One Hundred Twenty Days of Ruin Chapter 1

After a hundred and twenty days of captivity, I was finally pulled out of the dark.

The hallucinations—the phantom screams, the creeping shadows—refused to let me go.

Sienna played her usual card the moment she saw me.

"I’m so sorry, Paige. I had no idea you were actually taken," she wept, her voice trembling with practiced innocence. "It’s all my fault."

I heard nothing but a deafening, hollow ringing in my ears.

When I didn’t respond, she covered her mouth, tears spilling down her cheeks on cue. "I know you hate me. If it will help you heal, I’ll pack my bags and move out right now."

Lucas, the brother who had spent the last four months defending her every breath, hesitated for only a fraction of a second before cutting her off.

"I’m glad you see it that way, Sienna," he said, his voice completely flat. "I’ve already found you an apartment. Go pack your things."

Sienna froze.

* * *

On the hundred and twentieth day of my kidnapping, a SWAT team breached the heavy iron door of the cellar.

When the tactical lights tore through the pitch black and landed on me, I didn't feel a surge of euphoric relief. All I saw were twisted, grotesque silhouettes clawing at the periphery of my vision.

The lead officer’s eyes reddened instantly. He keyed his shoulder mic, his voice breaking into a roar as he called for an ambulance.

All of this had started a hundred and twenty days ago over a dress.

That afternoon, Sienna had arrived at the family estate in Greenwich, introduced as the long-lost "biological daughter" the Lynn family had finally tracked down. Instinctively, I felt like an interloper who had stolen her birthright. Drowning in guilt, I conceded to her every demand.

Yet right in front of Lucas, she took a pair of shears to my favorite silk gown, her eyes brimming with tears as she choked out that this dress represented the glamorous life stolen from her for twenty-one years.

Furious and humiliated, I stormed out of the house into the rain.

Waiting down the drive were kidnappers who mistook me for the newly found heiress. A single blow to the back of my head, and I was thrown into the back of an unmarked van.

When I was first shoved into that lightless concrete hole, a sick part of me had actually felt a twisted sense of relief. I thought of Lucas—how fiercely he had always protected me growing up. If he knew I had been taken, he would lose his mind trying to find me. Once he rescued me, the guilt would wash away the suspicion in his eyes, and he would stop looking at me like a thief who had hijacked his sister's life.

I had vastly overestimated my place in his heart.

The kidnappers dialed Lucas’s direct line, demanding a fifty-million-dollar ransom.

The call was on speaker. Lucas’s voice came through the receiver, ice-cold and dripping with utter contempt:

"Tell Paige that this little stunt is pathetic. Does she really think I'm falling for another one of her dramatic cries for attention? You want money? Let her rot out there."

The line went dead.

The kidnappers went ballistic.

The hundred and twenty days that followed were a descent into raw, unadulterated hell. Denied their payday, they vented every ounce of their rage onto my body. Leather belts. Heavy boots. And finally, boiling water poured straight down my throat.

My vocal cords were scalded into ruined tissue, rendering me completely mute. There wasn’t an inch of unbruised skin left on me. The thick, dark hair I had once taken pride in was ripped out in bloody patches. I was reduced to a hollow, skeletal frame—a corpse wrapped in parchment skin.

In my fevered delirium, I kept seeing Lucas standing in pools of my blood, looking down at me with folded arms, telling me I had brought it on myself.

Now, the sharp, stinging reek of hospital antiseptic dragged me back to consciousness.

Just outside the trauma bay, the detective taking my intake notes dialed Lucas’s number once more and hit speakerphone.

The moment the line connected, the sound of pop music, clinking champagne flutes, and rowdy laughter spilled out of the tiny speaker.

"Paige, what kind of game are you playing now?" Lucas snapped, his tone laden with arrogant exhaustion. "Mom and Dad are overseas on their research sabbatical. Today is Sienna’s twenty-first birthday. As her brother, it's my job to make up for the two decades she lost. Will you stop acting like a spoiled brat for once in your life?"

Then came Sienna’s soft, fragile voice in the background: "Lucas, please don't be too hard on her. I’m sure Paige didn't mean to throw a tantrum today of all days..."

I lay flat on the gurney, staring blankly at the acoustic ceiling tiles above.

There was no anger left in my chest. No sorrow. Only the vast, icy numbness of someone who had burned through every nerve ending.

The detective’s face hardened into stone. He cut through the party noise with lethal authority:

"Mr. Lynn, this is Detective Miller with the Major Crimes Division. Paige Lynn was rescued from an armed kidnapping ring less than an hour ago. She has suffered four months of severe, systematic torture and is currently in critical condition in the trauma unit at St. Jude's. You need to get here immediately."

The music and laughter on the other end died instantly, cut off as if by a guillotine.

A suffocating silence hung in the air for five full seconds before Lucas’s voice came back, cracking into something unhinged and unrecognizable:

"She... she wasn't faking?"