ONE NIGHT TOO LATE

CAUGHT FALLING

Justin's POV

The first thing I was aware of was the light, which was so so unusual, It was wrong. It was too warm, too soft, filtering through the windows and painting my bedroom in hues of gold and amber. My bedroom was a place of shadows and sharp edges, of cold sheets and solitary awakenings. This light felt like an intrusion, something strange that had seeped into my sanctuary and softened it.

Then came the scent.

Beneath the familiar notes of my own cologne and the crisp of the sheets, there was something else. Vanilla. And something wilder, like night-blooming jasmine. It was on my skin, in the air, on the pillow beside me.

Then I had a flashback, the girl, I had a one night stand with. Didn't get her name or I forgot .

Then I went reminiscing about ivie, my former girlfriend. . This was different. Ivie had smelled of sunshine and raspberries. This was… darker. Sweeter. More intoxicating..My eyes snapped open.

The space beside me was empty.

The sheets on her side were rumpled, the dip of her head still a deep valley in the pillow. But she was gone. The vanilla-jasmine scent was already fading, a memory clinging to the cotton.

I sat up, the movement too sharp, too sudden. The room tilted for a second, the remnants of last night’s whiskey and the overwhelming weight of… her… making my head throb. I scanned the room. No dress draped over the chair. No discarded heels in the corner. No clutch on the nightstand.

Nothing.

It was as if she’d been a dream. A beautiful, fevered, devastating dream.

But my body remembered. The feel of her skin, like heated silk under my palms. The way her breath hitched when I first entered her. The look in her eyes , wide, trusting, scared, but so, so brave. The shocking, gut-wrenching realization that I was her first. The way she’d whispered, “Don’t stop. Please. I want this. I want you.”

A cold dread, sharp and acidic, began to pool in my stomach.

“Anne?” My voice was a ragged croak, rough with sleep and disuse., That was her name.

Silence.

I threw the sheets back and stood, my bare feet cold against the polished floor. I didn’t bother with a robe. I walked out of the bedroom and into the hallway, my stride quickening with each step.

“Anne?”

The great room was empty, the cityscape below looking clean and impersonal in the morning sun. The kitchen was elegant not a single glass out of place. The guest bathroom door was open, dark and unused.

A frantic energy seized me. I checked the home gym, the library, the damn wine cellar. Every room was a monument to my solitude, echoing back the silence of her absence. She was gone. She had walked out of my house, out of my life, without a word.

Without a f*****g word.

A wave of fury, hot and immediate, washed over me. Who did she think she was? This wasn’t how this worked. Women didn’t just leave Justin Clark’s bed before dawn. They waited. They made breakfast. They vied for another night, another glance, a sliver of my attention.

She had taken something from me last night. Not just her innocence, but a piece of my own guarded peace. She had cracked me open, and now she had the audacity to simply vanish, leaving me to deal with the fissures she’d created.

But beneath the anger, something colder and more familiar stirred. Fear.

What if she was hurt? What if she’d been disoriented, stumbled out into the city? What if…

What if she regrets it? What if the memory of you is so tainted that she couldn’t stand to be here when the sun rose?

The thought was a punch to the gut. I’d been careful. I’d stopped. I’d asked. But had it been enough? In the harsh light of day, did she see me as a predator? A mistake?

I stormed back into the bedroom, my eyes landing on the nightstand. Her clutch was gone, but had she left anything? A note? A lipstick? A trace?

Nothing.

Then I saw it. A single, long, dark hair coiled on the cream-colored pillowcase. Like a signature. A taunt. I picked it up, the strand impossibly fine and soft between my fingers. It was the only physical proof I had that she had ever been here at all.

This wasn’t happening. I was Justin Clark. I commanded a multi-billion dollar empire. I could find anyone.

My phone was on the dresser. I snatched it up, my fingers flying across the screen. I pulled up the security system log. The front door had been opened at 6:17 a.m. and closed again moments later. The exterior cameras would have captured her leave.

I opened the live feed archive, scrolling back to the timestamp. The high-definition video showed my driveway, the morning mist still clinging to the rose bushes. And then, there she was.

My breath caught.

She was barefoot, clutching her heels in one hand, her beautiful red dress looking wrinkled and forlorn on her. She looked… small. And lost. She paused at the bottom of the steps, hugging herself as if she were cold, her head bowed. For a heart-stopping moment, I thought she might turn around. I willed her to turn around.

But she didn’t. She just straightened her shoulders, a gesture that seemed to take every ounce of her strength, and walked down the driveway, disappearing from the frame as she headed for the gates.

I stood there, watching the empty screen, the cold dread solidifying into a block of ice in my chest. She had walked away. Deliberately. Purposefully.

Fine.

If that was how she wanted to play this.

I had resources. I had a name. Or, I had the ghost of a name. What had she said? In the club, when the music was loud and our faces were close, I’d asked her name. She’d smiled, a little sad, a little defiant. “Anne,” she’d said. Just Anne.

It was enough.

I called Marcus, my head of security. His voice was gruff with sleep. “Sir?”

“I need you to find someone. A woman named Anne. She was at The Eclipse Club last night. She left my residence this morning at approximately 6:17 a.m. on foot. I want to know where she went. I want an address. I want her full name.”

There was a beat of silence on the other end. Marcus had been with me for a decade. He’d seen me through Ivie’s death, through the dissolution of my company, through the long, dark years of silence. He never asked questions. But this silence was heavy with unasked ones.

“Understood, sir. I’ll start with the club’s guest list and traffic cams in the area.”

“I want this done today, Marcus.”

“Yes, sir.”

I ended the call and finally pulled on a pair of sweatpants, the silence of the house pressing in on me. The bed was a mess, a testament to the chaos of the night. I couldn’t stand the sight of it. I stripped the sheets myself, balling them up, the scent of her rising from the fabric like a ghost. I almost threw them in the incinerator chute. But I didn’t. I shoved them into the bottom of my closet, a guilty, pathetic secret.

The day stretched before me, an empty wasteland. I tried to work. I sat behind the massive desk in my home office, the city sprawling beneath me, and pulled up the quarterly reports for Clark Conglomerate. The numbers blurred on the screen. All I could see was her face, the way her eyes had fluttered shut when I kissed her neck, the way she’d bitten her lip to keep from crying out.

My phone buzzed. Marcus.

“Sir, the club’s list from last night is a dead end. It was a open night, no formal guest list. Paid entry. No names.”

Of course. The one place I went to be anonymous had served its purpose too well.

“The traffic cams,” I snapped, my patience, a currency I usually had in abundance, was completely depleted. “What about the traffic cams?”

“We’re tracking her. She called an Uber from the end of your street. We’re working on getting the driver’s information from the company now. It will take some… persuasion.”

“Persuade harder,” I said, my voice low and dangerous. “I don’t care what it costs.”

I spent the next two hours pacing, a caged animal in a gilded cage. Every minute that passed felt like a personal failure. How could one woman, whose last name I didn’t even know, disappear so completely? It was an affront to my entire existence, to the control I wielded over every other aspect of my life.

Finally, my phone buzzed again. Marcus.

“We have the driver. He picked her up from your address and dropped her off at an apartment building in the North End. 1245 Maple Avenue, Unit 4B. The name on the Uber account is Anne Idia.”

Anne Idia.

The name echoed in the silent room. It was real. She was real.

A grim sense of satisfaction settled over me. I had her.

“Good. Send me everything you have on that name. I want her employment history, her educational background, her financials. Everything.”

“Sir…” Marcus’s tone was cautious. “Is that… necessary? If this is a personal matter…”

“It is a personal matter,” I cut him off, my voice like ice. “And everything is necessary. Do it.”

Within the hour, a dossier materialized in my inbox. I opened it, my heart pounding a strange, irregular rhythm.

Anne Idia. Twenty-eight years old. Bachelor’s in Finance from State University. Worked as a junior analyst at a middling firm for five years. Currently unemployed. Her financial records were… bleak. Student debt. Credit card balances. A checking account that hovered perilously close to zero.

And then I saw it. A recurring transaction. A monthly transfer of $1,500 to an account under the name David Miller. For the past six months.

Who the hell was David Miller?

A landlord? A sibling? A…

The pieces clicked into place with a sickening finality. The ten years she’d mentioned in the club, the heartbreak she was trying to forget. “I gave him everything,” she’d whispered, her voice thick with tears and alcohol. “Even my money.”

David Miller was Dave. The boyfriend. The one who had broken her. The one who had driven her to my club, to my arms, to my bed.

And she was still supporting him.

The fury returned, white-hot and blinding. This bastard was leaching the life out of her, and she had come to me, vulnerable and shattered, and I… I had been a rebound. A distraction. A one-night stand fueled by grief and Hennessy.

The thought was unbearable.

I had her address. I had her number, listed right there in the file. I could go to her. I could confront her. I could demand to know why she left. I could tell her… what? What exactly did I want to say?

I picked up my phone, my thumb hovering over the call button. What would I say? “You left. I didn’t give you permission to leave.” I sounded like a tyrant. “I was worried about you.” It was the truth, but it felt like a weakness I couldn’t afford to show.

I typed a text instead. Simple. Direct. Non-negotiable.

This is Justin Clark. We need to talk.

I hit send.

Then I waited.

The minutes ticked by. Five. Ten. Thirty. No response. The message showed as delivered, but there was no indication she had read it.

She was ignoring me.

The CEO of Clark Conglomerate, a man who commanded boardrooms and dictated market trends, was being ignored by an unemployed woman from the North End.

I called her number. It rang once, then went straight to voicemail. A generic, automated greeting. She had sent me to voicemail.

I called again. Voicemail.

Again. Voicemail.

A red haze descended over my vision. I had never been so thoroughly dismissed in my life. It was a novel, infuriating sensation. I was used to being sought after, appeased, feared. I was not used to being a nuisance to be blocked out.

This wasn’t over. It couldn’t be over. She had crawled under my skin, and I wouldn’t rest until I had answers. Until I had… her.

I stood by the window, watching the day fade into evening, the city lights beginning to twinkle like a field of cold stars. Anne Idia thought she could walk away. She thought she could reduce what happened between us to a forgotten mistake.

But she was wrong.

She had awakened something in me that had been dormant for years. A possessiveness. A need. A desperate, clawing hunger that went beyond the physical.

She had called me an accident. A means to forget.

But as I stood there in the growing dark, the silence of the penthouse feeling more oppressive than ever, I knew the truth.

The accident wasn’t her in my bed.

The accident was me, falling and opening my heart for a ghost who had already vanished. And I would tear this city apart to find her.