For sixty days, the sun rose over Manila, but for Matthew Tenorio, the world had been plunged into a permanent, freezing eclipse.
The penthouse was a mausoleum. He had left everything exactly as it was the night she walked out—the half-empty bottle of wine on the counter, the scent of her perfume lingering in the silk pillowcases, a single silver earring left on the vanity. He refused to let the house staff clean it. He wanted to choke on her absence.
Cheska had executed a tactical disappearance that would have made Timothy proud. Within an hour of the confrontation at the Blue Marlin, she had stripped herself of the Tenorio name. She left the Cartier bracelets on the kitchen island. She left the keys to the armored Rover. She even left the designer clothes he had bought her in Paris, taking only what she had owned before they met.
She moved into a cramped, fourth-floor walk-up in a gritty corner of Quezon City—a place where the streets were too narrow for Matt's security SUVs and the air was thick with the smell of street food and exhaust. To the world, she was just another corporate worker. To the Tenorios, she had become a ghost in the machine.
The Fractured Communication
She didn't cut everyone off. She couldn't.
She spent her nights at the hospital or the safe house with Alliana and Joie. She was the one who held Alliana's hand when the nightmares of the bridge became too much. She was the one who looked at Joie—not as a doctor or a Tenorio, but as a woman who was bleeding out from the inside—and offered a silent, supportive nod. They were bonded by the trauma of what the family had done to them.
But her communication with Stephen was strictly, brutally professional. She still held her position at the Tenorio Resort Group, and she refused to quit. To her, quitting was a weakness; it was letting the family win. Instead, she became a machine of pure, cold efficiency. She handled the "Legitimate" optics of the family empire with a ruthlessness that mirrored Stephen's own.
"The Q3 reports are on your desk," she told Stephen during a brief, icy meeting at the headquarters. She didn't sit down. She didn't look at the chair where Matt usually sat.
"Matthew hasn't slept in three days, Cheska," Stephen said, his voice level, testing her. "He's losing his grip. The shipments in the South are being intercepted because he's too busy looking for your shadow in every crowd."
Cheska's expression remained as blank as a fresh sheet of paper. "That sounds like a personnel issue, Stephen. I'm here to discuss the expansion in Palawan. If Matthew is failing his duties, that's your problem to solve. Not mine."
She walked out before Stephen could respond, leaving the most powerful man in the country stunned by her coldness. She wasn't just hiding; she was proving that she could survive the Tenorio world without the Tenorio protection.
The Wolf's Decay
Back at the "logistics" hubs, Matthew was falling apart in real-time.
He was the man who handled the world's mess, but he couldn't handle the silence of his own bedroom. His efficiency didn't just drop; it cratered. He missed a major hand-off in Batangas because he thought he saw a flash of her hair in a passing jeepney. He was sloppy, leaving digital trails that Timothy had to scramble to delete.
His temper had become legendary. He had nearly beaten a middleman to death for a minor discrepancy in a manifest. The "Cleaners"—men who dealt with blood and bone for a living—now whispered in corners when they saw his car pull up. He walked with a hair-trigger violence, his eyes bloodshot and sunken.
Stephen finally cornered him in the gym of the estate, where Matt was systematically destroying a heavy bag until his wraps were soaked in his own blood.
"Fix it, Matt," Stephen commanded, his voice echoing in the empty room. "This isn't just about a girl anymore. You're becoming a liability to the name. Either go find her and crawl on your knees, or forget she exists. If you miss one more shipment, I'll have to find someone who isn't distracted by a ghost to do your job."
Matt didn't stop hitting the bag. "You don't get it, Steph," he rasped, his knuckles splitting open. "She wasn't just a 'girl.' She was the only part of me that didn't feel like a weapon."
"Then you're a broken weapon," Stephen countered coldly. "And broken weapons get discarded."
Matt stopped. He looked at his hands—shaking, bloodied, and empty. He realized then that he wasn't a wolf. He was just a starving animal, and the only person who had the "food"—the warmth, the softness, the humanity—had gone into the dark where he couldn't follow.
He didn't need a logistics plan. He didn't need a tactical extraction. He needed to find a way to make a woman who hated him remember why she had ever loved a monster.