The Young and the Restless: French Nightmare Unfolds as Victor Seeks Vengeance for Missing Nick & Sharon

In the echoing marble corridors of a French villa now consumed by dread, Victor Newman was a man on the brink. Not just of fury, but of something darker: vengeance forged through years of protecting a legacy that others constantly tried to dismantle. He had seen corporate sabotage, family betrayal, even murder, but nothing compared to the quiet dread gnawing at him now.

His son, Nick, and the woman who had once been the center of both their lives, Sharon, had vanished without a trace during a supposed celebratory trip to Nice. What had begun as a luxurious getaway had transformed into a maze of locked doors, misleading clues, and whispering staff who refused to answer questions. But Victor had sensed something was off the moment Carter had gone silent, his reports delayed, his behavior more evasive. So when the news finally reached him that Carter had been seen wandering the halls alone the night of Damian Cain’s stabbing, the weight of suspicion tilted heavily and irreversibly in one direction.

Victor didn’t waste time. He summoned Chance Chancellor, who had already been digging into Damian’s murder. Their alliance had always been one of necessity rather than kinship, but in this moment, they both had the same objective: find Carter, extract the truth, and save Nick and Sharon from whatever nightmare had swallowed them whole. Carter was not a man known for leadership or initiative. For years, he had lingered in the shadow of Cain Ashby, the rebranded Aristotle Dumas, fetching coffee, handling minor errands, and managing logistics with unremarkable efficiency. But somewhere along the way, Carter had changed. It wasn’t just loyalty anymore; it was obsession. He believed Cain was more than a man. He believed Cain was destiny. And for that vision to thrive, Damian Cain had to die. Nick had to be neutralized, and Sharon, well, Sharon was collateral damage in a story that Carter believed wasn’t hers to survive.

When Victor and Chance cornered Carter in the drawing room of the estate, it was not a dramatic arrest, but a quiet war of words wrapped in civility. The fireplace crackled. The room was lit too warmly for comfort. Carter sat in a stiff leather chair, his posture upright, his hands clasped tightly together as though rehearsing a confession he would never truly make. Victor didn’t speak first. He didn’t have to; his presence demanded an answer. Carter, on the other hand, seemed eerily calm, his eyes betraying only the faintest flicker of nerves. He spoke with a mixture of reverence and resignation, admitting with a soft, unwavering voice that he would do anything for Aristotle Dumas. He said it like a mantra, like a prayer. To Carter, Cain wasn’t just a boss; he was a cause, a symbol of reinvention and power unfairly denied. Chance leaned forward, not as an interrogator, but as a man speaking to another man’s buried conscience. “Where are they, Carter?” That was all he wanted to know. But Carter, like all zealots, deflected with vague rhetoric. He insisted he didn’t kill Damian. He claimed he had nothing to do with the knife. He swore the footage that went missing—footage that could exonerate Nick, or at least add clarity to that chaotic night—had simply disappeared, as though digital data could vanish into thin air. But Victor wasn’t interested in excuses. What he wanted was his son back. And if Carter wouldn’t tell him where Nick and Sharon were being held, then Victor would burn down every villa, warehouse, and guest house in this country to find them.

Meanwhile, deep beneath the villa, behind a thick metal door disguised as a wine cellar entrance, Nick Newman lay on the cold stone floor, bleeding from a gash along his thigh sustained during a failed escape attempt. He had managed to overpower a distracted guard, or at least believed he had, and had nearly reached the outer corridor before Carter reappeared, cold and calculated, swinging a batten hard enough to drop him to the ground. Sharon had screamed, her voice hoarse from hours of shouting into silence. And now she sat beside him, pressing her scarf against the wound, whispering fragments of hope as his eyes flickered in and out of focus. Every hour that passed without rescue weakened him, and the once defiant spirit that made Nick Newman unbreakable began to fade beneath the weight of blood loss and uncertainty.

Back upstairs, Carter remained stone-faced. Victor raised his voice only once, a deep, thunderous warning that left even Chance unnerved. “You don’t want to know what I will do to you if my son dies in your cage,” Victor growled. But Carter remained unmoved. To him, the captivity of Nick and Sharon wasn’t cruelty; it was necessary balance. Damian had been a virus. Nick a destabilizer. And Sharon a witness who knew too much. Their removal wasn’t personal; it was strategy. And like all good soldiers, Carter followed orders. Or did he? That was the deeper question Victor and Chance were beginning to explore. Perhaps Carter wasn’t simply following Cain’s commands. Perhaps he was acting on his own, driven by the warped delusion that he was saving Cain from the consequences of his own weaknesses. If Damian had indeed known something about a past assault, a buried scandal, or Cain’s fraudulent business dealings, then Carter may have acted alone in secret, carving out a brutal solution he believed Cain would one day understand.

Amanda Sinclair, already suspicious of Carter’s involvement in the erased footage, watched the confrontation from the hallway. She had demanded to be present for Carter’s formal interrogation, but Victor had denied her access, warning that the time for legal niceties had passed. Amanda, however, was done playing passive. She believed Carter had not only deleted the footage, but possibly orchestrated the entire cover-up to frame Nick and keep Amanda too preoccupied to ask the right questions. The fact that Carter had access to the security system, had moved freely the night of the murder, and had wiped Cain’s laptop history after the incident made his insistence on innocence all the more laughable. And yet, without a confession or physical evidence, he remained untouchable—for now.

The most disturbing development, however, came when Victor received a burned CD slid under his hotel room door. On it was grainy audio, just breathing, a few muffled words, a male voice whispering what sounded like coordinates. No name, no demands, just a cruel game. Was Carter toying with them? Or was this Colin Atkinson’s handiwork, a ghost orchestrating suffering from a distance, feeding scraps of information to lure Victor closer to a trap? Chance analyzed the file, cross-referenced the location, and discovered a nearby abandoned monastery sealed off since a fire five years earlier. Could that be where Nick and Sharon were being kept? Or was it just another diversion, a twisted breadcrumb in a maze designed by minds much sicker than they had anticipated? Regardless, Victor made a promise to himself and to the portrait of Nikki he kept in his wallet: He would bring his son home, dead or alive. And if Carter refused to break, then Victor would shatter him piece by piece.

Darkness lingered in the corners of the cellar, thick with the scent of damp concrete and something more metallic, more ominous—blood perhaps, or the remnants of fear left by those who had come before. Nick Newman’s breathing had grown shallow, labored by pain and exhaustion. His side burned with every movement, the wound he sustained during his failed escape attempt now worsening by the hour. He had hurled himself against the reinforced door when Carter had left it ajar for a moment too long, trying to force it open with nothing but desperation and raw will. The effort had earned him nothing but a deep gash along his ribs, torn muscle, and a deeper sense of helplessness. Sharon knelt beside him, her hands slick with his blood, using whatever cloth she could tear from her blouse to apply pressure, whispering calm into his ear, even as her own heart pounded in dread. Every second that passed in that stone tomb felt like a countdown to something irreversible.

But fate, as it often did in Genoa City, had another twist in store. Just as Sharon began to fear she might lose Nick to blood loss or infection, the silence above was broken by the unmistakable crack of wood splintering. Footsteps echoed, fast, erratic, not the careful tread of Carter or a guard. Then a voice, sharp, feminine, unmistakable: “Nick! Sharon!” The steel door creaked open, and there she was—Sally Spectra, flashlight in hand, eyes wide with urgency and disbelief. Without waiting for an answer, she rushed forward, dropping to her knees beside Nick. Sharon blinked, stunned, but too grateful to question. Sally didn’t explain how she’d found them, but the truth was she’d followed instinct and a trail of half-spoken words from Carter’s distracted ramblings during a phone call she wasn’t meant to overhear. Whatever her motives, she was here now. And in that moment, she became the thread holding Nick’s life together.

Together, Sally and Sharon hoisted Nick up, arms around his torso, dragging him up the narrow passage that led out of the cellar. Every step was agony for him, but he never cried out. He only clenched his jaw and moved forward, eyes locked on the distant square of light like a man crawling out of the grave.

Upstairs, chaos brewed in its own volatile rhythm. Billy Abbott had arrived at the estate just hours earlier, convinced that Cain was being framed and that Damian’s murder had been carefully orchestrated to make both Cain and Nick pawns in a larger game. He wasn’t wrong, but his timing couldn’t have been worse. No sooner had he stepped into the main salon than a second round of power outages plunged the estate into confusion. Backup generators sputtered. Guards scrambled, and somewhere in the shadows, the “rail killer” moved unseen, biding time for their next strike. Billy had promised Phyllis Summers he would help uncover the truth—not just about Damian’s killer, but about who was manipulating the narrative behind the scenes. Phyllis, of course, had her own reasons for wanting justice, ones that went beyond morality. She’d always played too close to the fire, and now her obsession with unraveling the conspiracy surrounding Cain had placed her squarely in the path of someone who would kill to stay hidden. Together, she and Billy had traced a series of encrypted messages sent from a remote server in the Pyrenees to one of Carter’s encrypted laptops, and from there to a mysterious email dump containing documents tied to Abbott Communications. Documents that Jack Abbott had never seen and never approved.

That was the real betrayal—not the murder, not even the framing of Nick. It was the slow, deliberate undermining of Jack’s authority by his own brother. Jack, who had trusted Billy to manage Abbott Communications as a clean, visionary media project, now faced the grim realization that Billy had retooled the division to hunt secrets, leak dirt, and push private agendas disguised as journalism. It wasn’t illegal. Not exactly. But it was dishonest. And as Jack paced the upstairs hallway, hearing rumors from staff that Billy was in the estate interrogating Carter’s assistant, he knew a reckoning was coming. He couldn’t allow his family name to be dragged further into scandal. He would confront Billy soon, and when he did, it might not just be the business relationship that ended. It might be the brotherhood, too.

Meanwhile, the questions surrounding the villa’s staff only grew stranger. Cain, ever composed in public, claimed that his personal security team had gone down the mountain days ago to retrieve help when the estate’s communications had been severed. But if that were true, where were the authorities? Where were the paramedics, the detectives, the officials who should have responded to a distress call? Had the staff been silenced, paid off, or worse, had they vanished like Damian had? Rumors began to circulate that one of the guards had been found unconscious near the wine cellar, his radio smashed, and his wallet missing. Another had reportedly been seen fleeing toward the cliffs in the early morning, eyes wild, clothes torn, muttering something about a man with a scar. No one knew what that meant, but a few began to whisper the name Colin Atkinson again, each time more fearfully.

Back inside the estate, Nick collapsed on a fainting couch as Sally cleaned the wound with vodka and linen napkins. He was pale but alive, his grip on Sharon’s wrist still firm despite the pain. Chance arrived moments later, breathless, weapon drawn, having followed a GPS ping from Sally’s phone once he realized she had gone after them. It was too early to celebrate, though. Carter had vanished again. So had Phyllis. And out near the orchard, where fog clung to the ground and the moon cast eerie shapes between the trees, someone stood watching the windows of the estate, their breath fogging in the cold night air, a long blade resting at their side. The killer was still out there. And now, with Nick rescued, the game had changed.

Whoever had orchestrated the original attack knew that containment was no longer an option. The story was spiraling out of control. The lies were fracturing. And in the heart of the estate, Billy and Phyllis, so certain of their mission to clear Cain, were about to uncover something neither of them expected: a bloodstained cloak tucked into a suitcase in Carter’s quarters and a hidden journal with names, dates, confessions, including one that simply read, “Nick was never the target.” But if Nick wasn’t the target, then who was?