December 25th.
Snow fell in silent, mournful flakes past the darkened windows of the Thorne penthouse. Outside, the city was a symphony of colored lights, laughter echoing from nearby parties, and the distant, joyful chords of Christmas carols. Inside, there was only silence and the faint blue glow of a laptop screen.
Cassian Thorne sat in his study, a tomb of failed hopes. There were no decorations. No tree. No scent of pine or cinnamon. The only evidence of the season was the relentless, cheerful snow, which felt like a mockery. Spread before him were the latest search reports, each one a monument to failure. No trace in coastal towns. No medical records under any alias. Sophie Prescott's movements: routine, cautious, revealing nothing.
His last thread had snapped four days ago. Thinking like a strategist, he had ordered his team to trace the serial number of Elara's phone. They'd located it. Right under the bed in the room she'd fled, powered off and wiped clean. She hadn't just left her SIM card; she'd left the device itself, severing the last digital tether. It was the act of a professional, a ghost who knew how to vanish.
Defeated, exhausted in a way that went to his marrow, he had done something desperate and personal. He'd taken her SIM card, inserted it into her phone, and powered it on. He wasn't the CEO hunting now; he was just a man, looking for any piece of her she might have left behind.
He scrolled. Call logs—empty, wiped. Notes—nothing. Messages—gone.
With a heart heavy as stone, he opened her photo gallery. Most were what he expected: architectural sketches, photos of building sites, elegant designs. Professional, precise, distant. Then he clicked on videos. Dozens of clips on structural integrity, material stress tests. And then, three files, labeled only with dates, that made his breath catch.
He tapped the first. The screen showed Elara, curled on their living room sofa, swallowed by an oversized white fur hoodie. Her hair was a mess, her face soft with sleep. She was half-buried in a book.
"Hey… testing? Is this thing on? Ugh, it's Elara. Husband is on a business trip… again." She pouted at the camera, a real, unguarded expression he hadn't seen in months. "Cassian Thorne, if you're watching this, just come home already. I'm so bored I'm talking to a phone. Your house is too quiet." She gave a sleepy, exaggerated glare before the video ended.
A sound escaped him—something between a sob and a laugh. His thumb trembled as he played the second.
Elara was in the kitchen, wearing one of his old t-shirts. She looked adorably grumpy, flour smudged on her cheek. "Tch. Seriously? I'm recording myself again. This is stupid. I'm deleting this." She stared at the lens, her nose scrunched, then sighed. "Forget it." The video cut off.
His eyes, hardened to flint over the past months, softened into something vulnerable and aching. He could almost smell the flour, hear her sigh. He braced himself and played the third and final video.
The date stamp was the day before she disappeared. She was sitting in his study chair, in the very seat he now occupied. She was dressed simply, but her gaze was direct, fierce, and brimming with a profound sadness. She was looking right at him.
She took a deep, steadying breath.
"Cassian. If you're finding this… after coming back from the gathering… first, forgive me. Forgive me for the shock, for the silence, for leaving." Her voice was clear, without a single tremor. "But we both know there was a reason. A reason bigger than you, bigger than me."
She paused, her eyes searching the lens. "I can't say for sure if I'll be back anytime soon. I just hope… this will give you the time you need. Time to do what you vowed. To dismantle that decree. To do it properly, without the risk hanging over us." Her hand drifted down, resting gently, protectively, on her lower abdomen. The gesture was unmistakable.
Cassian's heart stopped.
"Please," she continued, her voice dropping to a fervent whisper, "don't misunderstand me. And please… don't look for me. Not yet. I will come back. One day, when the time is right." Her eyes glistened, but she smiled then—a beautiful, heartbreaking smile filled with love and promise. "I will come back with 'our' child. I love you… and you know that."
The screen went black.
Cassian sat motionless. The rapid shifts of emotion were a tempest inside him. First, a staggering, dizzying relief—She's alive. She's carrying our child. She loves me. Then, a crushing wave of guilt—She's out there, alone, afraid, because of my family's poison. Followed by a fierce, burning pride—She's so strong. She's protecting our family. And finally, a deep, resonant pain—She asked me not to look. She's choosing our child's safety over my comfort, over our life together.
He was lost in the storm of his own thoughts, the silent room pressing in, when a sound shattered the vacuum.
Brrrring. Brrrring.
His personal, encrypted phone. The one with firewalls within firewalls. The screen flashed: UNKNOWN NUMBER.
Ice water flooded his veins. This was impossible. No spam call, no wrong number could penetrate this line. It was a digital fortress. Someone with immense resources, or terrifying skill, had just blown a hole in it.
His first instinct was to reject it. But his hunter's instinct, the one honed over three months of paranoia, screamed that this was connected. He swiped to answer, bringing the phone to his ear without a word.
A long, static-filled silence. Then, a voice. A voice that belonged in the darkest corner of his memory, a voice he hadn't heard in eighteen years. It was cultured, smooth, and laced with a madness that had once torn his family apart.
"Hello?" the man said, the single word a velvet-covered blade.
Cassian's blood turned to frost. He couldn't speak.
The man on the other end chuckled, a dry, rustling sound. "Mmm… your silence says you recognize me after all. I'm touched. Good old times, Cassian. Be aware, Cassian Thorne…" The voice dropped, every syllable dripping with venomous promise. "I. Am. Back."
The line went dead.
"Hello? Hello!" Cassian barked into the silence, but there was only the dial tone. He immediately redialed the number.
A robotic female voice answered. "The number you have dialed is not in service."
He threw the phone onto his desk. It hadn't just been disconnected. The SIM had been destroyed immediately after the call. This was a declaration of war from the shadows.
Any hesitation born from Elara's video evaporated. The game had changed. She was no longer just hiding from a vague family decree. She was in a world where a ghost from his past had just resurrected. He had to find her. Not because he didn't trust her strength, but because a storm was coming, and he refused to let her and their child face it alone.
First, he had to be sure. He took a second, even more secure satellite phone and dialed a long international number to a private security facility.
It was answered on the second ring. "Helli—"
"Sir!" a panicked, breathless voice cut him off. "We were about to call you! He's gone! The patient in the high-security wing… he's missing! Not just from his room, sir. From the facility. From the entire city! We have teams sweeping the area, but there's no sign! Please, forgive us! Give us a little more time!"
Cassian's face drained of all color. "What do you mean, no sign?" he hissed, his voice low and deadly. "You had one job! One! To keep that man contained and observed! Search the nearby cities! Check every flight manifest, every train, every bus terminal for the last 72 hours! Now! You have 48 hours to find him. If you fail, don't bother coming back. Your lives will be forfeit."
He ended the call, his hands clenched into white-knuckled fists. The ghost was loose.Aris's father... Was loose...
He immediately called his assistant, Mr. Prescott. "Prescott. Tell the team searching for Elara to stand down for 48 hours. They have a new priority. The highest. It concerns the Thorne family's past. Our true origins. Dig up everything. Every sealed record, every buried name, every financial trail from my grandfather's era back."
"Sir?" Mr. Prescott's voice was laced with confusion. "The priority shift… is everything alright?"
"Just do it, Prescott. The reasons are family. And they are urgent."
Within an hour, Cassian had drafted a brutal, precise outline of what he needed: financial records of the first Thorne businesses, medical histories of his grandparents, police reports from the city where his father grew up, any records of institutionalization or "private treatments."
The search that followed made the hunt for Elara look simple. The Thorne family past wasn't just private; it was deliberately erased, buried under layers of money and legal obfuscation. Cassian's elite team, who could infiltrate government databases before lunch, hit walls made of older, darker money.
Days bled into weeks. Christmas passed, uncelebrated. The penthouse remained a tomb.
New Year's Eve arrived. The city exploded in fireworks. Cassian stood at his window, a crystal glass of untouched whiskey in his hand, watching the bursts of color reflect in the eyes of a man who felt no hope for a new year.
January 12th—their one-year wedding anniversary. The date was a knife twist. To maintain the facade, his PR team released a brief, elegant statement: "Mr. and Mrs. Cassian Thorne are enjoying a private anniversary retreat abroad. They thank you for your well-wishes and request privacy during this special time." He gave a single, grim interview via satellite feed, a fake Mediterranean villa backdrop behind him. "Elara is resting," he said, his face a mask of calm. "She sends her love to everyone." The lie tasted like ash.
February came with its flurry of commercial romance—Valentine's Day, Rose Day. Tabloids speculated on what extravagant gift the reclusive billionaire had bought his wife. The truth was, he spent the day in a secure data vault, reviewing financial ledgers from 1953.
Finally, after nearly three months of digital archaeology, Mr. Prescott came to him, his face pale, a secured tablet in his hand.
"Sir, we've found… fragments. But the three clearest results are… they're not what we expected. They're disturbing."
"Tell me," Cassian commanded, his voice rough.
"First, the decree. The oath you and Samuel took… it has no precedent. We've traced family council minutes back to your great-grandfather. There is no mention of any 'elimination' clause for heirs or their mothers. It appears the decree was created specifically for you and your brother. The elders lied. It is not an ancient tradition. It is a new rule, fabricated in your lifetime."
Cassian absorbed this, a cold fury replacing confusion. They had weaponized tradition to control him.
"Second," Prescott continued, swallowing hard. "Regarding your first wife, Jeanette. The accident reports… we found deeper forensic audits that were suppressed. She wasn't just running away with her lover. Medical records we unearthed from a closed clinic indicate she was approximately eight weeks pregnant at the time of the crash."
The floor seemed to lurch. Pregnant. The decree… had they known?
Had they…?
"And the third?" Cassian asked, his voice now dangerously quiet.
Prescott looked truly afraid. "The third concerns your father's death. The official cause was the rapid, aggressive cancer. But we found inconsistent pharmaceutical records. There were experimental, highly toxic treatments administered in his final months—treatments not signed off by his lead oncologist, but by a private physician paid directly from a Thorne family discretionary fund. Treatments that would have… accelerated his decline."
The world dissolved into a silent, white roar. The floor wasn't just gone; the entire foundation of his life had been a carefully constructed lie. His father hadn't just died. He had been ushered toward death. The elders he'd respected, feared, and obeyed were not just cruel traditionalists. They were architects of a hidden, monstrous legacy.
He looked at Prescott, his eyes the cold, dead grey of a winter sea. "Schedule a meeting with the family council. All of them. Tell them it's a matter of the family's continued existence." He stood up, the weight of the past three months—the grief, the hunt, the lies—forging him into something new. Not just a hunter, but an avenger. "It's time they remembered who the true head of this family is. And it's time I learned what they buried."