"How about we find a quiet place to... talk?" The woman immediately pressed herself against him the moment she heard Cassian Jennings speak.

Cassian Jennings gave a roguish smile and wrapped his arm around the woman’s waist. "Whatever the lady says..."

Fiona Vance’s smile grew even more seductive. She pressed herself completely into Cassian Jennings’s embrace, reveling in the way he made her heart race...

*****

It had been three whole days since Archie Summers disappeared.

At first, she’d thought the Grayson Family had the resources to find her brother and resolve the situation without a hitch. But now, it seemed they were completely useless.

She couldn’t just sit around and wait for news... The more she thought about it, the more anxious Mika Summers grew...

In the end, her anxiety got the better of her. She left Kiki with her parents and took a taxi back to the Summers family villa.

She planned to look for clues there. Even if something bad had happened, it couldn’t have just occurred out of nowhere.

When she arrived at the Summers’ home, she tore the seal off the front door and let herself in.

She stood in the living room, staring blankly at the staircase. The second floor. Her brother had never let her go up there.

She remembered the first time she’d come to the villa, how Louise Jordan had stopped her and the few words of warning she’d given.

The more she stared, the more she felt there had to be a secret up there—a secret that was very likely connected to her brother’s disappearance...

At that thought, she hurried upstairs. There were five rooms on the second floor. She peeked into each one but found nothing out of the ordinary. One was a nursery, one was a study, one was her brother and sister-in-law’s bedroom, and the other two rooms contained nothing but a bed.

She frowned and, after a moment’s thought, decided to check the study first.

The study was filled with books. She flipped through a few and saw they were related to computers and economics. The bottom shelf held some books on life philosophy.

’Nothing suspicious here, it seems.’ She walked over to the desk and flipped through a few documents, but she couldn’t understand any of them. Even if there was something suspicious, she wouldn’t know it. Dejected, she turned to leave, but her hand accidentally bumped the mouse on the desk. Suddenly, a voice emanated from the laptop.

She quickly opened the laptop, and an image appeared on the screen.

Two men, equally matched in appearance and aura, were negotiating. One of them was her brother, who had been missing for three days.

She was both shocked and excited. She couldn’t understand a single word of the men’s negotiation. Eventually, she saw her brother get up to leave. The camera followed him, but then the screen went black. Just as she was wondering if the computer was broken, her brother’s voice sounded again.

"Mika, if you truly know your brother, you should be watching this video right now."

"Boss, the chances of that are less than one percent!"

"Howard, we’re out of time. Just record this."

"But Boss, what if Miss Bishop sees this..."

"In any case, no matter what happens, you have to record the whole thing. This is our final gamble! If Eleanor Bishop is the one who sees this, then I, Archie Summers, will just have to accept my rotten luck and consider my life a waste!"

"Mika, if you’re the one seeing this, back this video up immediately. Then, completely des—"

At that point, the audio cut out. A few seconds later, the screen returned to the previous image of the two men negotiating.

Mika’s mind was in turmoil, but she moved with lightning speed. She began to download the video. Instead of backing it up to her phone, she created a new cloud storage account online and uploaded the video there to save it.

Just as she closed the webpage, intending to delete the video from the computer, she heard a car pull up outside, followed by the sound of several men’s voices...