Chapter Forty-One: The Search

"Alright," I had said.And then Damien had nodded and we had stood in his study with the weight of what came next sitting between us, and then he had said Valour was already moving and I should try to sleep, and I had gone back to my room and lain in the dark until four in the morning listening to the estate do the specific things it did when people were moving through it with purpose.At four the baby moved. Twice. Definite and unhurried, like someone reminding me they were there regardless of what else was happening in the house.I pressed my hand flat against my stomach and lay still and listened to the corridors and thought about Lyra in a stone building forty minutes north with a man in the next room.By morning, three things had happened that I wasn't told about directly but understood from the specific quality of the activity below my studio window.Dorn had been called back to the city to use his professional network — property records, business registration cross-references,

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Chapter Forty-Two: Northern Coast

"How far behind us is he," Damien said.Valour was already on his phone. "The car left twenty minutes before we did. If he's returning directly, we have fifteen minutes at the property before he arrives. Possibly less.""He drives fast," Damien said.I sat in the passenger seat and watched the coastal road unwind in the headlights and thought about fifteen minutes.Fifteen minutes to get in, find Lyra, get out.Lyra who had been surviving in a stone building for weeks. Who had called me from the next room with Pax twenty feet away. Who had packed a bag and been ready for four days.She would be ready. That was what I held onto during the forty-three minutes of dark road. Not the plan. Not the timeline. Just the specific certainty that my sister, whatever else she was and whatever she had done, was not someone who waited without preparing.The property appeared at the end of a narrow coastal road — a converted farmhouse, old stone, set back from the cliff edge. Lights in two windows. O

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Chapter Forty-Three: What's on the Drive

"They know," Damien repeated.He said it quietly, looking at the road ahead, filing it rather than reacting to it."Who is the contact," I said. "The one inside Cross Corporation.""Dorn doesn't have a name yet," Valour said. "Just the message and the timestamp. He's working on the number.""How long," Damien said."An hour. Maybe less if the number is traceable."In the back seat Lyra was very still. I could feel her stillness — the specific quality of someone calculating the cost of both options."Lyra," I said.She looked at me."Do you know who the contact is," I said. "Inside Cross Corporation."A pause."I saw a name," she said carefully. "In the files. I didn't have the context to understand whether it was relevant. I didn't put it on the drive." She paused. "But I remembered it. Every detail I saw in those files, I memorised. Because I understood they were the only thing I had.""What name," Damien said.She told him.Valour went very still in the front seat.Damien said nothi

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Chapter Forty-Four: Pax Responds

The person sitting in the Cross Corporation building in the city was dealt with by ten in the morning.Valour left at seven forty-five. He came back at eleven with the specific expression he wore when something significant had been concluded and he had decided the conclusion was correct. He went directly to Damien's study. The door closed. Twenty minutes later it opened and both of them came out and the estate shifted in atmosphere — the particular change that happened when the weight of something urgent had been lifted and replaced with the weight of something that now needed to be built.Isolde was already working on the legal filing.I went to my studio and sat at my desk.Found myself instead looking at the sketchbook that had started all of this — the one Damien had moved to the library table and placed open to the portrait page, the one that had changed the shape of everything in this house. The sketchbook that had been a hiding place and then a communication and then something

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Semua Bab Faking his wife, carrying his child.: Bab 41 - Bab 44

Chapter Forty-One: The Search

Chapter Forty-Two: Northern Coast

Chapter Forty-Three: What's on the Drive

Chapter Forty-Four: Pax Responds