2025-08-15 10:45:40Elise sat behind her desk, fingers tapping against the glass surface, fury burning in her chest. News of Felix’s injuries had hardened into a cold knot of anger. Her brother’s bruised face and bloodied nose, which according to Clara and the guards was Lukas’s doing, felt like a personal betrayal.
By the windows, Margot, her sharp-tongued assistant, crossed her arms. “He’s unhinged,” she said. “Assaulting Felix in an alley? Lukas is a liability. You were right to cut him loose.”
Elise nodded, her jaw tight. “He’s gone too far,” she said, her tone low but venomous. “Felix is reckless, but Lukas… I never thought he’d stoop to this.” She picked up her phone, her fingers hovering over Lukas’s number.
She dialed, her heartbeat sped up as the line rang. When Lukas answered, his voice was rough, weary. “Elise.”
“Explain yourself,” she snapped, her voice icy. “You attacked Felix, my brother. Why?”
Lukas let out a quick, sharp breath that crackled through the phone. “He provoked me, Elise. Him and Clara, they ambushed me, accused me of stealing your money. Felix smashed my grandfather’s watch. I lost it. I’m not proud of it, but—”
“You lost it?” Elise interrupted, her voice rising. “You broke his nose, Lukas! You think that’s justified? You think you can just lash out because you’re angry?” Her grip tightened on the phone, her knuckles whitening. “You’re not the man I thought you were.”
“And you’re blind,” Lukas shot back, his tone laced with defiance. “You believe Clara’s lies, Felix’s theatrics, without questioning them. You’ve chosen your family over the truth. Again.”
Elise’s breath caught, his words stinging like a slap. “This isn’t about them,” she said. “This is about you. Apologize to Felix in person, Lukas, or I’ll make sure you face legal consequences. I mean it.”
A bitter laugh echoed through the line. “An ultimatum? That’s your answer? I’m not groveling to Felix or anyone else. You want to play hardball, Elise? Go ahead. I’m done bending.” The call ended abruptly, the silence deafening.
Elise stared at the phone, her heart pounding. His defiance and refusal to give in sparked a new surge of anger. How dare he? She had offered him a way out, a clean break, and a generous settlement, but he had thrown it back in her face, first with the divorce and now with this. “He’s made his choice,” she said, tossing the phone onto the desk. “I’m done with him.”
Margot raised an eyebrow, her lips curling slightly. “Good. You don’t need distractions. The Laurent Group gala is tomorrow night. Sofia’s expecting you, and the merger talks could be worth billions. Focus on that, not some washed-up herbalist.”
Elise nodded, her resolve hardening. The gala, hosted by Sofia Laurent’s conglomerate, was a golden opportunity to solidify her empire’s dominance. Personal grudges could wait. “Get me the guest list and the latest financials,” she said, standing. “I want to be ready.”
Across Rotterdam, the clean, white halls of Rotterdam General Hospital were full of urgent activity. Lukas Brandt stepped off the elevator, his boots echoing on the linoleum floor, he had no time for her threats now. Viktor Stahl’s call had given him a purpose and a chance to prove he was more than the “stain” Elise’s family believed him to be.
He followed a nurse to a private wing, where Viktor’s colleague, Pieter Dubois, lay in critical condition. The room was stark, filled with the hum of monitors and the scent of antiseptic. Pieter, a gaunt man in his sixties, lay pale against the white sheets, his breathing weak. Beside him stood a young woman, her dark hair pulled into a messy bun, her blue eyes filled with worry. This had to be Amelie, Pieter’s daughter, Viktor had mentioned. A group of doctors and nurses stood nearby, watching Lukas with doubtful looks as he walked in.
“You’re the herbalist?” Amelie asked, her voice laced with doubt. She crossed her arms, her posture defensive. “My father’s dying, and they send us a… plant expert?”
Lukas met her gaze, unfazed. “I’m here to help,” he said, his voice calm but firm. “Viktor says it’s poison. I know compounds most doctors don’t. Let me see him.”
A doctor, a wiry man with thinning hair, scoffed. “We’ve run every test. Toxins, heavy metals, you name it. What can you possibly do that we haven’t?”
Lukas ignored the jab, approaching Pieter’s bedside. He checked the chart, noting the symptoms—rapid heart rate, organ stress, untraceable toxin. His years of studying rare plants and their effects clicked into place with patterns forming in his mind. But before he could speak, Amelie stepped closer, her eyes narrowing.
“What are your credentials?” she demanded. “Why should we trust you?”
Lukas paused. “Watch,” he said, gesturing for her wrist. Reluctantly, she extended it. He pressed two fingers to her pulse, seconds passed, the room silent except for the monitors’ beeps. “Your pulse is weak,” he said, his voice low. “You’ve got chronic fatigue, joint pain, probably in your knees and shoulders. You’ve been hiding it, haven’t you?”
Amelie’s eyes widened, her mouth parting slightly. “How… how did you know that?”
The doctor blinked, stepping closer. “You diagnosed that from her pulse?”
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Chapter Six Hundred and Thirty Two
Schiphol was doing what large airports did in the early morning — moving with the particular purposeful chaos of thousands of people who all had somewhere to be and were at various stages of believing they would reach it on time.Lukas found a corner seat away from the main flow of the terminal, near a window that faced east, where the morning light came through the glass in the clean, level way that autumn morning light achieved when the cloud had lifted enough to allow it. He had two hours before boarding. He had checked his bag. He had done the things you did before a long flight, the small practical acts that were also a form of transition — not the flight itself but the preparation for it, the series of decisions that closed the previous context and opened the next one.He sat with his carry-on beside him and the terminal moving around him and he reached into his jacket pocket and took out the watch.He held it in his open palm and looked at it properly in the full light, the way
Chapter Six Hundred and Thirty One
Lukas woke before his alarm.The apartment was quiet in the way that packed apartments were quiet — not the ordinary morning quiet of a space that was lived in and waiting to be lived in again, but the particular stillness of a place that had already released the person it had been holding. The suitcases stood by the door. The kitchen surfaces were bare. The bookshelves that had spent three years holding the organized disorder of a working life were empty now, and the spaces where the books had been held the faint pale rectangles of their absence, like memories of objects rather than the objects themselves.He made coffee with the small stovetop pot he had decided not to pack because it was old and dented and New York would need its own kitchen objects rather than Amsterdam's. He stood at the counter while it heated because the chairs were in storage, and he watched the canal below the window catch the morning light — what there was of it, the cloud low and the sky doing what Amsterda
Chapter Six Hundred and Thirty
Lukas found another bench further along the canal, unoccupied, set back slightly from the water's edge where a gap in the trees opened a longer view of the surface.He sat down.The water moved with its patient, indifferent rhythm, carrying the amber reflections of the houses on both banks in long broken shapes that reformed constantly without ever arriving at stillness. He had watched this canal at various points across the decade and the water had always done exactly this — the continuity of it felt like something worth noting on a night when he was trying to understand the shape of what the years had made.He was not, he realized, trying to assess whether he had made the right choices at each junction. That accounting was not what tonight required. What he wanted was something different — not whether the choices had been correct but what they had created together, the shape that emerged when you stood far enough back to see the whole rather than each individual decision in isolatio
Chapter Six Hundred and Twenty Nine
Lukas left his apartment at seven without a destination.He had packed the last of what he was taking — two suitcases and a carry-on, the deliberate reduction of a life to what was genuinely his rather than what had accumulated around him across the years — and the apartment was clean in the specific way of spaces that have been lived in and are now ready to be handed back. He had arranged the key handover for morning. He had confirmed his flight. He had nothing left to do in Amsterdam except be in it one more time.He walked toward the Prinsengracht first, not because he had decided to but because his feet had their own knowledge of this city after so many years, the accumulated navigation producing movement without intention.The autumn air was exactly what Amsterdam autumn air was — damp in the way specific to proximity to water, the smell of the canals present as background rather than foreground, the kind of smell that stops registering consciously after enough time and returns a
Chapter Six Hundred And Twenty-Eight
Lukas took the long way home.This was a choice Lukas made deliberately, standing outside the Prinsengracht café in the December cold after Elise had turned the corner and disappeared. Lukas could have gone directly. The direct route was fifteen minutes. The long route was nearly an hour, depending on how slowly Lukas walked, and Lukas intended to walk slowly.Lukas turned away from the canal and moved into the Jordaan, into the particular texture of those streets at that hour — the amber light from ground-floor windows, the smell of someone's dinner drifting from a half-open door, a bicycle propped against a wall with a child's seat on the back. The ordinary intimacy of a city in its evening. Lukas had walked these streets so many times and in so many different conditions that the streets themselves were a kind of record, layered with occasions Lukas could no longer fully separate from each other.Lukas passed the street where the first clinic had been. The building had been somethin
Chapter Six Hundred And Twenty-Seven
Lukas considered the question honestly rather than immediately, which Elise would have noticed and which was partly the point of asking it the way she had asked it. Not successful, not accomplished. She had taken care to exclude the categories that would have made the question easier to answer in the affirmative, and what remained after those exclusions was the harder thing."I need a moment with that," Lukas said."Take it."Lukas sat with it. Outside the window the canal went on doing what canals did in December, grey and unhurried and indifferent to the conversations happening alongside it. The café candles gave off their small warmth. Lukas turned the question over and looked at it from the side, from underneath, from the angle of actual honesty rather than reflexive reassurance."What I experience," Lukas said finally, "is something I've come to think is better than happiness. Though it took me a long time to understand the difference.""Tell me the difference," Elise said."Happ
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