2026-06-03 09:24:21Priya arrived at eight forty-five with two coffees, a paper bag of egg tarts and a look on her face that meant she had seen something online. This look was a sign that she was thinking about whether or not to bring it up.
She had been Lenas assistant for two years now. In these two years, Priya had learned how to manage things that Lena did not see coming. She was really good at it. Priya could read a room without trying. She knew when to be calm and when to be the one who walked up to a problem and dealt with it.
Today was one of those days. Lena knew it soon as she saw the coffees. Priya only brought two coffees when she needed Lena to really listen to her.
"Morning," Lena said. She was sitting in a chair, where she had been since four in the morning. She had given up on sleep. Moved out of the bedroom because lying there felt like being stuck in a question with no answer.
"Morning," Priya said. She put the coffee down. Looked at Lena. "You are still wearing the dress."
"I know, " Lena said.
"Okay," Priya said. She sat on the edge of the sofa, which was not her spot. This was the posture she used when they needed to talk about something. "So before I start, I have one question."
"Priya—"
"One question," Priya said. "Is Ethan here?"
Lena looked at the bedroom door. "No, he is not."
"Alright," Priya said. She picked up her coffee. "The photo of Marcus. I want to talk about that."
"I already know about it," Lena said.
"The photo has been shared sixty-three thousand times as of this morning," Priya said. "It was at eleven thousand shares four hours ago. There is already an article about it on one of the business sites. They are calling it 'the romantic act of female loyalty since—'"
"You can stop there," Lena said.
"Yeah," Priya said. She watched Lena carefully. "Do you want to tell me what really happened?"
Lena looked at the bedroom at the papers on the pillow. "There are divorce papers in there " she said. "On the pillow."
There was a silence.
"Right, " Priya said.
"He was already gone when I got back," Lena said. "He left the papers there with a card." She picked up her coffee, which was still too hot, and drank it anyway. "The card said he heard everything."
"Heard everything," Priya repeated slowly. "What does that mean?"
"It means my phone must have been on when I was at the hospital," Lena said. "He must have been listening to everything."
Priya went quiet, which meant she was thinking. She was really good at processing information. Lena had come to depend on this ability even if she did not say it loud.
"Okay," Priya finally said. "So, he is not answering his phone."
"No," Lena said.
"You have tried all of his numbers," Priya said.
"Yes I have." Lena said. "Every number goes straight to voicemail. He is good at disappearing when he wants to. I have known that about him for three years. I never thought about what it meant."
Priya nodded slowly. Then she said, "Can I say something you might not want to hear?"
"You are going to say it anyways," Lena said.
"The reason I came over this morning before you even called me, before all of this " Priya said. She reached into her bag. Held out her phone. "I found something last night. While everyone was talking about the photo of Marcus I started looking into things. I just like to look you know?"
"I do, " Lena said.
"Some things came up that felt off " Priya said. "Not scary just strange. His company registration does not go back than four years. The company is real. There is no history before that. His name—" She stopped and looked at Lena with a mix of guilt and excitement. "Lena, Ethan Cross is not his name."
It was not a question, a statement.
Lena stared at her. "What?"
"I know, I know, " Priya said. She turned her phone around. "I was up until three in the morning looking into it. What I have is not proof. I have a feeling and some papers that do not quite add up. There are some records that do not line up and—"
"Priya," Lena said.
"Yeah," Priya said.
"Tell me what you found, " Lena said.
Priya took a breath. Then in a tone, she said, "I think your husband has another identity. A real one. I think Ethan Cross is the name he used for the life he built with you and whoever he was before that whatever his real name is it is something entirely." She looked at Lena. "I think there are people out there who know exactly what it is. I just do not think you are one of them."
Lena looked at the papers on the pillow. At the card next to them.
Then she looked back at Priya.
"Show me, " she said.
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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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