Under Contract

Chapter Eight: Missing

Anton POV

Three days.

Three days without Melody Richardson in my office, and Vespucci Tower had started to feel wrong.

Not quieter.

Wrong.

The glass walls still held the city in place. The skyline still sat beyond them in its usual gray-blue haze. My desk was back in order, every report aligned, every page exactly where it belonged. No keyboard snapping through the room like gunfire. No fan whining at war with my patience. No muttered insults aimed at my management style from the side desk she had somehow turned into enemy territory.

It should have been a relief.

Instead, the silence had teeth.

I stood at the windows with my sleeves rolled to my elbows and read the same board email twice without taking in a word. Then a third time. Same result.

My father’s influence was moving exactly how I expected it would.

End the startup.

Pull back exposure.

Cut losses before the founder destabilizes the deal.

The language varied. The message did not.

On paper, I still had enough to resist him. Metrics were coming through in irregular bursts from Melody’s side. Ghost updates. Backend activity. Silent signs that she was working somewhere, somehow. Performance had not collapsed. The platform was holding. But she wasn’t here, and that absence was becoming a problem I could no longer explain away as temperament.

I had texted.

Status?

Check-in. Now.

Where are you?

Nothing.

By day two, irritation had sharpened into something less manageable. By day three, it had become impossible to ignore that I was no longer angry only because the deal was being mishandled.

I was angry because she was gone.

I dragged a hand through my hair and looked across the office toward the empty side desk. The space was clean again. No cables. No hoodie tossed over the chair. No open notebook. No half-dead pizza box radiating garlic like a territorial warning.

I hated how much the absence registered.

Worse, I hated that I knew exactly where to find her address.

It sat in her file with the rest of her founder documentation. Brooklyn. A building I would never have noticed twice if her name were not attached to it.

I told myself the drive was about the investment.

About the board.

About the fact that fifty million dollars did not disappear into silence just because its founder had decided to vanish.

That explanation held for almost seven minutes.

After that, even I stopped believing it.

By the time I left the tower, night had settled over the city. My driver was off. I took the car myself, which should have told me something about my state of mind. I had poured two fingers of whiskey at the penthouse and left the glass half-finished on the counter before deciding I had no more patience for waiting.

Brooklyn looked rougher the farther I drove into it. Narrower streets. Tired brick. Storefronts half-lit and half-abandoned. Nothing like the polished height of Manhattan glass. Nothing like the world I lived in by habit.

I parked hard, got out, and stared up at the building number twice to confirm it.

Then I went inside.

Her floor smelled faintly of old cooking oil, dust, and overheated pipes. The hallway lighting was poor. Cheap bulbs. Thin walls. Too many doors too close together. The kind of place where noise traveled and privacy was mostly a myth.

I found her apartment and hit the buzzer once.

No answer.

Again, longer.

Then I knocked.

“Open the door, Melody.”

Silence.

I knocked harder. “Now.”

A chain scraped.

The door opened two inches.

And the world went red.

It was her.

Hoodie zipped high. Hair pulled into a ruined knot. Face pale in the narrow strip of light from inside the apartment. One side of her mouth was split, red against skin gone colorless. Under her left eye, a bruise bloomed dark and fresh, purple at the edges, swelling not yet fully settled.

She tried to angle her face away.

Too late.

Every muscle in my body locked at once.

“The f**k is that?”

Her hand came up instinctively, as if she could hide it after I had already seen it.

“Nothing.”

I pushed the door wider before she could stop me and stepped inside, shutting it behind me with more force than necessary.

The apartment was small. Too small. A couch, a narrow counter, open containers from takeout on the kitchen side, laptop dark on a table by the wall. No fan. No music. No keyboard. The absence of her usual chaos hit me almost as hard as the bruise.

“Leave,” she said.

I turned toward her.

She had backed up a step, shoulders tight under the oversized hoodie, eyes refusing to settle on mine. Her voice was steady only by effort. I knew the sound well. I had used it myself often enough.

“Who hit you?”

“Drop it.”

“Who.”

She lifted her chin, but there was no real force in it. “I said drop it.”

I took one step closer. “I’m not asking again.”

Her jaw tightened. “You don’t get to storm into my apartment and interrogate me.”

“No,” I said. “I get to show up when my founder disappears for three days and opens the door looking like someone put a hand on her.”

Her breath caught.

Anger flared briefly in her eyes, but something underneath it looked thinner. Frayed. Exhausted.

“Where were you?” I said. “No calls. No meetings. No explanation.”

“I needed time.”

“That’s not how this works.”

“I know how deals work, Anton.”

The use of my name should not have landed the way it did under the circumstances. It did anyway.

I ignored it.

“Who hit you?”

This time, when she answered, the words came quieter.

“Family.”

Everything in me went still.

Not calmer.

Worse.

A different kind of rage settled in—colder, deeper, the kind that arrives when something old and filthy suddenly makes sense.

“Your stepfather?”

Her eyes flicked up at that. Surprise first. Then irritation that I had guessed correctly.

“He gets drunk,” she said flatly. “He gets loud. He asks for money. This time he got impatient.”

The room sharpened around the edges.

I looked at the bruise again and had to unclench my hand before I put it through the nearest wall.

“Does he do this often?”

“No.”

I looked at her.

She looked away.

So. Yes.

A hard, ugly pulse started beating at my temple.

I knew men like that. Men who used family as a key and obligation as a weapon. Men who mistook access for ownership. Men who believed they were entitled to hurt and still be called necessary.

My father wore his violence in better suits.

The principle was the same.

“If he touches you again,” I said, “he’s finished.”

Her eyes snapped back to mine. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t say things like that as if you can fix it.”

I held her gaze. “I can.”

“That’s exactly the problem with you.”

“No,” I said. “The problem with me is that I’m still standing here talking instead of already handling it.”

For one second she just stared.

Then some of the fight in her expression shifted, not gone but disrupted by surprise.

I stepped closer again, slower this time.

She didn’t move back.

Not until my hand lifted.

Then I stopped, letting my fingers hover near the bruise without touching it. “Does it hurt?”

The question sounded wrong in my own voice. Too direct. Too unguarded.

Her throat moved as she swallowed. “I’m fine.”

“You are many things, Melody. Convincing is not one of them tonight.”

A faint, humorless breath escaped her, almost a laugh and not even close.

I lowered my hand.

My anger needed somewhere to go, and she was not going to be the place I put it.

“Our deal is taking damage,” I said, because business was the only structure I trusted when everything else threatened to crack open. “My father is already pushing the board. Three days of silence gives him ammunition.”

Her shoulders tightened again. “I told you. I needed time.”

“And I’m telling you time is a luxury he won’t give us.”

Us.

The word sat between us for half a second before I cut around it.

I dragged a hand through my hair and forced my voice back under control. “Tomorrow. In my office. You show up, you work, and you remind everyone why I backed you.”

Her eyes searched my face. “That’s why you’re here?”

No.

Yes.

Partly.

I went with the version I could say aloud.

“I’m here because the deal stands,” I said. “And because disappearing was weak.”

The insult landed. Good. She needed fire more than pity.

Her chin lifted again, this time with something real behind it. “I wasn’t hiding.”

“It looked like hiding.”

“I was handling it.”

“Badly.”

A spark returned to her expression. There she was.

“I really don’t need a performance review in my own apartment.”

“You’re getting one anyway.”

She folded her arms. “You are impossible.”

“And you are coming in tomorrow.”

Silence stretched.

Then she nodded once.

Slowly.

“Fine.”

I exhaled through my nose, not relief exactly, but close enough to irritate me.

Only then did she wrinkle her nose slightly and look at me with fresh accusation. “You smell like alcohol.”

I glanced toward the dark window over her sink. “I had a drink.”

“You drove here.”

“I arrived.”

“That is not the same thing.”

“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”

For some reason, that answer made her study me more closely, as if she were trying to decide whether I was reckless, furious, exhausted, or some combination of all three.

The truth was not especially flattering.

“All week,” I said. “No more vanishing.”

Her mouth tightened. “That sounds a lot like an order.”

“It is.”

She should have argued again.

Instead she just looked tired.

That hit harder than the bruise.

I stepped back and reached for the door before I did something unwise, like stay.

“Back to work tomorrow,” I said, pulling the cold mask back into place because it was either that or honesty, and honesty was dangerous. “Or you risk the funding.”

There. Clean. Businesslike. Something a man like me could say without exposing anything useful.

I opened the door.

Behind me, I heard her straighten.

“Wouldn’t miss torturing you,” she said.

The line was weak by her standards, but the fire was there.

I allowed myself the smallest pause before stepping into the hall. “See that you don’t.”

Then I left.

The door shut behind me with a hard, final click.

The hallway felt colder than before. Narrower. Meaner. I stood there for a moment with my hand still on the knob, jaw locked, mind split between two equally unwelcome facts.

The first was that my father was coming for the deal harder now.

The second was that Melody Richardson had opened her door bruised, shaken, and stubborn enough to tell me to leave while barely holding herself upright, and I had wanted—violently, irrationally—to tear the city apart until I found the man responsible.

That was not business.

That was something else.

Something worse.

I walked back toward the stairs with the taste of whiskey still faint in my mouth and her face burned into the back of my mind.

Tomorrow, she would be in my office.

And if she wasn’t, I was not sure what I would do.

That uncertainty irritated me almost as much as the truth beneath it.

I was already in too deep.