The gala doors opened onto a wall of light.Camera flashes hit Malcolm before the cold air did, a strobing white barrage that turned the marble steps of the building into something closer to a stage than an exit. Voices rose over each other, clipped and hungry, reporters pressing forward against a thin velvet rope that did almost nothing to hold them back."Over here, new chairman!" one of the cameramen shouted, angling his lens up toward the top step. "Just one look this way!"Selene stayed close at Malcolm's side, her hand curled around his forearm with a grip that was steadier than it needed to be, as if some part of her still expected him to vanish the moment she let go. He didn't blame her for the instinct. There had been moments tonight, standing under those chandeliers being introduced to a room full of strangers who now called him sir, when he'd wondered the same thing about himself.He turned toward the cameras, found the angle that felt least like performing and most like si

Malcolm slid into the back of the same black sedan that had carried him home from the gala the night before, still half dressed in the Avalanche Suites' borrowed robe he'd thrown a coat over in his hurry to leave. Dr. Osei Bramwell's call had come through only minutes earlier, brief and clipped in a way that told Malcolm nothing except that his father's condition had changed, and that Malcolm needed to see it for himself before he'd believe any version of it secondhand. "The hospital," he told the driver, and the city blurred past the window in streaks of gray morning light until the familiar glass and steel facade rose up ahead of them. "Wait here," Malcolm said, already halfway out of the car before it had fully stopped, walking into the hospital with the same hurried steps that had carried him through these same doors three weeks ago, except everything about the lobby felt different now. The marble floor, the hush of the reception desk, a

Mr. Talon's office hadn't changed at all in the years since Malcolm had last set foot inside it, and there was something faintly disorienting about that, walking into a room frozen exactly as he remembered it while everything else in his life had rearranged itself beyond recognition. The walls were still lined floor to ceiling with framed victories, case after case where no one else had seen a path to hope, gold-embossed certificates and photographs of handshakes that had cost other families everything to arrange. Behind the enormous desk at the center of it all sat Talon himself, a broad, imposing man whose eyes had gone steady and sharp with decades of experience, a pair of bifocal glasses perched low on his nose.Those eyes found Malcolm the moment he stepped through the door, and Talon leaned back into his chair, studying him with the unhurried thoroughness of a man who'd long ago learned that first impressions were rarely the ones that mattered."Reyes," he said, gesturing toward

The rest of Malcolm's day slowly turned into a ticking time bomb, the words of warning he'd given the Ferris house still sitting heavy somewhere behind his ribs, refusing to loosen no matter how many meetings filled the hours between then and now. He'd sat through two board briefings since morning, nodded through quarterly projections he barely absorbed, signed documents he would later need to review twice because his mind kept drifting back to a marble floor, a silver ring, and a woman who had looked him dead in the eye and told him no.Across the wide glass table in the Halcyon Meridian CEO office, Selene stood mid introduction, her hands moving through the air as she spoke, her mouth forming words that slid past Malcolm entirely, lost somewhere between the ring, the twenty-four hours, and the silence from Odalys's phone that refused to break. The city stretched out behind her through the floor-to-ceiling windows, indifferent and glittering, the same view he'd been staring at for we