Chapter 17

Four months after Evelyn disappeared, Alistair did something he hadn't done since he was a twelve-year-old boy.

He visited his mother's grave.

The headstone sat in the forgotten churchyard of Aethelgard on the northernmost cliff edge—a private, wind-scoured cemetery that the Thorne family maintained with the same cold, sterile efficiency they applied to their shipping fleets. Clean white marble. Sharp, manicured grass. No flowers. His grandfather had considered placing flowers at a gravesite to be sentimental, wasteful, and inefficient, and the corporate mandate had simply never been challenged.

Alistair stood before the stone on a bitter Tuesday morning in early spring. He had driven himself. He had told no one.

CECILE THORNE Beloved Mother 1973 – 2005

He had been twelve when she passed. She had been only thirty-two. The sudden cardiac event had taken exactly four hours from onset to its clinical conclusion. His grandfather had spent two of those hours on an international conference call with the Thorne Global logistics team because a major European shipment was running behind schedule. Alistair had sat completely alone in the green-tiled hospital corridor, his feet dangling inches above the linoleum from a plastic waiting-room chair, watching doctors move in and out with the hollow efficiency of people completing paperwork for a foregone conclusion.

He hadn't cried. His grandfather had arrived at hour three, knelt in front of him, and told him that Thorne men did not cry in public spaces. Alistair had taken the instruction literally, because he was twelve and his grandfather was the only mountain left standing.

He stood at her grave now, the salt spray from the cliffs cutting through his wool coat, and thought about the document sitting on his desk.

The biological mother shall execute a total, unconditional waiver of all parental rights.

He thought about his own mother—the vanished warmth of her, the specific, rare gravity of her unconditional love. He remembered the way she used to call him mon coeur and mean it without a single shred of hidden corporate calculation. He thought about that lonely twelve-year-old boy in the plastic chair, and then he thought about his own child sitting in some future equivalent of that cold room, asking why their mother was gone, and being given an answer that translated to: Because I treated her like an asset.

He stood there until the rain began to fall, soaking through his clothes.

When he finally walked back to his car, his face was an unreadable sheet of ice. His hands were perfectly steady on the steering wheel. But deep within the internal architecture of his mind, something had shifted, quietly and without ceremony—the way structural pillars give way when a tremendous, long-ignored pressure is finally acknowledged.

He called Renner before he even started the engine.

"The search parameters for Hex," Alistair said, his voice cutting through the speaker. "Expand them globally. But I don't want her captured. I don't want her brought in. I want her located. Position data only. No contact, no approach, no surveillance teams within five hundred meters." He paused, swallowing a sudden bitterness. "And pull Harrison's medical compliance protocols off the Marceau file entirely. Whatever civil fraud charges are pending against her father—waive them completely."

Renner’s hesitation over the line was microscopically longer than usual, a corporate red flag. "Sir... the legal team is adamant that the compliance clause is our only leverage to secure—"

"I know exactly what the legal team believes, Renner," Alistair snapped. "I am overruling them. Update the file immediately."

He cut the call before his head of security could argue.

He sat in the idling car, staring through the fogged windshield at the cemetery gate, and told himself that this was a superior strategy. That a healthy, unmonitored mother would produce a physically superior heir. That the legal clauses could always be reinstated at a later date.

He was still very good at telling himself things. But he was getting terrifyingly slow at believing them.