Echoes 01

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It's amazing how varied people can be. Some in Chase's situation would have become eager drunks, living each moment in order to do nothing but bury the last. Some would have lashed out at everything around them, alienating everyone in order to ensure that no one could ever have the chance to hurt them again. Some would have become pussy hounds on an epic scale until their dicks rotted off from warring STDs. Chase... he chose another route; though it would be a tough sell to say it was a better one.

Nearly from the moment that he woke up the day after, well, the day after, he buried himself in his work. Coming into the office wasn't the worst moment of his life, obviously, but it may have been the most difficult up to that point. Knowing that every opinion under the sun was being batted around by his employees--his alone, now--was a tough thing to accept. It helped that, immediately, he'd seen that Shane was smart enough to believe him and had cleaned out all his stuff, even leaving the key to the building on his empty desk. Apparently, knowing that your boss was an amateur boxer means little until you experience it firsthand.

When he'd entered, he smiled at Maggie at the front desk, walked over to Bizzy's office, locked it without going inside, and then began to lay out the order in which he wanted to meet with everyone to give them their marching orders going ahead. As he closed his own office door, he could hear the murmurs of relief that the lot of them may not have to find other work after all.

That was it. For three months that was his life. Work, home, distraction, sleep... repeat. He was alive, but not living. It made sense because he had no idea what living without Bizzy even looked like, and he couldn't let himself rectify that lack of knowledge. Planning a life without his wife meant thinking of his wife, and thinking of his wife meant wondering what had happened to her. Wondering why he hadn't even heard a peep from her. The one time he'd tried pondering it, he'd only snapped out of the funk after missing three days of work. He just wasn't capable at that point.

Maybe he never would have been, it was a distinct possibility. The thing was, that option was removed the day he heard a key in the lock of the front door when he was sitting on his couch, not paying attention to what was on TV.

The noise made his heart race so hard, he actually broke a sweat, and it would have taken a baseball bat to shift his head away from that door being opened with such agonizing slowness. When the delicate, pale hand on the knob came into view, Chase stopped breathing.

"Chase? Are you..." The face that appeared was framed by rich, black hair, expertly coifed in the latest style. As always. Chase's breath came back then, hissing from between his gritted teeth. "Ah. There you are. Exactly as I'd pictured."

"What the hell are you doing here, Isabella?" Even saying the name was grating now, and not for the reasons it used to be. Not all the same ones, at least. Chase was painfully aware that Isabella was another form of...

"Elizabeth." The woman was fully inside now, watching him with her hands on hourglass hips draped in a pencil skirt that probably set her back five figures. "Have you found her yet?"

That face, like a marble sculpture, that body, statuesque and flawless, those eyes, pure onyx, that hair, the richest of silk. Those items were symbolic of two things about this woman; that she was one of the most beautiful creatures Chase had ever seen, in person or otherwise... and that she was just as cold and lifeless as each one on the list.

Seeing her come back into his life in this way, with that question, rocked him so hard, he had no words for almost a full minute.

Isabella sighed. "Some of the mystery is lessening now." She snapped her fingers. "Earth to Chase, is that a yes or..." She frowned as her eyes lit on something. "Why is there a huge bloodstain in that corner over there?"

"It's a consolation prize." Chase mumbled without needing to look at what she was staring at. "What do you mean, found her?" He growled then. "What the hell makes you think I'm looking for her?"

"She's your wife." She said it like he'd asked why he should wear clothes to leave the house. "You owe it to her to make sure she's safe."

Chase shot to his feet, his finger pointing at her angrily. "Listen to me, Isabella, I don't know what you think you know, but I don't owe a goddamned--"

"I know you couldn't keep her. I know you made her... step out on you. I know your marriage is, in all likelihood, a thing in name only. None of that matters. You have a duty."

Chase's throat worked, but all the many, many things he wanted to say got caught in a log jam, and all that came out was a grunt. Isabella, in the meantime, was striding in imperiously, pulling a huge suitcase on wheels behind her. She unhurriedly closed the front door and then turned to him, arching an ebon brow.

"I'll be staying here as an incentive for your best efforts." She sat on a nearby chair and crossed her legs demurely at her slim ankles. "Once you find my daughter, then you can have your life back."