caruso problem. He had used an old political favor to freeze Caruso’s secondary assets, forcing the syndicate to surrender Thomas Carter’s forged document without giving up a single square foot of the South Harbor terminal.

He had won. His empire was entirely secure.

Yet as he stepped into the silent, dark foyer of the Lake Shore Drive mansion, an unbearable, suffocating weight settled onto his chest.

He walked up the marble stairs to the master suite. The door was open. The bed was completely untouched.

He walked to her east wing studio. The room was empty. Her paints, her canvases, and her scalpels were neatly packed away into wooden storage boxes.

He walked down to his private office.

On the center of his mahogany desk sat her diamond wedding ring, the unsigned divorce papers he had kept locked in his safe, and a small, folded note written in her careful, precise script.

Four words.

You said I was nothing.

Adrian stood in the quiet office, holding the small piece of paper in his hands, feeling his knees literally give out beneath him. He sank into his heavy leather chair, staring at the empty ring sitting on his desk.

The realization hit him like a physical blow to the head: he had won his corporate war, he had protected his sixty-million-dollar project, and he had successfully destroyed the only thing in his entire miserable, wealthy life that had ever made him truly feel human.

“Find her,” he whispered into the empty room.

Marcus stepped into the doorway forty-three minutes later, giving him the report of her vanishing.

“Where is her father?” Adrian demanded, standing up slowly, his eyes wild with a terrifying mixture of rage and grief.

“Thomas is at his apartment in Lincoln Park,” Marcus reported. “He doesn't know where she is either, Adrian. She left him a note too. She paid off his remaining personal lease with her private savings and told him she was leaving Chicago forever.”

Adrian grabbed his suit jacket from the chair.

“Get the cars,” Adrian ordered, his voice shaking with raw emotion. “We are going to check every train station, every regional airport, and every art restoration firm from here to Boston.”