THE MAN NAMED AXEL KNOX

SOMETHING MORE THAN THIS

Before that night in the alley, Axel Knox was nobody.

He didn't live on the streets, and didn't he starve either, but he had learned early that the world had no interest in him. Foster homes came and went, some were fine, some were cold but none of them were kind enough to want him forever. He was just a body of matter taking up space.

Teachers looked past him and oher kids called him "the ghost" because he was so quiet, so easy to forget. When he turned sixteen, he aged out of the system with a trash bag of clothes and forty-seven dollars. He worked odd jobs—washing dishes for restaurants, sweeping floors, stacking boxes in a warehouse that smelled like mold. Nobody ever said to him "you matter, Axel." Nobody ever looked at him like he was worth anything.

People always had a way to tell him exactly what he was. That he was nothing, that he was a limitation and that he was good for nothing.

And then, overnight, everything changed.

He was the son of Harrison Hawthorne. Heir to one of the five founding families of Bonneville. The same blood that ran through the men who owned newspapers, who made judges bow, who decided what was true and what was forgotten. Axel didn't ask for it, he didn't want it either, but somehow it was his now.

The name sat heavily on his shoulders like a chain.

The wooden house was quiet now, Vince and Leo had left him alone in the large room, but not before tying him properly to a heavy oak chair. Thick rope bit into his wrists and ankles. There was no room for escape.

Axel twisted left, then right. The chair didn't bulge.

"Come on," he muttered through gritted teeth.

He looked down at his arms, the bandage from the hospital was gone. In his arms, faint blue lines pulsed under his skin—like rivers on a map, glowing and fading, over and over again. He blinked, as he stared at the dark window across the room. A reflection. His own face staring back, but his eyes were glowing. Blue. Bright as a gas flame.

The surge came without warning.

It started in his chest and exploded outward— and then flowed down his shoulders, through his arms, into his fingertips. His whole body hummed like a power line. The rope around his wrists began to smoke. He could feel it. The strength whelming up. The heat. Something else that had been sleeping inside him since that needle went into his arm.

"Yes," he whispered. "Come on. Come on."

He pulled against the rope. The wood of the chair groaned. One more pull and…..

Nothing.

The glow died, the heat vanished and his eyes went back to normal. The humming in his head stopped like someone had flipped a switch. The ropes didn't burn, they just sat over his wrist and legs still tight and cruel.

"No!" Axel slammed his head back against the chair. Pain shot through his skull. "No, no, no…… "

He tried again, but there was nothing. He tried to feel for that power, whatever it was, to grab it, to force it, b byut it was gone. Like trying to remember a dream five seconds after waking up. He knew it had been there. He just couldn't reach it anymore.

Frustration burned hot in his throat. He twisted and wriggled until the rope bit into his skin, drawing blood. His breathing was fast and ragged.

"Let me go!" he shouted into the empty room but there was nothing still other than the silence.

He slumped forward, head hanging, chest heaving and for one brief moment, he had felt like something more than a ghost and it just slipped away.

Lost in his thoughts the front door exploded inward, Woods splintered off flying across the room. Vince and Leo came running from the kitchen….. Vince came running with a knife, Leo with a metal pipe.

"Who the hell….. " Vince didn't finish.

A woman stepped through the shattered doorway. Blonde hair fell past her shoulders. A black mask covered the lower half of her face, but her eyes were unmistakable. They were right blue, they had electric aura and they glowed the same way Axel's had glowed moments ago.

She moved so freely like water. Leo swung the pipe at her, she was quick enough to duck under it, grabbed his wrist, and twisted. His bone made a sound like a dry branch snapping, leo screamed from the pain and dropped to his knees.

Vince lunged forward towards her with the knife. She caught his arm mid-swing, held it there like he was a child, and drove her palm into his chest. Vince flew backward into the wall. He hit hard, slid down, and didn't get up.

It took her less than ten seconds to take both of them down.

Axel stared with his mouth half open, the woman turned to him. Her glowing eyes softened as she crossed the room in three quick steps, dropped to her knees in front of his chair, and pulled a small blade from her boot, slashed the blade against the rope binding him as it fell away.

She looked up at him. Her hands were warm and trembling as she cupped his face.

"I'm so glad you're safe," she said.

Her voice cracked or rather it broke. It was like as though she had been holding something inside for years and it was finally spilling out. Her eyes glistened, it wasn't from the glow anymore, but from tears that threatened to fall.

Axel couldn't move. Not from the ropes. From her.

"Who are you?" he whispered.

The woman pulled down her mask.

She had his face. Not exactly, hers was much older, softer in some places, harder in others. But the same shape of the jaw. The same curve of the lips. And those blue eyes that looked at him like he was the only thing in the world that mattered.

"I'm your mother," Mariette Windsor said. "And I've been looking for you for fifteen years.”