Chapter Two: Forty Floors Above A Dying Man

"Mr Wray."

Cyrus didn't answer.

"Mr Wray, your two o'clock is waiting."

"Cancel it."

His assistant knew better than to argue. Her footsteps disappeared down the corridor and the office went quiet again — the particular quiet of a room that cost a lot of money to be silent in.

He stayed at the window.

Ironveil City sat forty floors below him, all glass and grey concrete and cold ambition. He had built three floors of that skyline. Bought two more. His name was engraved on things that would still be standing when he was gone.

That word kept surfacing.

Gone.

Mira Flint had left exactly fourteen minutes ago. His doctor. Twelve years of working together and she had never once dressed anything up for him, which was why he kept her. Today she had sat across from him with her hands folded on the desk and delivered the news the way she delivered everything — directly, without ceremony, with nowhere for him to deflect.

"Without a matched donor within six months, you will die."

His kidneys were failing faster than the medication could slow. The transplant list was long and his tissue type was rare enough to make the list almost meaningless. They had tested his mother. Tested Orin. Worked through every branch of the family registry that could be accessed.

Nothing.

He picked up his phone.

Rhys answered on the second ring.

"I need you to find someone," Cyrus said.

"Who?"

He hadn't said her name in a long time. Longer than he'd realised until this exact moment, standing in a glass office with a diagnosis on his desk and a city spread below him that suddenly looked very different from how it looked this morning.

"Ivy Kay."

Silence. Not the silence of someone who didn't know the name. Rhys knew the name. He'd been there the night she left — standing in the hallway with his eyes forward and his face completely neutral the way he always stood when things were happening that he had been instructed not to comment on.

"Ivy Kay," Rhys said carefully.

"Yes."

"The same—"

"Yes. Start with Bain Croft. He'll know where she is."

A pause. The particular pause that meant Rhys wanted to say something and was deciding whether this was the moment.

"And when I find her?" he asked.

"You tell me where she is. Nothing else."

"Cyrus."

"Nothing else, Rhys."

Another pause. Longer this time.

"Are you sure about this?"

Cyrus looked at the file on his desk. White paper. Clean type. His name at the top and a six month countdown underneath it.

"I've never been less sure of anything," he said. "Do it anyway."

He ended the call.

The office held its expensive silence around him. He sat down at his desk. Opened the file. Read the same paragraph he had already read four times — kidney function, deterioration rate, donor compatibility requirements — and closed it again because reading it a fifth time wasn't going to change what it said.

He was not a man who panicked. He had spent thirty two years making sure of that. Panic was for people who hadn't prepared for the worst and Cyrus had always prepared for the worst. He had legal structures, contingency plans, succession documentation that his lawyers reviewed every two years.

He had not prepared for this.

Not for the specific calculation his mind kept returning to — five years ago, a door closing, a figure walking away with one bag, a silence that he had told himself he chose and was only now, sitting here with a file full of bad news, beginning to question.

He had said three words to her that night.

Prove it's mine.

He had said it the way he said most things back then — without thinking about the weight of them. Without looking at her face properly when he said them. Without staying in the room long enough to see what they did.

His phone buzzed.

Rhys. Fast, even for him.

Bain Croft confirmed her location. Maplewood Hollow. Two hundred miles inland. She runs an alterations business from a cottage on the main street.

Cyrus read it. Read it again.

Then the second message came through.

There's something else. She has a child. A boy.

He went very still.

He looks about five years old.

The file sat on the desk in front of him. The city moved below the window. Somewhere down the corridor his two o'clock was being turned away by a woman who had no idea why her employer had just stopped being available to anyone.

Cyrus read the message one more time.

A boy.

About five years old.

He put the phone face down on the desk. Pressed both hands flat on the surface. Sat with the specific and total silence of a man whose carefully prepared worst case scenario had just been replaced by something he had never once thought to prepare for.