Se connecterMichael's POV The office suits me. That’s the first thing I noticed when I sat behind the desk for the first time three weeks ago. After all those years in the chair beside it, the chair at the side of the desk, the one that always faced the man in power and waited for him to finish speaking. Now I’m the one behind it. It fits me better than I expected, and exactly as much as I always knew it would. The organisation has accepted the change with the usual pragmatism these people have. They understand power is power no matter who’s holding it, and the alternative to going along with it is the kind of mess nobody wants. There was some pushback. Bryan was the loudest, young, loyal to Ocean in that simple, straightforward way young guys get loyal to powerful men. He came to me in the first week with his jaw tight and his eyes saying shit his mouth was trying not to. I listened to everything. Then I gave him a promotion. He’s running the east operations now. More responsibility, m
Ethan's POV I've been looking forward to this visit for weeks. The guards at the gate are Vincent's guys, so they search me properly before letting me through. I let them, I’m all cooperative and polite. I’ve got nothing on me they’d care about anyway, and the visit is approved I’m here as Ocean’s son, which gives me access most people don’t get. That’s always been the one useful thing about being his kid. The access. I find him in the garden. Of course he’s out there, he always liked walking in the garden back at the Belgravia house too. Something about needing to move while he thought. I used to watch him from my bedroom window when I was little. Same path, over and over, early in the morning before anyone else was up like the rest of us didn’t even exist yet. He looks up when I come around the side of the house. His face doesn’t change at all. That used to scare me, that total blank look. There was never any reaction for me to grab onto. I spent most of my childhood tryin
Ocean's POV Daniel comes on Tuesday and Friday. Those are the days I really work. The rest of the week I’m building everything in my head, turning over every detail, preparing for whatever Daniel brings and what Lilo works through on his laptop while a guard sits in the next room pretending to read a newspaper. Today is Tuesday. Daniel puts the folder on the kitchen table. Guard standing in the doorway like always, door left open. Same routine. “The timestamps,” I say quietly. He slides a page to the top of the stack, legal bullshit on the surface. Underneath, in the margins, in the shorthand we created twenty years ago, the real information. I read it. The access to the secondary node happened three separate times. The timestamps put it on days when the property was running a reduced staff rotation. Days when fewer people were logging movements through the system. Days that were picked very carefully. “Someone knew the rotation,” I say. “Yeah.” “Who sets the rotation?” D
Lola's POV Three weeks in the cottage. I know because Hannah has been marking the days on an old calendar she found in the kitchen drawer. It’s from a previous owner and the year is wrong, but she uses it anyway. She puts a neat little cross through each day before bed. I’ve started avoiding looking at it. The crosses pile up too fast and too slow at the same time. The morning sickness came back hard. I thought it was getting better, two weeks ago I had four good days in a row where I woke up feeling normal, ate a proper breakfast, and actually believed the worst was over. Then week three hit and my body decided otherwise. It’s worse in the mornings and hits randomly in the afternoons. I’ll be fine for hours and then something sets it off. Usually a smell. Hannah cooked with onions on Tuesday and I had to run out of the room fast. I spent twenty minutes standing by the open back door breathing cold air while she stood in the kitchen looking genuinely sorry. “I didn’t know onio
Ocean's POV The property is in Surrey. It’s big enough to be comfortable but small enough to feel like a fucking cage. Three bedrooms, a study, and a garden that backs onto private land with a high perimeter wall. That wall isn’t there to keep people out, it’s there to keep me in. There are four guards on rotation at all times. Two from Vincent’s side, two from a neutral family. No Dmitri’s men. That was one of my conditions and it stuck. They’re professional. They don’t talk to me unless they have to, they don’t chat much with each other either. They’re here to do a job, and that job is making sure I stay put. I stay put. For now. They let me have one phone, monitored. Every call logged. I’m not allowed any contact with my organisation except through approved channels. Daniel is my legal representative, so he can visit twice a week under supervision and we get one thirty-minute phone call a day. Thirty minutes. I used to run an entire empire through encrypted lines and priva
Lola's POV The safe house is a little cottage. That’s the only word that fits. Small, made of stone, sitting at the end of a long private road with open fields on three sides and a thick wood on the fourth. It looks like something your grandmother might own, except for the heavy reinforced door and the two serious-looking men who step out to meet the car the second we pull up. We get there at two in the morning. Daniel gives us the quick tour. Kitchen, two bedrooms. A sitting room with a real fireplace that actually works. A bathroom that’s been fixed up recently. Everything is clean, simple, and totally anonymous. “There’s food already stocked in the fridge,” he says. “The doctor will come here to check on you, same guards rotating as before. Nobody comes near this place without clearance.” “How long?” I ask. “We don’t know yet.” I nod and he leaves before the sun comes up. Hannah claims the bedroom closest to the front door without even asking. I take the other one that has







