Chapter 942
“Guys.” Parker looked up from his phone, his face drained of color. “Look at the news.”
He turned the screen around. The headline screamed: MAXIMILLIAN STERLING RETURNS: THE BILLIONAIRE HEIR’S SECRET EMPIRE.
The internet was already dissecting Parker’s face, his suit, his arrogant silence. They were building a legend around a lie.
“They love me,” Parker said, his voice caught somewhere between vanity and horror. “I’m trending.”
Skye walked over and took the phone from his hand. She locked the screen.
“Enjoy it,” she said, her voice flat. “Because now you can’t stop acting. If you break character — even for a second — the people trying to kill you will know you’re fake. And then they won’t bother with kidnapping. They’ll just erase you.”
Parker swallowed hard.
The gilded cage had just locked shut.
The air inside the Vance estate greenhouse was thick and heavy, laden with the scent of damp earth and medicinal herbs that edged toward rot. It was a humid, suffocating warmth that contrasted sharply with the cold rain lashing against the glass ceiling above.
Skye pushed through the ferns, their wet leaves brushing against her arms like cold fingers.
Julian was sitting in his wheelchair beside the koi pond. He wasn’t watching the fish. He was staring at the reflection of the grey sky in the water, tossing fish food in a slow, mechanical rhythm.
𝗥е𝗰𝗼𝗆𝗺𝖾ոd g𝖺𝗅n𝘰𝗏𝗲𝗅ѕ.𝖼o𝗺 𝘁𝗈 𝗒𝗼𝘶𝘳 fr𝗂e𝗇𝖽ѕ
“We were attacked,” Skye said without preamble. She studied his profile closely, searching for any flicker of surprise. “Dominic Thorne’s old guard. Or someone mimicking them.”
Julian didn’t turn. His shoulders, usually broad and straight, looked frail beneath his cashmere sweater. “I heard,” he murmured. “Alistair was injured. Is he stable?”
“He’ll survive. No thanks to your ‘bait’ strategy.” Skye stepped closer, her heels clicking against the stone path. “You told us this would be a chess match, Julian. That looked like a demolition derby. Are you sure you have a handle on the Mastermind’s movements?”
“I calculate probabilities, Skye. I cannot control the chaos of human desperation.” Julian turned his chair. His face was shocking — grey and drawn, the skin around his eyes bruised with exhaustion. He looked like a man whose battery was draining by the minute. “If Dominic’s men are active, it complicates the board. It means the Mastermind is consolidating assets. He is rallying the fallen houses.”
Skye felt a wave of frustration. Julian was deflecting, hiding behind vague strategic language. “We need more than probabilities. We need a target. Where is the Mastermind operating from?”
“He is everywhere and nowhere,” Julian said, his voice raspy. He gestured to a table beside him. On it lay a yellowed, brittle piece of parchment — a fragment of a map of Sea City, its layout archaic, showing infrastructure that no longer existed.
“The four founding families — Sterling, Vance, Kensington, Thorne — didn’t just build this city,” Julian said. “They built a failsafe beneath it. A repository for the physical servers that host the core of the network. The location was split into four parts.”
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