Resigning from His Obsession

Chapter 3: Three Weeks Later

Three weeks. Twenty-one days since Damian Ashford stood in the rain outside his office building and watched his entire world tilt off its axis.

In that time, the Ashford Tower had turned into a place where nobody dared to breathe too loudly. The employees walked on eggshells, keeping their heads down and their reports flawless, terrified of drawing the CEO's attention. Damian looked like a man possessed. His jaw was always locked in a hard line, dark shadows bruised the skin beneath his eyes, and the icy aura around him had grown so bitter that even his closest business partners hesitated before speaking to him.

He had turned half the city upside down looking for Isla Sinclair.

His private investigators had checked train stations, airports, hospitals, and apartment complexes. They tracked her bank card activity, but it had gone completely silent the very night she walked out. She hadn't used her old accounts, she hadn't contacted her landlord, and she hadn't applied for a single job under her own name. It was as if she had dissolved into thin air.

Damian sat behind his massive mahogany desk on the fortieth floor, staring blankly at a blank financial spreadsheet on his monitor. His mind wasn't on the numbers.

It was trapped on the empty space where her desk used to be. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw that single piece of white paper and the cold plastic badge.

A sharp knock broke the heavy silence of the room.

"Enter," Damian said, his voice a low, gravelly rasp.

Sebastian Calloway pushed the heavy oak door open and stepped inside, holding a thick manila folder. Sebastian took one look at Damian's face and let out a quiet sigh, walking over to drop the folder onto the corner of the desk.

"Tell me you found something," Damian said without looking up, his fingers gripping the edge of the wood until his knuckles turned white.

"We checked every single transport hub leaving the capital on the night she resigned," Sebastian said carefully, keeping his tone measured. "No ticket was purchased under the name Isla Sinclair. We tracked her old landlord—she paid her remaining balance in cash before she left, and she hasn't been back to her apartment since. It is like she planned every single step of this disappearance."

Damian's jaw tightened so hard a muscle twitched in his cheek. "Keep digging. Double the team. Someone doesn't just vanish without leaving a trail. She has to be eating, sleeping, and living somewhere."

"Damian, be reasonable for a second," Sebastian said, leaning against the edge of the desk. "You've turned half the private security firms in the country upside down. If she doesn't want to be found, throwing more money at it isn't going to magically make her walk back through those doors. What is actually going on? Why are you tearing the city apart over a secretary?"

Damian snapped his head up, his dark eyes flashing with a sudden, dangerous intensity that made Sebastian pause.

"She wasn't just a secretary," Damian said, the words slipping out before he could stop them. He hated how ragged his own voice sounded. He hated that he felt this hollow ache in his chest, an emptiness that coffee, work, and control couldn't fix.

Sebastian raised an eyebrow, crossing his arms over his chest. "Then what was she to you? Because for the last four years, you acted like everyone in this building was made of glass."

Damian looked away, his gaze drifting out the massive floor-to-ceiling window toward the gray, overcast sky. He didn't have an answer he was willing to say out loud. He couldn't tell Sebastian that Isla had become the quiet heartbeat of his miserable routine. He couldn't explain how every time he looked at her, the sharp, suffocating pain of losing Lilian used to ease just a little bit.

Except, the bitter irony was eating him alive. He had spent years thinking Isla was just a comforting reflection of the past, a ghost-repellent keeping the dark memories at bay. But now that she was gone, he realized a horrifying truth. He hadn't been looking at a ghost when he looked at Isla. He had been looking at a living, breathing woman—and he had treated her so coldly that she chose to run away rather than spend one more day by his side.

"Just find her," Damian muttered, turning his attention back to his computer screen.

Sebastian shook his head, realizing there was no getting through to him right now. He grabbed his empty folder and turned toward the door. "I'll let the team know to expand the search radius to the coastal provinces. But Damian? When you find her, you'd better have a hell of an apology ready. Because from where I'm standing, you broke something that can't easily be fixed."

The door clicked shut, leaving Damian alone once again in the suffocating quiet of his office.

Meanwhile, miles away from the towering glass skyscrapers of the city, the air smelled differently. It smelled of salt, damp earth, and blooming jasmine.

Isla Sinclair stood on the small wooden porch of a modest, two-story house nestled in a quiet coastal town far away from the capital. The morning breeze blew gently against her face, carrying the distant sound of crashing ocean waves. She took a deep breath, letting the clean air fill her lungs as she looked down at her hands.

She wore a simple, loose cotton dress, her hair tied back in a messy braid. Her life here was drastically different from the frantic, high-stress world she had left behind. There were no ringing phones, no demanding CEOs, and no glass walls trapping her in a gilded cage.

A small, protective hand rested softly against her lower abdomen. A tiny, barely noticeable bump was beginning to form beneath her clothes.

She had managed to find a quiet administrative job at a local shipping cooperative using an alternative reference, and she rented this cozy little house from an elderly woman named Martha who asked no questions and offered warm soup every evening. It was safe. It was peaceful. And most importantly, it was entirely hers.

Yet, as Isla stood there watching the sunrise paint the sky in shades of orange and pink, a quiet shadow crossed her features. She knew men like Damian Ashford. She knew that pride, power, and obsession were built into his very bones.

He wasn't the kind of man to let things go, especially when someone dared to defy him by walking away without his permission.

He was looking for her. She could feel it in her bones.

And when he finally tracked her down—because she knew, deep down, that he eventually would—everything she had built here would be put to the test. She placed both hands firmly over her stomach, her heart racing at the mere thought of him finding her. She had escaped the cage once, but the real storm was only just beginning to brew on the horizon.