Chapter 30

A year.

Renner confirmed the timeline on a bitter Monday morning, laying the annual security ledger on his desk as if Alistair hadn't spent every single morning of the last three hundred and sixty-five days counting the seconds.

"She’s gone, Alistair," Renner said simply. "The Oakhaven grid signature we've been monitoring as background noise—the minor power fluctuations near the old server farm—dropped to absolute zero three days ago. Our ground team confirmed the space has been completely cleared. No prints. No hard drives. She even took the lightbulbs."

Alistair stood up, walking to the floor-to-ceiling glass. "She was six hundred meters from my perimeter sweep in month one," he said, his voice dropping so low it barely registered against the glass.

"She was," Renner admitted, his head down. "The digital mask she built around the cellar's power consumption was flawless. If she hadn't turned the main breaker off when she left, we wouldn't have known she was there for another year."

Alistair looked out at the city of Solaria. A whole year had passed. He had run twelve board meetings, expanded four international ports, survived three separate legislative attempts by Julian to undermine his authority, and sat every night in this silent penthouse, watching the empty linen on his bed grow colder. And the entire time, she had been sitting in the gray fog of the slums below him, nursing his children and building her knives within walking distance of his front gate.

"Where is she now?" Alistair asked.

"She didn't use the airports," Renner said. "We would have caught the Mervane passport registrations on the regional grid. She went by rail out of the Oakhaven freight junction. There are seventeen different connections crossing the border from that terminal. We're running the passenger manifests now, but..." He paused. "She’s under the Voss identity now. The academic record has given her a real-world weight that’s making the automated filters bypass her name."

Dr. Elara Voss. She had built a ghost so thick it had become a person.

"The board is pressing for the annual registry update, Alistair," Renner reminded him carefully, stepping closer. "The twelve-month compliance window on the inheritance clause expires on Friday. They need to see the wife, or they need to see the heir."

Alistair turned from the window, his face looking as if it had been carved out of the gray cliffside outside.

"Tell the board that my wife is continuing her medical treatment at a private clinic in Western Epe," Alistair said, his voice flat, final, and entirely cold. "Tell them the heirs are stable, the situation is under my personal management, and if any director wishes to review the clinical files, they can submit a formal request to my personal legal counsel."

He looked at Renner until the security chief nodded and backed out of the room.

Alistair sat back down at his desk. He opened the leather folder, picked up his heavy fountain pen, and added a final line to the white page inside:

Month 12. Oakhaven cell abandoned. Rail exit. Mervane proxies active. She's out of the country.

He set the pen down, his hand resting on the paper. For twelve months, he had told himself this was a strategic game—a corporate hunt for an asset that belonged to the Thorne estate. But as he looked out at the vast, empty sky above the Veridian Sea, the illusion finally broke, leaving him completely exposed to the cold.

She wasn't his asset. She had never been his asset. She was out there in the world, moving through the mountains with his blood in her arms, and he was nothing but an analyst sitting in a glass cage, tracking the trajectory of a star that had already left his sky.