2026-02-19 16:24:45
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Chapter Three Hundred and Thirty
Lukas stepped back from the door and Viktor came in, bringing the cold of the corridor with him, and looked around the flat with the quick comprehensive survey of someone who assesses spaces not aesthetically but functionally, noting what was there and what was not and drawing conclusions from both."Have you eaten today?" Viktor said."Coffee," Lukas said."That is not what I asked." Viktor moved to the kitchen with the ease of someone who had decided that standing on ceremony was not useful and opened the refrigerator and looked at its contents with the expression of a man who had found confirmation of a suspicion. "Sit down," he said. "I am going to make you something and then we are going to talk and you are going to hear me out completely before you say anything. Can you do that?"Lukas sat down at the kitchen table. "You are cooking in my kitchen.""I am making eggs. It is not cooking, it is basic nutrition." Viktor found a pan without asking where it was, which suggested either
Chapter Three Hundred and Twenty Nine
Lukas did not go to the office.He sat at the kitchen table at nine in the morning with his laptop open and his phone face up beside it and watched the article spread in real time the way you watch weather move across water, the pattern of it visible from a distance even when you cannot stop it. The mainstream outlets had picked it up by eight. By nine it had been shared enough times on social media that the algorithm had apparently decided it was worth promoting, which meant it was now appearing in feeds that had no prior connection to Amsterdam's social world or to Lukas specifically, which meant the audience was no longer the city's elite but anyone who found the headline satisfying enough to click.Billionaire's Ex-Husband Preys on Desperate Rich.It was a good headline. Lukas could admit that with the detached clarity of a man who had already moved through the initial shock into something flatter and colder. It had the rhythm of something people would remember and the implication
Chapter Three Hundred and Twenty Eight
Lukas read the article three times.The first time quickly, the way you read something when you are trying to establish the shape of the damage before you assess the details. The second time slowly, paragraph by paragraph, with the cold clinical attention of someone cataloguing wounds. The third time he was looking for the architecture of it, the construction, the choices made about what to include and what to omit and in what order, because understanding how it had been built was the only way to understand how it might be challenged.It was good. That was the first and most difficult thing to acknowledge. Whoever had written it, and Lukas suspected the byline was not the only hand involved, understood that the most effective character assassination was the kind that did not look like character assassination. The piece was structured as concern. Careful, reluctant, public-interest concern from a publication that had apparently decided that Amsterdam's social elite deserved to know who
Chapter Three Hundred and Twenty Seven
Lukas told her he needed time.Sofia received this the way she received most things that were not yes, with a nod that communicated she had expected it and had decided in advance not to treat it as an obstacle. She put her coat back on and stood and looked at Lukas across the small kitchen with the expression she had been wearing all evening, the one that was more honest than her usual ones."How long do you need?" she said."A few days.""You have them." She buttoned her coat from the bottom. "The terms I described are the terms. I am not going to pressure you by telling you the offer expires at midnight on Thursday." A pause. "I will tell you that the financial situation does not improve by waiting. But you know that already.""I know that already," Lukas said.She left and Lukas sat in the small kitchen for another twenty minutes doing nothing in particular, which was its own kind of thinking, and then he turned off the lights and locked the office and walked out into the January n
Chapter Three Hundred and Twenty Six
The first cancellation arrived at six forty-seven on a Tuesday morning.Lukas was already awake, already at the kitchen table, already doing what he had been doing every morning for the past week, which was opening his laptop with the specific dread of a man who knows the news will be bad and looks anyway because not looking does not make it better.The email was from Faisal's assistant. Courteous, precise, three sentences. His Highness had decided to consolidate his medical care through a single integrated facility in Geneva. He wished Dr. Bauer well and was grateful for the consultations. No reply was necessary.Lukas read it twice and then opened the next one.By nine o'clock there were seven.By the end of the first day there were fourteen, and three of them were not emails but calls, which was worse in the specific way that personal rejection is worse than written rejection, the voice of a stranger's assistant delivering a verdict in real time while Lukas sat at his desk and said
Chapter Three Hundred and Twenty Five
He called Elise at nine in the morning and she answered on the second ring."I need to see you," he said. "Today.""Lukas, I was going to call you about last night—""This is not about last night." He paused. "It is related to it but it is not about it. Can you meet me at your office in an hour?"A brief silence. "What happened?""I will show you when I get there."She was waiting for him in the lobby of the Van der Meer Enterprises building when he arrived, which told him she had taken the call seriously enough to come down herself rather than have someone collect him from reception. She looked at his face and said nothing and took him up to her office, which occupied a corner of the fourth floor with windows on two sides and the particular ordered calm of a space maintained by someone who thought best when their environment was uncluttered.She closed the door and turned to face him. "Tell me."He opened his laptop on her desk and turned it toward her. "The blog post with my client
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