Chapter 43 Chapter 43

Chapter 43 Chapter 43
Lily
The garden is nearly dark now, the last of the fairy lights blinking out like dying stars. I can still feel the weight of his voice in my chest, and every step he takes toward me makes my heart beat harder against my ribs.
“I came to take you,” he says. His voice is low, but there’s no softness in it. It’s full of finality—like he’s already made up his mind and nothing I say will change it.
I shake my head, taking a step back. My bare feet feel cold against the grass, but my voice is steady.
“I won’t come with you.”
“Lily.”
He shouts my name like it’s a command. Like it still belongs to him.
“You are my wife.”
“NO,” I snap, “I want a divorce.”
The second I say it, something in him shifts. His jaw clenches. His hand turns into a tight fist at his side.
“Fuck,” he curses under his breath, his eyes burning into me.
“I won’t divorce you.”
Before I can take another step back, his hand grabs my arm.
“Sebastian, leave me!” I shout, struggling to pull away, but his grip only tightens.
“You should have been happy to see me alive,” he growls, dragging me across the grass toward the entrance of the restaurant garden. “But instead you’re asking for a divorce.”
His words sting, but it’s the betrayal in his voice that hurts the most. Like I’m the one who disappeared. Like I left him.
We reach the quiet road. There’s a sleek black car parked there, engine off, no driver in sight.
I dig my heels into the ground, but he yanks the door open anyway. The passenger side.
“Get in,” he says through gritted teeth.
I don’t.
So he reaches into the glove box, pulls out a zip tie, and turns to me. My breath catches.
“Sebastian—what the hell are you doing?”
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he grabs my wrists. I try to yank them back, but he’s stronger. He forces my hands together and zips the plastic tight around them.
“Sebastian!” I scream, panic rising in my chest.
I do the only thing I can think of—I bite his hand. Hard.
But he doesn’t even flinch. Doesn’t even blink.
“I don’t care if you scream. I don’t care if you hate me right now,” he says, voice deadly calm. “You are mine. You’re going with me. End of discussion.”
The door slams shut beside me, trapping me inside the car.
The man I once loved more than anything—the man I mourned, the man I wrote poems about—is no longer a memory.
He’s here. He’s real.
And he’s not letting me go.
He gets into the driver’s seat, not looking at me, not saying a word. The moment the engine starts, I feel the air shift.
“Sebastian, please, I don’t want to go with you.” My voice cracks, pleading—desperate.
But he doesn’t even flinch.
Instead, he reaches for the volume knob and turns up the music so loud that my words vanish beneath the bass.
He silences me. Just like that.
I stop talking. My throat tightens as I press myself against the cold car door. My heart is pounding, fast and wild like it’s trying to break out of my chest. I can still feel the zip tie around my wrists—tight, unrelenting. My fingers are starting to go numb.
The car moves fast. Too fast. I watch the trees and streetlights blur past, and then it hits me—he’s taking the road to the airport.
No. No. No.
When we arrive, everything feels too quiet, too prepared. His jet is already waiting on the private runway, stairs lowered, engine humming. A man in a headset nods at him and walks away, like he already knew. Like they’ve been planning this.
He opens the door and gets out, then walks around, opens mine. I try to fight him—I twist, push back—but he just grabs my arm and drags me out.
“Sebastian!” I cry out. “Let me go!”
He doesn’t answer.
He marches me across the tarmac like I’m some piece of cargo, up the stairs and into the jet. The cabin is spotless, expensive, suffocating. He forces me into one of the leather seats and yanks the belt across my body, buckling me in like a prisoner.
He still doesn’t untie my hands.
“Sebastian…” I scream his name now, tears blinding me. “I hate you!” I sob, my voice raw. “I hate you!”
He doesn’t shout back. He doesn’t even look shaken.
Instead, he moves to a small cabinet, opens a metal box, and pulls out something I don’t expect—an injection.
My eyes widen. “What the hell is that?!”
He steps forward, calmly, like this is nothing. Like this is normal.
I squirm, try to move, but the belt locks me in place.
The needle slips into my arm before I can scream again. It doesn’t hurt. Just a soft prick. But I still whimper, scream like it does.
“What is this?!” I cry out, eyes wide.
“It’ll make you rest for some hours,” he says with a damn smirk on his face. Like he’s proud of it. Like he’s won.
My limbs already feel heavy. My head tilts slightly to the side.
Everything slows.
And in those fading seconds, as I try to fight the drug pulling me into silence, one thought slices through me like a knife:
This isn’t just a kidnapping.
This is my husband.
And he’s stealing me back like I’m a thing he owns.