Elise reached them just as Sofia's fingers tightened on Lukas's arm, a subtle but unmistakable claim of territory. The two women's eyes met, and something electric passed between them—recognition, assessment, challenge. Like rival predators encountering each other at a watering hole, each measuring the other's strength and intent."Lukas," Elise said softly. Just his name, but weighted with eighteen months of absence and all the history that came before. All the mornings waking up together, all the fights about money and family and future, all the promises they'd made and broken.Up close, she was even more beautiful than he remembered. The midnight blue dress brought out the green in her eyes, those eyes that had once looked at him like he was the only person in the world. Her perfume was the same—jasmine and bergamot, the scent that used to cling to his clothes after she left for work, the scent he'd found on his pillow for weeks after she moved out."Elise." His voice came out stea

Lukas stepped out onto the terrace, needing air and distance from the ballroom's intensity. The night was cool, the gardens below lit with subtle landscape lighting that made the manicured hedges look like sculpture. He could still hear the party through the open doors—laughter, music, the clink of champagne glasses—but out here, he could breathe.He'd just leaned against the stone balustrade when he heard footsteps behind him. Not the click of women's heels or the casual shuffle of someone seeking solitude. These steps were measured, deliberate, accompanied by the whisper of expensive fabric."Mr. Van der Berg."Lukas turned. The man approaching was in his sixties, distinguished, wearing traditional Arabic dress—a crisp white thobe and a black bisht embroidered with gold thread that caught the light. His bearing was impeccable, his expression warm but carrying the quiet authority of someone who had built empires and commanded respect across continents.Behind him stood a younger man

Lukas stood at the tall window of his consulting room, watching rain streak the glass in slow silver lines. Amsterdam lay beyond it—gray rooftops, canal water the color of old pewter, the faint glow of bicycle lights cutting through the drizzle. He had just ended the call with Abdullah Al-Mansour.The man’s voice had been calm, almost gentle, the way people speak when they know money is no object and time is the only currency that matters.“She will come to you,” Abdullah had said. “Yasmin prefers familiar skies. And you, Dr. De Vries, prefer your own garden. We will make this arrangement work.”Lukas had agreed before the sentence finished. Not because of the fee—though the number Abdullah quoted made his pulse stutter—but because the girl’s file had kept him awake three nights running. Sixteen years old. Recurrent fevers no specialist could explain. Organ inflammation that flared and retreated like a tide nobody could predict. Every test clean, every scan normal, every conventional

The last patient of the day was a man named Mr. Fletcher, somewhere in his mid-sixties, with a knee that had been slowly failing him for nearly a decade. He had taken two buses to get here. Lukas knew this because Mr. Fletcher mentioned it every visit—not as a complaint, but as a kind of offering, as though he wanted Lukas to understand the full weight of what he was receiving. He paid nothing. He never did. And when he finally eased himself off the examination table, put his weight on the joint and found it holding, his face did something that Lukas had no clinical language for. It was just gratitude, raw and unguarded, the kind that makes the person witnessing it feel almost like an intruder.“Same time next month,” Lukas said, helping him with his coat.“God bless you, doctor.” Mr. Fletcher took his hand in both of his and squeezed. “I mean that. Every single time I walk out of here I mean that.”Lukas walked him to the front, watched him stop to say somet

The restaurant was the kind of place that did not need to advertise. No sign above the door, no listing in the obvious guides, just a discreet address along the Amstel that you either knew or you did not, and the knowing of it said something about you before you had even stepped inside. Lukas had dressed carefully without admitting to himself that he was dressing carefully, and when the car Sofia had sent arrived at his door he had stood in his hallway for a moment looking at his reflection in the dark window glass, trying to decide what exactly he was walking into.He still had not decided when he arrived.She was already there. Of course she was. Sofia was the kind of woman who was always already there, settled and composed and giving the impression that the room had been arranged around her rather than the other way around. She stood when she saw him, and he understood immediately why she had chosen the black dress. It was not a loud choice. It did not demand attention the way some