LOGINEliora's POVI had been holding him up for the last ten minutes.My shoulder under his good arm, my hand wrapped around his waist. Taking enough of his weight that he didn't have to ask me. We had arrived at an old house somewhere on the walk from the car without discussing it. Kian, despite his dizziness led the way and I followed even though I was the one actually leading the way.Reeves had gone back to the city for back up with his team who were either alive or holding on, we couldn't leave… Kian refused to. He was heavier than I expected. Or maybe I was just more tired.The house was set back from the road behind a low wall and a garden that someone clearly loved, even in the dark I could see the careful arrangement of it.The lights inside were on. Warm yellow against the cold night. The kind of light that means someone is home and wasn't expecting you.i knocked on the door three times, trying all my best not to bring down the door.We heard movement inside. Then footsteps…qu
Eliora's POVI don't know how long we stayed like that.Long enough for the cold to work its way through my jacket and I wish I had worn something thicker.Long enough for my breathing to slow from something ragged into something that almost passed for calm. Long enough for me to become aware of the world again. Reeves was moving quietly through the trees somewhere to our left, the distant call of something in the undergrowth, the fire throwing long amber shadows across the clearing.I pulled back from the hug first, pressing the back of my hand to my face. I straightened my spine the way you do when you are telling your body it is time to function again whether it wants to or not.Kian let me go without a word. He stayed crouched for a moment, watching my face with the focused attention he gave everything that mattered to him, and then he stood. Brushed the cold dirt from his knees. Then turned to look at the house.I looked at it with him.It sat there, cold and indifferent, giving
Eliora's POVNobody spoke for the first hour of the drive.That was fine with me. I had run out of words somewhere around the third day of searching and hadn't found new ones since. I sat in the back and watched the city thin out around us, buildings giving way to wider roads, then to stretches of land that didn't have names I recognised. The kind of landscape that exists at the edges of cities and belongs fully to neither. In between. The kind of place where things happen that nobody talks about afterward.Kian was in the front. I kept my eyes on the window.Reeves cleared his throat."There's something I need to tell you both." He said it to the windscreen. "Dare flagged something this morning. A digital trail, communications, access logs, patterns that don't add up." He paused. "Someone inside the penthouse has been feeding information to Mia's people. Locations, timelines, what we knew and what we didn't. That's how they stayed ahead of us." Another pause. "That's why I kept cer
Eliora's POVI heard my son's name before I saw his face.The television in the living room had been on all morning, someone had turned it to the news channel and nobody had turned it off, so it had become background noise, something that existed in the apartment the way the hum of the city existed outside the windows. Present but unacknowledged.Then the newsreader said Ezra Donovan and I stopped walking.His face filled the screen. His school photograph, the one I had taken three months ago, him in the little blue shirt I had ironed twice because the first time I hadn't done it properly, his gap-toothed smile aimed at a camera he found deeply suspicious. Frozen there. On national television. Beneath the word MISSING in letters that were far too large for the size of the room.I stood in the middle of the living room and watched the newsreader talk about my son the way they talked about traffic updates and weather forecasts and I felt the walls of the apartment move very slightly inw
Eliora's POVI didn't throw her out.I thought about it. The impulse was there, familiar, well-worn, the same reflex I had been reaching for every time Lydia Monroe appeared in my life with her careful eyes and the particular timing that always managed to be the worst possible one. I thought about it and then I looked at her standing in the doorway of the bedroom, she had followed me upstairs.I was too tired."Sit down," I said.She sat. On the chair by the window, not the bed, leaving the distance, not pushing for closeness she hadn't earned. I noticed that. I didn't say anything about it.Zoey looked at me. I looked back at her and gave her the smallest nod I could manage. She stood, squeezed my hand once, and left, pulling the door almost closed behind her.And then it was just us.My mother and me and all the years between us sitting in the room like a third presence… heavy and specific and entirely too large for the space.She opened her mouth."Don't apologise yet," I said. "I
Kian's POVI had built an entire company on the principle that information was the most valuable currency in the world.I know the right piece of information at the right moment could shift markets, end careers, build empires from nothing. I had staked everything on that belief for fifteen years and I had never once been wrong about it.So when Lydia Monroe sat in my living room and said the word sister, and watched the entire room stop, I understood immediately what we had just been handed.I was already reaching for my phone."I need you in the penthouse," I said the moment Dare picked up. "Now. Bring everything."Dare Obi had been my head of intelligence at Donovan Tech for six years. He was twenty-nine years old, had three monitors running at all times, and could find a person's digital footprint in the time it took most people to make a cup of coffee. If Elijah had an off-grid location, if he had ever used a name, a card, a device, a anything connected to that place…. Dare would
Eliora's POV "You’re going to freeze out here, Eli. Come inside."I didn't turn around immediately. I kept my hands resting on the balcony railing, the cool night air of the city pressing against my face. I needed the cold. I needed anything that would numb the phantom sensation of Kian’s fingers
Kian's POV The door of the SUV was still open, the warning chime dinging rhythmically, but the sound felt miles away. My boots hit the pavement with a heavy thud. I didn't care that I’d left the engine running. I didn't care about the traffic or the people walking past.I just stared.Twenty feet
Eliora's POV "It’s a fascinating read, Eliora. Though I’ve always found that fiction is so much more palatable when the author doesn’t have a personal... *investment* in the tragedy."Mia’s voice was like honey poured over a blade—sweet, smooth, and designed to draw blood. She stood beside Kian, h
Eliora's POV "The way you captured Donovan's rise to power is nothing short of brilliant, Eliora. You have a gift for making even the most ruthless business moves look like art."I forced a polite smile for the critic standing in front of me. "Thank you. It helps when the subject material is so...







