Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Vision She Hid: Kabanata 71 - Kabanata 80

The rain had stopped pretending to be polite. It smeared down the window like it was in on something I wouldn’t approve. I sat in the back seat of Elky’s new Bentley, leather soft as a lie, elbows on my knees, a note folded twice in my lap like a secret trying not to shake. It was my second official outing from the house, not entirely unsupervised, naturally. Elky had loaned me the car with a smile that looked too generous and a driver that knew better than to ask idle questions.“Do you have to go shopping?” Elky’d said.I nodded and showed him a list I’ve scribbled down the last minute. It looked genuine enough. I was running out of moisturizer and my favorite pink pearl shade of lipstick, but I usually topped them up online. It took me some time to convince Elky why online didn’t work that well for the evening gowns and the seasonal camouflage a wife of respectable mafia boss has to wear in public every new season. It was a few month ago, just before the tragic dinner were some lun

I wondered whether Freya waited for me that evening. If she did, her waiting was in vain. I spent the sleepless night hanging from the rail, being sick on Elky’s boat. The storm passed around 5 am. The sea has become too calm for comfort. It lay outside my round window like a silk sheet—smooth, quiet, hiding things that mattered. It was the kind of morning that made you suspicious of too good weather and men in well-pressed chinos.I walked into Elky’s office without knocking. I never knocked anymore. Not after I saw what he did to the guy who always waited for permission.He didn’t look up. Just closed a leather-covered notebook with the kind of care you reserve for love letters and legal threats. His fingers lingered on the cover an extra second, like the book might whisper back if he pressed hard enough.There was a sheet of A4 paper on his desk—cream, textured, fine, the kind that flakes dignity when you fold it. There were names written in black ink. Some underlined. Some circled

The deck had been scrubbed, but you can always tell when something’s been cleaned too well. It glistens wrong, and smells of bleach and cover up. The sun was melting into the sea like a guilty conscience. The table was set for two. White linen. Two plates. Red roses in a silver flute vase. He sat across from me like a man who hadn’t executed three people with the same nonchalance most men reserve for peeling an orange.“Sea bass,” he said, cutting into it with the precision of a surgeon. “Caught this morning. Or at least that’s what the cook tells me. Who knows? Loyalty’s a slippery fish.”He looked up, smiling like sin on vacation. “Did you ever think about that, rabbit? How nobody’s really loyal? Just different flavors of afraid.”I sipped my wine. Red, dry, expensive enough to feel like a bottled bribe. “I think some people don’t need loyalty. They just need everyone else to feel too scared to lie.”He raised his glass. “To fear, then.”I raised my glass.He laughed. That soft,

The room smelled like rosemary and late autumn. The kind of place where curtains whispered and shadows knew when to hold their breath. A half-eaten dinner still sat on the table—wineglass with touch of my lipstick, silver fork still poised like it expected dessert and didn’t know better.I borrowed Elky’s shirt. It was soft, clean, and didn’t reek of gunpowder for a change.Elky stood by the window, shirt unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up. His hair was damp from the shower, the kind of damp that makes a man look like he’s been just baptized.He was quiet like a storm before the thunder. He poured me wine like it was an apology.“Do you think,” he said, “you and I could just disappear somewhere?”I raised an eyebrow. “You mean like death, or Marbella?”He smirked. The good kind. The one that made you believe in oceans and tender neck kisses.“No,” he said. “I mean like vanish. Start from scratch. A nice scratch, I mean.”I sipped the wine. It tasted expensive and sad. “Uh-huh. With your t

Elky knew something was off. He took me out to the sea for the night out. It was already late when his driver picked me up, and it wasn’t much fun to it, just a safer bed in the middle of the stormy sea. Elky slept alone in his cabin like a guard dog. There was no captain and no crew to slip the knife with written instructions to kill the blind girl. I obeyed him. I was grateful he took me out of that wasp hive. That way I knew he cared. Deeply. Not about me, just about me being alive. The storm had calmed down in the early morning. The sea beneath us was flat as an ironed sheet. We pulled up back to the estate just before dawn, the sky still drunk on stars, and the kind of silence that waits to see who gets in trouble next. The house stood there like a bad memory—wide, generous, cold, and pretending to be asleep. It had the look of a place that had been vacuumed of warmth with a fire hose.Elky stepped off the yacht like a resurrected king. The deckhands snapped to attention. Staff