Genoa City has a particular kind of silence that comes right before everything detonates—and Adam Newman can feel it in his bones. It’s the same charged stillness that has always preceded one of Victor Newman’s most drastic moves: the kind that doesn’t just shake boardrooms, but fractures families, rewrites loyalties, and leaves emotional casualties in its wake.

On Monday’s Young and the Restless episode (January 26, 2026), that tension finally takes shape as Adam goes to Chelsea Lawson not with casual pillow-talk updates, but with the uneasy weight of a son who knows his father’s “solutions” often come with a human cost. Newman Enterprises—once the crown jewel Victor treated like an extension of his own bloodstream—has slipped into Cain Ashby’s hands, and Victor is not the kind of man who accepts defeat as permanent. Not in business. Not in legacy. Not ever.

Adam’s warning lands like an alarm bell because it isn’t speculative gossip. Victor, according to Adam, has found a “viable” path to reclaiming the company—and the word viable sounds colder than it should, because it’s the kind of adjective used when a plan is effective, not necessarily moral. Chelsea hears it immediately. Adam may try to speak like a strategist, but his tone gives him away: he isn’t just impressed by what Victor is plotting—he’s afraid of what it implies.

And then the conversation drifts into the territory that makes Chelsea’s skin go tight with instinctive dread.

The “pressure point,” Adam hints, isn’t a contract clause or a board vote. It’s family. Specifically, the people Cain values most: Lily, Charlie, and Mattie. The idea that Victor could consider using them as leverage—turning real human beings into bargaining chips—hits Chelsea in the most vulnerable place possible. She isn’t hearing this as a former con artist sizing up a game. She’s hearing it as a mother in Genoa City, a town with an ugly history of children being used as collateral in grown men’s wars.

Chelsea’s reaction is immediate: disbelief first, then anger, then fear. Not because she thinks Victor is careless—because she knows he’s calculating. The most chilling thing about Victor Newman has never been that he loses control. It’s that he rarely does. His cruelty, when it appears, is usually dressed up as necessity. Strategy. Protection. “I’m doing what must be done.”

And Chelsea has seen what happens when powerful men convince themselves that crossing the line is the only way to win.

Adam, for his part, wrestles in real time with the contradiction that has always defined his relationship with Victor. He doesn’t want to believe his father would orchestrate anything resembling a kidnapping. Yet he can’t deny that Victor’s favourite kind of pressure often hovers uncomfortably close to criminality—legal manipulation here, back-channel intimidation there, and a willingness to weaponize fear if it produces results. Adam feels Chelsea searching his face for reassurance. He wants to give it. He just isn’t sure he can.

Because while they’re arguing about a hypothetical nightmare, Genoa City begins to live a very real one.

Across town, Abby Newman experiences the moment every parent fears—the kind that makes your stomach drop before your mind even catches up. One second, life at the Chancellor-Winters estate is routine: familiar rooms, familiar sounds, the comforting rhythm of home. The next, Abby notices something she can’t explain away.

It’s too quiet.

At first she does what parents always do—tries to rationalize. Dominic is probably with staff. Maybe he’s in another room. Maybe he’s outside, in the garden, laughing where she can’t hear him. She moves faster than she means to, calling his name with a voice that tries to sound calm while panic climbs like a flame up her spine. She checks one room, then another, and then another, and the silence turns from “odd” to “wrong.”

By the time Abby finds Devon Winters, the air between them changes. Devon tries to steady her with logic and reassurance—Dominic is in the house, they’ll find him, it’s fine—but Abby’s fear doesn’t live in logic anymore. It lives in the part of her mind that remembers what Genoa City is capable of. This town doesn’t just break hearts. It creates hostages.

They search again, together this time, and the estate begins to feel less like a sanctuary and more like a maze designed to torment them. Hallways stretch. Rooms feel unfamiliar. The grounds—usually serene—start to look threatening as shadows lengthen and daylight begins to slide away. Abby’s desperation sharpens when it becomes clear that no one can offer the one thing she needs most: a recent sighting. The phrase “no one has seen him” sinks into her chest like a stone. And as dusk approaches, another thought follows, darker and more terrifying:

If Dominic didn’t wander away… then someone took him.

Devon’s composure starts to crack, not because he wants to panic, but because he understands what Dominic represents. This child is more than a baby. He is a symbol of hard-won hope—born out of complicated choices, sacrifice, and a tangled history of love and loss. Devon has fought to build a life where Dominic is safe at the centre of it. The idea that safety can be shattered in an afternoon leaves him battling his own guilt: If I can’t protect my son, what kind of father am I?

As the episode unfolds, the lines between corporate warfare and personal tragedy blur until they are almost indistinguishable. Abby and Devon begin considering the next steps—police, security footage, calls to family—and the audience can feel the net widening. Because in a town like this, a missing child doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It becomes part of a pattern. A signal. A warning flare.

And suddenly, Adam’s earlier conversation with Chelsea doesn’t feel theoretical anymore.

Once news of Dominic’s disappearance starts to ripple outward, the paranoia of Genoa City does what it always does: it multiplies suspects faster than answers. Is this a personal vendetta? A Winters-Chancellor retaliation? A Newman consequence? Or is Dominic’s disappearance connected—directly or indirectly—to the power struggle over Newman Enterprises?

The horror isn’t just in the uncertainty. It’s in the possibility that someone is willing to escalate the corporate war by targeting the youngest, most innocent life attached to the families at the centre of it.

Chelsea, upon hearing about Dominic, would instinctively connect dots even if the picture is incomplete. And Adam—no matter how fiercely he wants to defend Victor—can’t stop a treacherous thought from forming: If my father believed creating fear would force Cain to surrender… would he justify it?

It’s a question that poisons the air because it has no easy answer. Victor loves his grandchildren. Adam believes that. But Victor also loves power with a devotion that has, at times, made him dangerous.

Meanwhile, another legacy storyline simmers alongside the crisis: whispers surrounding Jill Abbott’s worsening condition, and the way that looming fragility destabilizes Billy Abbott at the exact moment he’s already struggling to define who he wants to be. The possibility of losing Jill doesn’t feel like “news” to Billy—it feels like time running out on every unresolved conflict, every argument he thought he’d get to have later, every apology he never quite learned how to say. And when Sally Spectra’s involvement drags Jill’s name into Billy’s professional crossroads, it doesn’t just trigger anger—it triggers fear, because it forces him to confront the one thing he can’t outsmart: permanence.

But if Monday’s episode proves anything, it’s that Genoa City doesn’t let anyone focus on just one crisis for long—because the hour closes with a shadow that chills the entire canvas.

The recap title doesn’t tease “Ian Ward Attack” for nothing.

As the city spirals into heightened security, suspicion, and fear, the episode’s ominous undertone points toward a threat that feels both psychological and terrifyingly tangible. Ian Ward’s name carries a specific kind of dread—one rooted in manipulation, trauma, and the sick thrill of control. Whether he’s operating from the margins, resurfacing through someone else’s breakdown, or preparing to strike in a way that reminds everyone he was never truly gone, the implication is clear:

Genoa City is being set up for a fresh wave of terror—one that won’t be fought in a boardroom.

By the time the screen fades, the episode leaves viewers with a brutal understanding: Victor’s obsession with reclaiming his empire has created conditions where fear becomes currency. Dominic’s disappearance turns that fear into a living nightmare. And with Ian Ward’s shadow creeping closer to the forefront, the town is staring down a truth it hates to admit—

In Genoa City, the most devastating attacks are rarely the ones you see coming. They’re the ones that arrive right when everyone is already breaking.