2026-06-03 09:17:55The wedding dress was a problem.
Lena had worn it for eleven hours. It had been fitted twice. Altered once and cost more than she had planned to spend. She was not careless with money. When she put it on in the store and saw herself in the mirror, she felt sure it was the one.
She did not feel that way now as she ran through the hospital halls in it.
The lace on the dress kept getting caught under her heel. The top part of the dress made it hard to breathe when she ran. People in the hall stared at her because she was wearing a wedding dress in a place where you would not expect to see one.
They looked at her like she was something that was out of place.
She took the stairs because the elevator was too slow.
Marcus had told her to go to ward seven. He sounded really bad on the phone. His voice did not sound like him all. He usually sounded confident. This time he sounded scared. She had known Marcus for two years. He was the kind of person who would say he was fine even if he was hurt. So when she heard the fear in his voice it really scared her.
She did not stop to think she just went.
That is what she does; she goes when people need her.
The nurse at the desk told her to go down the hall to room twelve. She was out of breath, by the time she got to the door. She knocked twice. Then went in.
Marcus was sitting up in bed with an oximeter attached to his finger. He was wearing a hospital gown. He still managed to look dignified. He was pale and had dark circles under his eyes. When he saw her, his face. She could tell he was very relieved to see her.
"Lena." His voice was hoarse. "You came."
"Of course I came." She pulled a chair to his bedside and sat. "What happened? What did the doctors say?"
“Internal bleeding. They think it was yesterday but I didn't pay any attention to it. Stupid.” He exhaled slowly. "I'm sorry. I didn't have anyone else to call. I know it's your wedding night. I know what I'm asking."
"Don't be ridiculous." She squeezed his hand tightly. He squeezed back and for a moment they didn't say anything, except the quiet hum of the monitor and the hospital sound outside their door.
"How is he?" Marcus asked. "Ethan."
“He’s okay, he understood.”
"Of course he did." She could sense something gliding across Marcus' face, but what it was, she couldn't tell. "He always understands. That's rather the thing about him, isn't it?"
She was not sure how to respond, so she didn't, and she was told she was sometimes too good at not saying anything.
They chatted for over an hour. He spoke quietly, but it was about his childhood, his father who had felt love in the measure of his performance, who had withdrawn his love when Marcus did not live up to his expectations, about things he had never told her before and she listened, as she always did, wholeheartedly, leaning forward. He was still hilarious, even when he was scared, and she laughed twice and cried, guilty of laughing, and laughed again.
It was just before midnight when a nurse arrived and told her that technically, it was time to end visiting hours at ten. Marcus was adamant she leave. She told him that she would be back the next day.
In the corridor outside his room, she took her phone out of her clutch and saw that she had no messages from Ethan. No missed calls. The screen was clean.
It felt a bit off to her, but she couldn't quite put her finger on it. He always texted. Not too much or too little, not too leashed that he felt like he was walking on a leash to get to his cell phone; he had a habit of little check-ins, just like you take for granted when you're in a crowd and someone has their hand on the small of your back.
She was going to type when his nurse stopped her.
"Miss Sterling?" The nurse was a young lady with a tablet in her hand, and she looked a bit apologetic. "Mr. Vane asked me to let you know he's posted a photo. He says you should see it before the morning, given the, ah. The coverage."
"The coverage," Lena repeated.
“Yes, it does appear his followers are quite...” She looked at her tablet. "Quite invested."
Lena opened her own telephone. Found the photo in under ten seconds because her name was in forty-seven comments.
A picture of the two of them by Marcus's bedside. Her hand in his. Her wedding dress. His hospital gown. His face was as white as a lily and as grateful as a rose. Her face was open and she was listening, in the way that she listened when she was listening to somebody correctly.
The caption read: She came. That's all I'll say. There are some people who appear at the right time.
It had been shared eleven thousand times in the 40 minutes since he posted it.
Lena waited in the corridor for a while. Next she put down her cell phone. Then she raised it again and looked at the photo again, because she wanted to be sure she was seeing it correctly.
She was seeing it correctly.
She entered Ethan's name in her cell phone. Looked up his contact photo, the one she took without his knowledge in a coffee shop, while he was reading something, more relaxed than he ever was when she knew he was reading. She stared at his face.
She pressed call.
It rang five times and went to voicemail.
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The First Confrontation
She found him at the Harborview Café on the south side of the financial district. She had not found him technically; she had been directed by Priya, who herself had been directed by Zeph, which meant she had been granted permission to find him, which was another thing, but she did not know that yet.He was seated at a table in the rear. He had changed since last night, of course, and it was the first real sign that the past twelve hours were not a dream or hallucination of her own making, brought on by stress and lack of sleep. He was in a dark jacket she had never seen wear before, and he was sitting in the stillness of a man in mediation.He was not alone. There was a woman at the adjacent table who was reading something on a tablet, and who was so completely uninvested in the surrounding environment that Lena recognized her at once as someone whose job was to be invested in the surrounding environment and who was doing it unconcern.Lena sat down across from Ethan.He looked at her
GODSFALL's Return
The name of the man in the SUV was General Aldric Hume, and he was supposed to be dead.He had been supposed dead for seven years. That was how long it had been since his name turned up on a casualty list from an operation that had officially never taken place in a country that officially had no civil conflict. Ethan had attended the memorial. He had stood at the back, as funerals for the relevantly dead were always conducted, in a church nobody who had actually known Hume would have chosen, and he had watched the performance of grief from a suitable distance and left when it was over. He had taken the news the way he took most such news: a permanent subtraction from the short list of people he trusted, a list that had never been long and that kept getting shorter.Hume was not dead. He was sixty-one and looked every year of it, weathered in the particular way of men who had spent decades in places that required constant adaptation. His eyes were exactly as Ethan remembered. That spec
Priya Gets Involved
Priya Sharma had a talent for ending up in places she wasn't supposed to be.She had never considered this a flaw. It was more of a navigational condition, a chronic inability to recognise where the line fell between what she had been asked to do and what clearly, obviously, needed to happen before the asked thing could actually occur. Three separate managers had told her over her career that she went beyond her remit. She had smiled and nodded each time and kept going, because the remit was always, without exception, smaller than the problem. That wasn't stubbornness. It was just arithmetic.Lena had gone to shower and change. Forty-five minutes, roughly. Priya had a laptop, the hotel WiFi was good, and she had an incomplete picture that was making her slightly restless in the way incomplete pictures always had.She started with public records; Corporate registrations, court filings, property records across Evergreen and the three surrounding counties. Ethan Cross was almost entirely
The Favour She Didn't Know She Owed
She found the first one in August, three years ago.Except she didn't, not really. She found it now, at nine in the morning, sitting at the hotel desk with the divorce papers lying beside her and Priya cross-legged on the sofa and the egg tarts still in their bag going cold. Finding it now made the August version look like something she had never actually seen at all.At the time it had looked like good fortune. A vendor she had been fighting for four months dropped a lawsuit with no explanation, no warning, not even a courtesy call. She had rung her own lawyer, who told her it had been settled out of court. She had rung the vendor's lawyer, who told her his client had reconsidered. She thanked everyone, filed it away, moved on. That was the only rational thing to do. You learned quickly in business that disputes sometimes dissolved for reasons with nothing to do with right and wrong, that someone else's interests occasionally lined up with yours in ways you couldn't predict and proba
Marcus Vane's Real Face
The monitors were no longer necessary. He had never really needed them.Marcus Vane sat in the private room of a different hospital on the other side of the city and removed the oximeter connected to the monitor from his finger. He placed it on the table. Stood up. Shrugged his shoulders. The slight stoop he had been maintaining for close to eleven hours, the careful rounding of posture that signaled illness and vulnerability, reversed itself like a tide going out.His was 38 years old. Tall; about six feet one inch, and he usually hid it with slouching, or very deliberate body language. He had the kind of face that people described as ‘kind’ because the default expression was one of attentive warmth, a practiced warmth, the result of considerable investment in learning what warmth looked like from the outside.When he was alone, his eyes were like that of an accountant going through a trial balance sheet.He picked up his phone from the table and opened the post he posted. Sixty-thre
The War God Wakes
Three years, he'd been dormant. The world hadn't returned the favor.Ethan walked through the city in the hour before sunrise. His collar was up, and his hands were in his pockets. He walked at a pace like someone who did not have a particular place to be and therefore no reason to hurry. This was how Ethan always walked. The people who trained him taught him this on: the key to blending in was not to hide; it was to belong. Ethan moved with a confidence that made people look right past him still searching for something that seemed out of place.Ethan was never out of place. He had spent a lot of time making sure of this.The city of Evergreen was a place that rewarded people who understood how it worked. At this time the city was slowly coming to life. The last of the nightclubs were letting people out onto the sidewalk the first bakeries were turning on their ovens, and the garbage trucks were making their way through the streets that would be crowded with people in four hours. Etha
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