It all started when I came home from healing meditation class.
Technically, it was Advanced Healing Meditation because, apparently, regular healing meditation was no longer spiritually challenging enough for me after finishing yoga instructor training three weeks earlier.
I had spent the last two hours in a room that smelled aggressively like eucalyptus while a woman named Andromeda explained that lower back pain was caused by "emotional resistance to abundance."
Honestly, she might've been right.
My lower back had hurt ever since Aries accidentally flipped our rental car in Croatia.
Which, to be fair, he maintained was "technically evasive driving."
At the time, I had not asked about evasive driving from what.
That was my first mistake.
The second I opened the apartment door, I knew something was wrong.
The lights were off.
Now, normal people would probably think that wasn't alarming.
But Aries treated ambient lighting like homeland security.
He once spent forty-five minutes explaining "entry-point visibility vulnerabilities" because I had bought a floor lamp from IKEA.
Again.
At no point did I think:
My boyfriend might be a spy.
I thought:
Wow. Men who work in international goat startup logistics are apparently under a lot of pressure.
The apartment smelled faintly like sandalwood, bergamot tea, and gunpowder.
Which was honestly pretty normal for a Tuesday.
"Aries?" I called.
No answer.
I kicked off my shoes and immediately tripped over a black duffel bag in the hallway.
"Oh my God," I muttered. "If this idiot forgot his Kazakhstan presentation again—"
The bag hit the floor.
It burst open.
At least seven passports spilled across the hardwood.
I stared at them.
Then I crouched down and picked one up.
Aries stared back at me from the photo.
Except his name wasn't Aries.
It was Vega Blackwell.
I blinked slowly.
"Huh," I said.
Corporate travel sounded exhausting.
I tossed the passport back into the bag without another thought.
To be fair, Aries had always had kind of a weird job.
Officially, he worked in "international agricultural acquisition consulting."
Which sounded fake, but every time I asked follow-up questions, he'd answer with so much confidence that I immediately got embarrassed for not understanding economics.
Last month, over brunch, I'd asked what exactly he did all day.
He'd taken a sip of coffee and said:
"Mostly extraction."
And somehow I'd accepted that answer.
There had definitely been signs.
Like the time he disappeared for three days and came back with a dislocated shoulder and a Latvian passport.
Or the fact that he spoke fluent Russian despite allegedly growing up in Arizona.
Or the night I woke up at 2 a.m. because he was cleaning blood off his hands while calmly explaining:
"Networking event got weird."
Or the fact that he owned night-vision goggles.
Which he insisted were for hiking.
Night hiking.
In downtown Singapore.
Looking back, I really should've connected the dots.
Instead, I connected absolutely none of them.
I walked into the kitchen and immediately saw the note sitting on the counter beside Aries's favorite knife.
Not kitchen knife.
Knife knife.
Like the kind of knife that says:
I know at least three ways to escape from a moving vehicle.
My stomach dropped.
Not because I thought he was in danger.
I thought he was breaking up with me.
"Wow," I whispered.
I picked up the note with trembling hands.
Pisces,
If you are reading this, it means I've already left.
There are truths about my life that I can never explain to you.
Please understand that everything I did was to protect you.
You cannot contact me.
You cannot attempt to follow me.
You cannot trust anyone associated with KazAgriNova.
If anyone asks, we met at a farmers market in Seattle.
Burn this note immediately.
— Aries
I stared at the note for a full ten seconds.
Then I whispered:
"Oh my God."
My knees physically gave out.
I collapsed into a kitchen chair like a widow in a nineteenth-century opera.
"Oh my God," I repeated.
"He joined a cult."
Everything suddenly made sense.
The secrecy.
The random international flights.
The burner phones.
The six fake IDs.
The fact that he could identify seventeen different handguns by sound alone.
The mysterious bruises.
The encrypted emails.
The helicopter license.
The time Interpol called him during dinner.
Oh my God.
Multi-level marketing.
"Taurus was RIGHT," I gasped aloud.
Because Taurus from my aura-cleansing workshop had warned me about emotionally unavailable entrepreneurial men.
I grabbed my phone with shaking hands and opened Aries's contact.
Three missed calls from an unknown number immediately appeared on my screen.
Then all three vanished.
I blinked.
"Huh," I murmured.
Probably Mercury retrograde.
Then the apartment exploded.
Not, like, emotionally.
Actually exploded.