Hired a Gigolo Got a Billionaire (Zoey and Christian) novel Chapter 390

Chapter 390

Olivia’s POV

The yoga studio was quieter than usual when I finished locking the front door. The evening class had been

ecially calm-only five students, all regulars who preferred the serenity of the 8 p.m. session over the chaos of the morning rush. Normally, I loved this moment at the end of the day, when the peaceful energy of a good practice still lingered in the air.

But for the past two days, nothing had felt normal. Nothing felt calm.

Madeline had vanished since the morning before, after going to the doctor with Vivian. Since then, total silence. Her phone was off. No replies to messages. It was as if she’d simply evaporated. And worst of all, Vivian wasn’t answering my calls either. When she finally did respond, it was only to say she was “handling the situation” and that I shouldn’t worry.

Exactly the kind of answer that sent me straight into panic mode.

I’d tried to file a missing person report that morning, but the experience had been humiliating. The officer who spoke to me was a middle-aged man with a bored expression and a sarcastic tone. He looked at me like I was an overdramatic, neurotic relative.

“Isn’t this the ‘cousin’ who disappeared on her wedding day and then turned up in a rehab clinic?” he’d asked, making air quotes around cousin, as if he doubted we were even related.

I couldn’t deny that Madeline’s recent disappearances made the whole thing sound like the boy who cried wolf. First the dramatic escape from the wedding. Then the period when she was “unreachable,” which Vivian had explained away as emotional recovery. And now, another disappearance.

To anyone on the outside, it probably looked like the erratic behavior of an unstable woman who periodically ran away from her own life. But to me, someone who’d known Madeline since childhood, who could read every subtle change in her expression, every shift in her voice when she was truly afraid, it was obvious that something very serious was happening.

The problem was getting anyone else to take me seriously.

I walked across the poorly lit parking lot of the shopping complex where the studio was located, my car keys rattling inside my bag. It was a relatively safe area, busy during the day and with a few stores still open late, but at night it emptied out. Streetlights cast yellowish circles on the asphalt, leaving patches of shadow I usually never even noticed.

Tonight, every shadow looked like a potential hiding place.

I stopped abruptly when I reached my car.

“Shit,” I muttered out loud, the word echoing through the empty lot.

The back right tire was completely flat, clearly punctured. I walked around the car, confirming it was only one tire, then felt my stomach drop as I remembered I’d used the spare last month and still hadn’t replaced it.

I looked around, weighing my options. I could call an Uber, but it would take at least twenty minutes to arrive if I was lucky. It was still rush hour, and drivers would probably be cherry-picking better rides. Or I could just walk home since I didn’t live far, maybe a fifteen-minute walk through streets I knew well.

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Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have hesitated.

But with Madeline missing and a creeping sense that something was fundamentally wrong with my world, the idea of walking alone

rough the streets at night didn’t feel so simple anymore.

Even so, standing there doing nothing wasn’t a better option.

I locked the car and started walking toward my apartment, phone in hand, every sense on high alert. The first few blocks were calm-people walking their dogs, the distant sound of TVs through apartment windows, the occasional car passing by.

It was on the fifth block that something felt… wrong.

At first, it was just a feeling. That primal instinct that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up for no clear reason. Then I started noticing a pattern in the sounds behind me. Footsteps that stopped when I stopped. That resumed when I started walking again.

I deliberately slowed down, pretending to search through my bag. The footsteps slowed too.

My heart began to race.

I turned a corner quickly, then ducked behind a parked car and glanced back. A male figure rounded the same corner seconds later, looking straight in my direction, like he knew exactly where I was.

Panic rose up my throat, sharp and bitter.

I started walking faster. Then running. I could hear the footsteps behind me speeding up too, no longer bothering to hide. I managed to reach my street, but when I turned toward my building, I realized there was another man blocking the way.

I was trapped.

I backed up a few steps, my hand plunging into my bag in search of the pepper spray I always carried. My fingers closed around the small canister and I yanked it out, aiming it at the closer man.

“Stay where you are!” I shouted, my voice stronger than I expected. “I won’t hesitate to use this!”

He stopped, but he didn’t look particularly concerned. He was tall, well dressed, wearing a dark coat that made him look more like a shadow than a person. When he spoke, his voice was calm-almost polite.

“If you cooperate, we can do this the easy way,” he said, taking a small step toward me. “My name is—”

I didn’t care what his name was. I wasn’t cooperating with anything.

Almost at the same moment I pressed the trigger on the pepper spray, aiming straight for his face, he raised something small and metallic toward me that made a muted sound, like a mechanical sigh.

The spray left my hand and hit its target, making the man stumble back with a sharp curse. But whatever he’d used on me worked faster than I could have imagined.

A strange sensation spread through my body, like my muscles were disconnecting from my commands. My vision darkened at the edges, and the world began to tilt dangerously.

The last thing I remember was the sound of my knees hitting the asphalt-and the voice of the second man

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“Grab her. Let’s go.”

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Chapter Su