All Chapters of Hollow Throne: Chapter 91 - Chapter 97

"Sit down," her mother said. "Both of you."It was the specific voice she used when she'd made a decision about something and was not going to be redirected the one that had made Nora do her homework at seven years old and had made a vampire heir sit down without argument at a Lagos kitchen table at eleven in the morning.Caspian sat.Nora sat.Her mother poured tea. She did it slowly, with the deliberateness of someone organizing their thoughts through their hands. The kitchen smelled like the same things it always smelled like the specific accumulation of decades of cooking in one space, layered and warm.She set the cups down.She sat."Your grandmother," she said.Nora held her cup."Yes," she said."She was not a woman who explained things unless she had to," her mother said. "She was a woman who held things, kept them close, kept them private, and gave them up only when the keeping no longer served the purpose." She held her own cup. "She died when you were four. You don't remem

The panel came back with a problem.Not with the document Dr. Holt's voice was precise and measured when she came out at three-forty, forty minutes past the two o'clock start, and Nora read the quality of it before the words arrived. Not alarm. The specific register of someone who had found something unexpected and was deciding how to present it accurately."The document is authentic," Dr. Holt said. "The panel's authentication is confirmed. There's no question about that." She held the formal certification in her hands. "There's a question about something else.""Tell me," Nora said."The permanence clause," Dr. Holt said. "Lines forty-three to forty-seven. We've been working with the translation you provided." She held Nora's gaze. "One of the panel members, Dr. Osei, who holds the senior classification in pre-modern dialectal analysis for this archive, read the original language directly."Nora held the table."And," she said."Line forty-six," Dr. Holt said. "Your translation read

The man's name, according to the credentials he'd submitted, was Tomas Adeyemi.Felix found that no one named Tomas Adeyemi existed in any birth record, school registry, or tax document connected to the Lagos region in the last forty years."He built the identity from fragments," Felix said. He had his laptop open on the reading room table, three windows running simultaneously, genealogical cross-reference, public records search, and a facial recognition pass Felix had run against the security footage from the consultation building's entrance. "A real birth certificate template. A real address that's actually a vacant property. A name pulled from a deceased relative of the actual ninth family, which is why it passed the initial verification.""Someone built it carefully," Nora said."Someone built it months ago," Felix said. "The credential application was submitted before the consultation invitations even went out. Whoever did this knew the process was coming before Amara's office ma

Felix called before they'd left Abeo's street."The emergency protection request came back," he said, his voice clipped in a way that told Nora the news wasn't simple. "Yetunde Okonjo isn't at the facility anymore."Nora stood on the pavement outside Abeo's gate, Caspian beside her, the afternoon traffic moving past with its complete indifference to what had just landed in her chest."Define isn't there," she said."Discharged four days ago," Felix said. "According to the facility's own records, she checked herself out voluntarily. Signed the release forms personally.""Four days ago," Nora said. "Before or after the consultation invitations went out?""After," Felix said. "Two days after."Nora held the phone, working through the timeline. The invitation was intercepted. The impersonator seated in her place. And then, two days later, the real Yetunde Okonjo discharged herself from a facility she'd apparently been admitted to without anyone she trusted knowing where she was."Felix,"