The Wedding Night Audio

On our wedding night, my husband flashed a twisted smirk. "You do voiceovers." He leaned in. "Give me something... unique tonight." He tapped his screen.

A woman's voice filled the room. "Mimic her." Ice spiked my veins. I knew that voice. My sister. She vanished seven years ago.

Chapter 1 "Don't ruin the damn mood on our wedding night." Caspian's voice carried that dangerous, impatient edge. He was a trustfund playboy, volatile and entirely unpredictable.

I only secured my spot as his wife by perfecting the art of submission—swallowing my pride and playing the docile, perfect partner. I dragged a harsh breath into my lungs.

The audio continued playing from his phone. A woman singing. The tone was hauntingly familiar, crisp and piercing—like ice cubes clinking in a glass.

The sound bypassed my ears and lodged straight in my marrow. My throat closed up. It was absolutely Evangeline.

My gaze snapped up to meet Caspian's. "Husband, whose voice is that?" The words tore past my vocal cords, trembling and ragged.

He shot me a dark, warning glare. "Why the hell do you care? You're usually so compliant. Have you completely lost your mind tonight?" Normally, I would shrink back.

I would lower my chin and let the silence swallow my questions. Not tonight. I forced my spine straight. "I need to know. Please.

Tell me where you got this." Surprise flickered in his eyes, tracking the sudden shift in my demeanor. "Give me one good reason." The tightly coiled spring in my chest finally snapped.

Years of buried memories breached the surface. "In the voiceacting industry, raw talent dictates everything," I began, my voice dropping to a hollow whisper. "People constantly praise my vocal range.

They call me toptier. But compared to my sister? I was nothing. Evangeline closed out every single school talent show.

Miriam, her vocal coach, practically swore to my parents she would become a global sensation. "By nineteen, she received an acceptance letter to Juilliard.

Everyone thought she was untouchable. Then, she just… vanished. Like a drop of rain hitting the ocean. Erased. "Her disappearance ripped the flawless mask right off her face.

We uncovered a completely different side of her.

The real reason she left turned into our family's ultimate disgrace." Caspian narrowed his eyes, his hostility shifting into sharp curiosity. "You never once mentioned a sister." "When she disappeared, my parents lost their minds." A heavy, suffocating ache bloomed behind my ribs. "They scoured the entire country for her.

The obsession drained every ounce of life out of them. They burned out, got sick, and died within months of each other. I locked the trauma away.

I haven't spoken her name since." Caspian arched a brow, that dark obsession with control bleeding back into his tone. "I don't buy the disappearing act.

People don't just vanish into thin air. Walk me through exactly what happened back then. Do not skip a single detail." I gave a tight nod.

The memories played on a relentless loop in my head every single day. Time hadn't blurred the edges—it only sharpened the nightmare.

It had all started right after Evangeline's Juilliard acceptance letter arrived in the mail. The house was full of joy.

My parents were thrilled, flashing that piece of paper to every neighbor on the block. They bragged relentlessly about her bright, unstoppable future.

I practically worshipped the ground she walked on, beaming with pure pride. Looking back, the cracks were already showing. Evangeline was acting strange.

I just let the blinding euphoria of her success gaslight me into ignoring every single glaring red flag.

Chapter 2 Around noon on the twentyeighth, I grabbed the packed lunch boxes to run them down to my mom and dad at their flea market stand.

I had my hand on the front doorknob when Evangeline suddenly called out. "Calla…" I threw a bright smile over my shoulder. "What is it, Evangeline?

Want me to grab you some snacks from the corner store?" She stared at me. It was a heavy, unreadable look. Then, she slowly shook her head. "Just go.

Be careful on the road." I skipped out the door, totally oblivious, and delivered the food to my parents' stall.

After they finished eating, my dad dug a crumpled tendollar bill from his pocket and shoved it into my hand. "Pick up an iced coffee for your sister on the way back." I practically bounced all the way home, clutching a frozen box of treats, only to find the house completely empty.

Evangeline rarely went out. She practically lived in her bedroom, constantly obsessing over her vocal exercises. A flicker of confusion hit me, but I brushed it off.

It was summer break. She just graduated. Going out to celebrate was totally normal. But the sun went down. My mom and dad closed up shop and came home. Still no sign of Evangeline.

Cell phones weren't exactly mainstream back then. We had absolutely zero way to track her down.

My mom's face pinched with severe anxiety. "Evangeline never stays out this late," she muttered, pacing the living room. "The neighborhood hasn't been safe lately.

Those girls snatched from around here… You don't think she—" My dad slammed his fist against the kitchen table. "Stop manifesting that garbage!" he snapped. "Evangeline is fine.

Come on. We're going to look for her." They bolted out the front door, making a beeline straight for the hardware store down the block.

I scrambled to keep up, my sneakers catching on the cracked pavement. I hit the ground hard. Concrete tore through my jeans. Fire flared across my scraped knees.

The sting was sharp, blinding. Neither of them even looked back. Our street only had two exits: North and South. If you went South, you had to pass the local hardware store.

Wilbur, the old guy who owned the place, practically lived in his lawn chair by the front register.

He spent his days blasting the radio and watching every single person who walked by. By the time I limped up to the storefront, my parents were already interrogating him.

Wilbur stared at the ceiling, chewing on the question for a long moment before shaking his head. "Haven't seen her.

It's a dead zone around here," Wilbur added, leaning back. "I barely see two souls a day. I know Evangeline.

If she walked past this shop, I'd bet my life I'd remember." The color drained from my parents' faces. The South route led straight to downtown.

That was where the theaters, diners, and all the safe hangout spots were. The North route led straight to the train station. The North side was gridlock.

Transients, shady alleys, pure chaos. That was exactly where the human traffickers had abducted those other local girls. "No.

We need to call the cops right now." They tore away from the hardware store, sprinting back to our house to dial 911.

Even though it hadn't been twentyfour hours, the recent string of abductions put the local precinct on high alert. The police dispatched a cruiser immediately.

There was a single traffic camera mounted at the main intersection on the North end. The officers pulled the grainy blackandwhite footage for us.

We huddled around the monitor, our eyes burning, desperate for any sign of her. We stared at that screen until our vision blurred.

Evangeline wasn't on it. "Maybe Wilbur just missed her?" my mom whispered, clutching my dad's arm. "He falls asleep in that chair all the time.

She probably slipped right past him while he was dozing." We still didn't know where she was, but a collective, heavy breath left our lungs.

Going South meant she was infinitely safer than heading North.

One of the officers stepped forward, breaking the fragile relief. "There's a security camera at the South intersection, too.

Do you want to check that tape?" Chapter 3 The South intersection footage rolled. Blank. Evangeline never walked past that camera either.

She had simply ceased to exist. "Fascinating." Caspian let out a dry, scraping laugh. His thumb dragged across his jawline.

As he did, his eyes flicked—just for a fraction of a second—toward the study. He snapped his fingers, a sharp crack demanding more. I squeezed my eyes shut.

I let the suffocating gravity of that summer night pull me back under.

My mom's voice splintered the dead silence in the precinct. "Could… could Evangeline have taken the woods out back?" Our backyard backed up to a steep, jagged ravine.

It was wild, entirely off the grid, and lacked any real trails. Nobody hiked back there. My dad shot her a hard glare. "Stop making us look like idiots in front of the cops.

Why the hell would she go into the ravine?" Officer Marshall cleared his throat, sensing the toxic shift in the room. He leveled his gaze at me. "You were the last one to see her.

Did she do anything out of the ordinary?" My vocal cords seized.

It was my first time being questioned by the police. "When I left to bring them lunch, she called my name," I stammered, my pulse hammering in my ears. "She looked like she wanted to tell me something.

But she just… stopped." Marshall gave a grim nod and turned back to my parents. "This doesn't add up.

We need to search her bedroom immediately for any leads." We crowded into Evangeline's bedroom. My eyes locked onto her oak desk.

It was completely stripped bare—except for a single cassette tape sitting dead center. A cold dread settled heavily in my stomach.

This was before smartphones took over; we relied entirely on oldschool boomboxes and tapes. Was that a message? Marshall popped the tape into her stereo, and hit play.

Static hissed through the speakers. Then, Evangeline's voice bled into the room. "Mom, Dad. I'm leaving to find my own happiness.

If I get the chance, I'll come back and visit." The tape clicked to a halt. The color drained from my parents' faces.

Marshall let out a heavy, exhausted sigh. "Looks like she eloped with a boyfriend.

It happens more often than you'd think," he continued, his tone shifting into professional pity. "Teenage girls fall in love.

They get reckless and think running away is the only option." My dad's face morphed into a mask of pure, trembling rage. His knuckles popped.

My mom let out a shrill, borderline hysterical scream. "No! Absolutely not! Evangeline spent every waking second practicing her vocals. She never even looked at a boy!

She wouldn't just run off with some stranger!" My dad snapped.

He lunged across the room and slapped my mom hard across the face. "You have the nerve to defend her?" he roared, spit flying from his lips. "Is this how you raised your daughter?

To be a tramp?" My mom collapsed against the dresser, sobbing uncontrollably into her hands.

Marshall instantly tackled my dad by the shoulders, shoving him hard against the opposite wall to restrain him. "Back off! Now!

Kids aren't like they used to be," Marshall warned, keeping his forearm firmly across my dad's chest. "They use internet chat rooms. MySpace. Stuff parents never monitor.

If you can hack into her account, we can track exactly who she left with." I slowly raised my shaking hand. "I know her screen name.

I have her password." Chapter 4 We didn't own a computer, so we hauled ourselves to a dingy cybercafé downtown. Marshall pulled up Evangeline's MySpace page.

Her last status update was posted just yesterday. No text.

Just a pixelated image of a pair of wings. "Do you know her MySpace password?" Marshall asked, his fingers hovering over the greasestained keyboard. I shook my head.

He scowled, asked for her birthday, and punched in her initials followed by the date. A red error message flashed on the screen. Two attempts remaining.

Marshall exhaled a sharp breath. "This is a dead end." A memory violently clicked into place.

I rattled off a string of letters and numbers. "That's her favorite composer's name and birth year. Try it." Marshall hammered the keys.

The connection dialed, and the screen refreshed. We were in. Evangeline's Buddy List was sparse. A single contact sat isolated under a custom, private group at the very top.

My right eyelid twitched violently. The group title consisted of one word: Master. The screen name inside it belonged to someone named Lucius.

He was the only person in her recent chat logs. MySpace stored direct messages on their servers. Marshall clicked open her inbox and found a thread with Lucius.

Lines of text flooded the monitor. As Marshall scrolled down, a suffocating, graveyard silence paralyzed the tiny computer booth.

Beside me, my parents let out strangled, animalistic wheezes. Like dying beasts fighting for air.

The chat logs went off like firecrackers in my head, making it impossible to think straight. My perfect, untouchable sister—pure and proud as a white swan. She wasn't a prodigy.

She was someone's bitch. She documented every degrading, explicit command she obeyed for him. A sudden wave of nausea hit me.

If I wasn't staring directly at her screen name, I would have bet my own life this was a sick joke. The timestamp on the final message read three days ago.

Evangeline: Master, I can come find you soon. Lucius: Good. Crash! My dad drove his steeltoed boot straight into the computer tower, flatlining the monitor into instant blackness.

His bloodshot eyes and contorted face made him look like a demon, while my mom just stood there—completely hollowed out, staring at the dead screen with dead eyes. "I'm hunting her down," my dad snarled, his voice vibrating with pure malice. "I'm dragging that animal back here!" Marshall shoved my dad back, blocking the exit. "Where exactly are you going to look?!" The cop's voice cracked like a whip in the confined space. "Right now, we need to figure out who she went to, where he is, and how she got there!" The logic hit my dad like a physical blow, pinning him to the floorboards.

Marshall dropped into a crouch, inspecting the busted hardware. "Power cord just came loose," he muttered, jamming the cable back into the socket. The machine whirred to life.

He booted up MySpace again and clicked on Lucius's profile.

Marshall let out a vicious curse. "He completely deleted his account." We threw a wad of cash at the furious cybercafé manager and sped straight back to Evangeline's bedroom.

Marshall claimed we could track her trajectory by profiling exactly what she had packed. My mom fell to her knees, ripping through the bottom of the closet.

Her fingers snagged on a heavy, black duffel bag shoved off to the darkest corner. Chapter 5 My mom ripped the zipper open. A leather whip. A spiked collar. Dripping wax candles.

Total paralysis hijacked the room. It took a long, suffocating minute for my parents to register what they were looking at. Their faces warped in horror.

My dad dropped hard to his knees. He hammered his fists violently against his own temples. My mom looked like a corpse.

Her lips barely moved. "She only took her state ID and two outfits." I stared at the empty hangers.

She had only packed the two outfits she wore when she won her state vocal competitions. Every single other belonging was left behind.

Marshall scribbled furiously in his notepad. "She took her ID.

She needed it to book a Greyhound or an Amtrak ticket out of town." He scanned the room, his jaw tight. "Are there any other blind spots leading to the bus terminal?" My parents sat in stunned silence.

I forced the words past the lump in my throat. "I don't know how she got out. You have to take the North or South road. The ravine is out back. The yard is completely fenced in.

She didn't just sprout wings and fly." Marshall's expression hardened. A flash of deep pity crossed his eyes. "I'm pulling the transit security footage immediately.

I'll call you." The second his cruiser pulled out of the driveway, my parents completely snapped.

They turned the house upside down, screaming her name. "The cameras didn't catch her! She has to be hiding in here!" I curled into a tight ball in the corner of the hallway.

Silent, burning tears soaked my knees. When they finished destroying the house, they stumbled out the front door into the pitchblack street. Desperate to find her.

Begging to hear her say it was all a sick joke. Days bled into weeks. Marshall found zero footage at the stations. The local rangers found zero footprints in the ravine.

My parents plastered every telephone pole in our small town with missing person flyers. She never bought a ticket, nobody saw her, and she never logged back into MySpace.

In a mere twentyfour hours, Evangeline had successfully severed every single tie to us. Then, the whispers started. Small towns talk. The secret leaked.

Everyone found out the flawless local prodigy was actually someone's submissive pet. She ran off like a shameless stray.

The dirty looks and hushed grocery store gossip drove my parents over the edge. I had just turned eighteen.

By day, I drove our rusted pickup to the farmer's market, peddling their leftover inventory just to keep the lights on.

By night, I dragged my bruised, exhausted legs through the streets, hunting for a ghost. The sheer physical and mental agony of that summer is something I will never forget.

I eventually left for college. My parents withered away. The obsession completely drained their life force. Right around my graduation, their organs began shutting down.

On their deathbeds, their frail, skeletal fingers dug into my wrists. Their nails broke my skin.

They rasped the exact same final words. "If you ever find her… drag her to our graves." They died with their eyes wide open. I buried that nightmare.

I never breathed a word of it to a single soul. But I never stopped hunting. I played that wornout cassette tape religiously.

I refused to let time warp the exact pitch of her voice. My chest heaved as I stared up at Caspian. "So tell me.

How the hell am I supposed to keep it together when you just played her voice?" Chapter 6 Caspian's brows pulled tight. He was chewing on something dark and unspoken.

I leaned in, completely dropping my guard, my voice cracking with pure desperation. "Caspian, please.

Just tell me where you recorded this." He dragged a sharp breath into his lungs and squeezed his eyes shut.

When they snapped open a second later, that signature, toxic playboy smirk slid right back into place. "I recorded that clip five years ago.

At an exclusive underground party in Thailand. The vocals caught my attention, so I hit record on a whim. I had to bounce early, so I never even saw the singer's face.

The odds are basically zero, Calla. You're gaslighting yourself. You misheard it." I shook my head hard. "I'm not crazy. I do voiceovers for a living.

I dissect audio frequencies every single day. I've listened to her tapes for seven years. I would never mishear her." Caspian's scowl deepened. My eyes tracked his gaze. Again.

He darted a lightningfast look straight toward his study. "It was an underground, inviteonly event.

How the hell would I know whose plusone she was?" he scoffed. "It's been half a decade. The trail is completely dead.

Drop the obsession." He saw my mouth open to push back and instantly went scorchedearth. "Conversation over!" Caspian snapped. "Stop ruining our damn wedding night with all this depressing talk!" A heavy silence filled the room.

I slowly pivoted, turning my back to him. "Go get me a glass of water—" The words were barely out of his mouth when I spun around. My hand shot out.

The freezing steel edge of my dermaplaning blade locked flush against his throat. I pressed down. The surgical blade bit into his skin.

A hot bead of crimson blood welled up to the surface. Terror wiped the color right out of Caspian's face. I closed the distance, my lips brushing the shell of his ear.

My voice was pure ice. "The song in that recording? It was officially released exactly two years ago. But you just swore to me you recorded it five years ago.

Husband, why are you lying to me?" "Calla, are you out of your fucking mind?!" he choked out, his vocal cords straining against the metal. "Drop the damn blade right now, or I'm filing for divorce tomorrow!" I stared dead into his eyes.

The toughguy act was shattering. He was practically vibrating with panic. I dug the razor a fraction of an inch deeper into his flesh. "I don't give a shit.

I just want Evangeline." Dread hijacked his nervous system.

His breathing completely unraveled. "I told you, I don't know anything about your sister!" he rasped, his chest heaving. "The audio was a complete fluke!" I leaned my body into his, shaking my head with agonizing slowness. "You're hiding something.

Otherwise, you wouldn't have slipped up on the timeline. If you don't give me the absolute truth right now, I will make you beg for death." My gaze deliberately dropped.

I let my eyes burn a hole straight through the front of his slacks. His Adam's apple bobbed violently. A loud, jagged swallow echoed in the dead air.

Caspian's face twisted as his brain shortcircuited, weighing his options. Finally, the resistance bled out of him. "I recorded it last year. You dumped all that heavy shit on me.

I didn't want to get dragged into your family drama, so I lied about the date to shut you up. Everything else is the truth. I swear to god.

I heard her singing at a private underground party in Thailand." I didn't say a word. I didn't interrogate him further. Instead, I ghosted my way around to his back.

My right hand kept the bloodied steel fused to his throat. My left arm slithered up, coiling tight around the back of his neck like a vise. "Stop lying to me, Husband.

Evangeline is inside this house right now, isn't she?" Chapter 7