2026-06-03 09:17:05The honeymoon suite on the 43rd floor smelled like champagne and white roses and a little bit of the industrial chill of a city that always stays awake.
Ethan stood against the floor to ceiling windows of the suite with his jacket off and his cufflinks lying on the glass ledge watching the lights of Evergreen spread out beneath him. There are three million people living in that area down there, and none of their names are Ethan. None of their names are even close to being his actual name. He has spent many years arranging to keep that part of his identity completely private, and today of all days, he was glad he had.
Behind him, the suite was everything a typical wedding night suite should be. Candles lit the side board. An ice bucket sat quietly. A trail of rose petal's went across the marble floor that neither of them had laid there. They had walked into the suite earlier in the evening to find the flowers already in place. The hotel staff had placed them there as an act of professional romance, and Ethan found himself slightly moved by their gesture. This is surprising since Ethan isn't typically a man who can be moved by someone else's gestures. However, he felt deeply moved by Lena. He had been for three years.
Lena was in the bathroom, still wearing her wedding dress. He could hear her high heel shoes clicking softly on the tile. He could hear the gentle gurgle of water flowing from the showerhead. He could hear the small distinct noises a woman makes when she is unwinding after spending hours putting together the pieces of a wedding. He had been paying attention to Lena throughout the entire day. From the time they exchanged vows in the gardens of the Aurora Palace Hotel. Throughout the long dinner. During the dancing where he didn't do well but participated anyway because she laughed each time he stepped on her foot. Her laughter was the only sound in the world that caused something inside of his chest to stop tightening and remain still instead of tight.
He had gotten married to Lena today. He wasn't sure yet how he would feel about wanting that to be true.
His cell phone lay face down on the glass ledge next to the cuff links. He had put it there intentionally. His cell phone wouldn't be ringing tonight.
He heard her exit the bathroom. He heard a soft rustling of clothing and then he heard her voice. Her voice was softer and less formal now. The show was finally over.
"You're still in your clothes," she said.
"You've been gone for a while."
He turned away from the window. She had removed her hair from its updo. The length cascaded down her naked shoulders and she looked at him with that same look she gets before saying something that she has been thinking about all day long. He has learned to interpret her facial expressions over the last three years by paying close attention to what she does with her body language, because Lena communicates roughly fifty percent of everything that is important to her with her face and the remaining fifty percent with a subtle adjustment in her posture, and ninety-nine percent of everyone misses both.
"I kept thinking about our trip to Hainan during the reception," she said. "Remember? That second year? And it rained for seven solid days...and you bought that truly horrible umbrella from that street vendor?"
"That was a great umbrella," he said, smiling. Smiling isn't something Ethan does frequently enough to make it automatic; therefore when he does smile it is genuine. She knows it is genuine too. Seeing that she recognizes that it is genuine is one of the reasons why he married her.
As he crossed the distance between them, his phone rang.
This wasn't his phone. This was hers. The specific rising pitch that indicated it was a call (as opposed to a message), three short chimes sounded incredibly loud in comparison to the silence in the room.
Her eyes shifted quickly to her purse sitting on top of the bedside table. He observed the flash of internal conflict on her face, followed immediately by hesitation as she reached for her purse.
"It is late", he said. Not a prohibition. An observation.
"It's probably nothing," but as she moved towards the telephone, she could sense the tension building inside of her. "Just one moment while I check this."
As she placed her hand on the receiver, she turned back to where he stood. There were no words spoken by either of them. Her eyes fell upon the phone display and then returned to his face. Something shifted in her facial features that wasn't the same expression she had when she exited the restroom.
"It is Marcus", she said. "He is in the hospital. They say he has internal bleeding. They rushed him in about an hour. He sounds...". She raised her head from staring at the floor and met his gaze. "He sounds scared".
For three full seconds after she made this declaration, Ethan looked directly into her eyes. In those three seconds, he gained several pieces of knowledge regarding what happened next. As always, everything became clear to him immediately; all at once - like a map spreading open.
"You should go", he said.
"No, Ethan—",
"He is your friend, you need to go."
And before he even finished speaking, she was opening the door, putting on her heels, and slinging her clutch over her shoulder. The petals of flowers that led to the bed lay undisturbed as she walked away. She stopped at the entranceway to the hotel room and turned around to meet his eyes. His expression reflected a combination of regret, apology and perhaps relief.
"I will be back within an hour or two", she said.
"Fine", he said.
She pulled the door shut and Ethan remained motionless in the hotel suite for what felt like an eternity. The flames on the candles continued to burn lower. The champagne in the ice bucket grew warmer. And far beneath them, forty-three floors of twinkling lights offered little consolation.
He reached down and picked up his own cell phone from the glass ledge.
He spent another few minutes gazing out of the window at his reflection, and contemplating (the man in a white dress shirt standing in a flower petal covered hotel room) who had asked for the flower petals?
He unlocked his screen and opened a buried, encrypted application. He had installed a silent mirroring protocol on Lena's device about 4 months ago. It was a standard security measure for someone in his position, though he had sworn never to use it on her.
His thumb hovered over the screen. Then, he tapped the audio-link icon.
Through the phone's speaker, Lena’s warm and concerned voice echoed clearly: "Marcus, I am almost there... just let me know what ward..."
A male voice responded, and through the fake weakness and fabricated trembling, Ethan recognized a predator posing as prey; something he could identify easily based on years of experiences.
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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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