THE BILLIONAIRE'S FORGOTTEN FIANCÉE

Episode 5

I didn’t sleep at all.

I sat in the dark, the word Kisa echoing in my mind. It was a name that felt more real to me than Chloe, a name that felt like it belonged to a woman who was strong, and dangerous, and alive. A woman who was a complete stranger to me.

The next morning, I was a wreck. I was pale, my hands were shaking, and I couldn’t eat the breakfast Adrian had made for me. I kept looking over my shoulder, expecting to see the man from the garden, expecting to hear the whisper again.

“You’re not feeling well,” he said, his brow furrowed with concern. He reached across the table and put his hand on my forehead. “You don’t have a fever. Maybe we should call the doctor.”

“No,” I said, a little too quickly. “I’m fine. Just… tired.”

I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t tell him about the voice. What would I say? “A ghost whispered a foreign name in my ear last night.” He would think I was crazy. Or worse, he would know I was remembering, and the beautiful, perfect world we had built would shatter into a million pieces.

I spent the day in a daze, my mind a battlefield of fear and confusion. I was torn between the love I felt for Adrian and the terrifying truth that was clawing its way to the surface. Every time he looked at me with his warm, loving eyes, a part of me wanted to believe his lies. But the cold, hard truth was a persistent, nagging voice in the back of my mind.

That evening, Adrian had to go to a late-night meeting at his office. He didn’t want to leave me, but I insisted I would be fine. I needed to be alone. I needed to think.

As soon as he was gone, I went into the bedroom and took the black leather notebook out of the drawer. I sat on the edge of the bed, my heart pounding, and opened it.

I stared at the foreign symbols on the page. They were just a jumble of lines and curves, meaningless to me. But then I closed my eyes and focused on the word the voice had whispered. Kisa.

I opened my eyes and looked at the page again.

And the symbols started to make sense.

It was like a fog had lifted. The shapes rearranged themselves in my mind, the harsh lines forming letters, the letters forming words. I could read it.

The notebook was a log. A record of missions.

Target: Ivan Petrov. Location: Prague. Objective: Extraction.

Target: Marcus Thorne. Location: London. Objective: Termination.

My blood ran cold. Termination. This wasn’t a diary. This was a record of assassinations.

And then I saw a name I recognized. My name.

Chloe. Not her real name. Real name: Kisa. Asset. Highly trained. Dangerous.

I read on, my hands shaking so badly I could barely hold the book.

Asset went rogue. Disappeared. Last seen in the company of Adrian Sterling. Sterling is a liability. He knows too much. Asset must be terminated. Sterling must be… neutralized.

I slammed the notebook shut, a wave of nausea washing over me. This couldn’t be happening. This was a nightmare. I wasn’t an assassin. I was Chloe. I was Adrian’s sweet, loving fiancée.

But the words were there, in black and white. I was Kisa. And I was a target.

My eyes fell on the locket around my neck. The beautiful, thoughtful gift from the man I loved. With trembling fingers, I unfastened the clasp and opened it.

On one side was a tiny, perfect picture of Adrian, smiling his beautiful, loving smile.

On the other side was a picture of a woman I didn’t recognize.

She had short, dark hair, cut in a severe, practical style. Her face was pale, her cheekbones sharp. But it was her eyes that made my blood run cold. They were a flat, dead black. They were the eyes of a killer.

They were the eyes of the woman in the notebook.

They were my eyes.

The sound of the door opening made me jump. Adrian was home.

“Chloe?” he called out, his voice cheerful. “I’m back. I missed you.”

I looked up, my mind reeling, my world collapsing around me. He walked into the bedroom, his face lighting up when he saw me. He took one look at my face, at the open notebook in my hands, at the locket dangling from my fingers, and his smile vanished.

The love in his eyes was replaced by a look of cold, hard fear.

“Chloe,” he said, his voice a low, warning growl. “What did you do?”

I looked at the man I loved, the man who had lied to me, the man who had tried to turn me into someone I wasn’t. I looked at the picture of the woman I used to be, the woman I was supposed to be.

And I held up the locket, my voice shaking with a rage and a betrayal so deep it felt like it was going to tear me apart.

“Who is she?” I asked, my voice a raw, broken whisper. “And why did you try to kill her?”