Chapter 42
2273words
Sinclair Dominion HQ | Office of The CEO
Late Morning
The hush in Lucian’s office wasn’t unusual. But the tension today felt sharpened—like the stillness of a loaded gun.
Kristina stood near the glass wall, scrolling through her tablet, until Lucian finally looked up from his desk.
“Kristina,” he said. “Would you give us a moment?”
Her glance shifted to Sebastian, who stood patiently just inside the door, hands behind his back.
She didn’t question it. “Of course.”
As the door clicked softly behind her, Lucian stood, walked to the sideboard, and poured a measured finger of scotch. He didn’t drink it. He just stared into it.
“Do you remember the investigation Maxim mentioned?” Lucian asked.
Sebastian nodded. “The one regarding Kristina? Yes. He approached me discreetly a little over a year ago. Asked me to keep ears open, but he handled the core of it himself.”
Lucian turned, eyes narrowing slightly. “What did he tell you?”
Sebastian leaned forward, his voice low and even.
“Maxim didn’t say much. Just that someone approached him with information about Kristina’s past—things he couldn’t ignore. Said the guy had been… watching her for years. Not in a creepy way. Just… quietly. Protectively.”
Lucian’s expression didn’t change.
“He said the intel had weight,” Sebastian continued. “There were ties to old research. Companies Kristina’s parents were involved with. A biotech lab that shut down right after the accident. Maxim didn’t give a name. Didn’t even say how the guy found him. Just that he believed him.”
A pause stretched.
“That’s all?” Lucian asked.
Sebastian nodded. “That’s all he told me.”
Lucian’s voice dropped. “I need you to look into someone.”
“Everett Lysander.”
Sebastian’s brow furrowed. “Who is he?”
Lucian didn’t blink. “Just a name Kristina mentioned.”
“Kristina?” Sebastian repeated, surprised.
“Yes,” Lucian said flatly. “Find out what you can. Keep it quiet.”
“Understood,” Sebastian said without hesitation. “Anything specific you want me to look for?”
“Start with anything tied to the accident. Parents, labs, cleanups. See if Everett Lysander shows up near any of it.”
Lucian’s voice was firm. “No one else sees this.”
Sebastian gave a single nod. “You have my word.”
Sinclair Dominion HQ | Outside the CEO’s Office
The hallway outside Lucian’s office was quiet, save for the low hum of the overhead lights and the faint ticking of a wall clock that Kristina had never noticed until now. She stood near the coffee machine, a half-filled cup cooling between her hands. Her thoughts were elsewhere.
Footsteps approached. Familiar ones.
She didn’t look up right away, but she didn’t have to.
“You’re up early,” Eli said gently, nodding toward her coffee. “That your second?”
She glanced at him. “Third.”
He gave a soft, amused sound, but there was something careful about it. He leaned against the wall beside the machine, not too close, but not distant either.
“I saw you last night,” he said, not quite meeting her eyes. “Outside his room.”
Kristina stilled.
Eli didn’t push. “You looked… safe.”
She blinked. “Is that a problem?”
“No,” he said quickly. “Not at all. It’s good. You deserve that.” A pause. “You always have.”
There was something heavier under the words. Something unspoken.
Kristina turned slightly toward him, fingers curling tighter around the paper cup. “Eli…”
He smiled, small and lopsided, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “I’m not going to make this weird.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“Didn’t have to.” He nudged the toe of his boot against the floor. “I just meant… whatever this is with you and him, I’m not stepping in the way.”
She watched him. “But you’re still watching.”
That made him glance at her, finally. His voice dropped. “I always do.”
The silence between them held years. Some remembered. Some forgotten.
He shifted, reaching into his jacket. “Here.” He handed her a folded piece of paper. “You left this in the control room last week. Figured you’d want it back.”
She took it without looking. “Thanks.”
Their hands brushed.
It wasn’t an accident, but neither of them reacted.
Eli cleared his throat. “Sebastian’s probably almost done in there.”
Kristina nodded, but didn’t move.
“I should go,” he said, pushing off the wall. “Work to pretend to do.”
“Eli,” she said, quietly.
He paused, turning back.
She didn’t say anything else. Just looked at him.
And for a second, his mask slipped. Something raw flickered across his face before he caught it.
“Don’t worry about me,” he said softly. “I’ve had practice.”
Then he turned, and walked away.
Sinclair Dominion HQ | Executive Hallway Alcove
Kristina sat on a sleek bench tucked beside the executive hallway, near a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the city. The air was quiet, sterile. Lucian was still in his meeting with Sebastian. Eli had just left.
The folded slip of paper rested between her fingers.
She hesitated for a moment, then opened it.
Neat handwriting, familiar in a way that didn’t make sense.
“What has keys but opens no doors?”
Kristina blinked once, then again — and something flickered.
A flash of warmth.
Not heat — warmth.
A boy’s voice: “Bet you can’t solve this one in under five minutes.”
They were seated on the ground somewhere — a rooftop? A stairwell?
She was younger. Her hands were smaller.
He passed her a scrap of paper. A riddle scrawled in pencil.
She smirked. “Watch me.”
The memory evaporated just as quickly.
Kristina exhaled slowly.
Her fingers traced the curve of the handwriting again. It didn’t bring panic or fear — just a hollow sense of almost. Like brushing up against a word you used to know but can’t quite recall.
She turned the paper over.
Quietly, she wrote the answer in the corner.
Then folded the paper again. Carefully, deliberately. And slipped it into the inner pocket of her jacket.
She didn’t know why she kept it.
Only that something in her wanted to.
Kristina sat quietly by the tall window, the folded riddle now tucked into her jacket pocket. The hum of Dominion moved around her — muffled footsteps, distant elevator chimes, the quiet murmur of conversations behind closed doors.
She didn’t look up when the office door clicked open behind her.
But she felt him.
Lucian’s steps were soft, controlled as always — but there was a certain weight to them. A shift in the air that pulled her attention before he even said her name.
“Kristina.”
She turned, standing at once.
His gaze skimmed her face. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”
She shook her head. “It’s fine.”
Lucian studied her for a beat longer — something unreadable flickering behind his eyes. His voice was low when he finally said, “Let’s go.”
Kristina fell into step beside him. But as they walked down the hallway, his hand brushed hers. Deliberately. Barely noticeable to anyone watching — but unmistakable to her.
A silent anchor.
She didn’t say anything.
Just let her hand rest by her side.
Close enough to touch.
Sinclair Dominion HQ | Cyber Intelligence Subfloor
Sebastian’s ID cleared him through three secure checkpoints. No questions asked. No names given.
Inside the glass-walled workspace buried beneath Dominion’s executive levels, the air buzzed faintly with filtered recirculation and the low hum of deep system servers. Most of the desks were empty — field teams were already out, rotations were staggered. Which was exactly how he liked it.
He sat down at a terminal tucked in the corner, out of line of sight from the main feed wall.
Everett Lysander.
No middle name. No known aliases.
Just a name Lucian had spoken without emotion — too calm for a man asking him to dig quietly.
Sebastian opened a sandboxed environment and typed in the name. No searches tied to Dominion. No requests routed through the mainframe. This would live and die off-grid.
He tried public archives first. Birth records. Property registries. Travel visas.
Then a few hits — spotty university attendance tied to a small private college near Santa Cruz, California. No graduation. Disenrolled after one semester. A regional high school math competition in Fresno. Some fragments of an academic paper co-authored under a research mentor at a biotech firm based in Palo Alto—never published. Then… nothing for almost a decade.
“Ghost,” he muttered.
Sebastian leaned back in his chair.
Something in his gut prickled. He’d seen this before—not sloppiness, but intentional erasure. The kind of trail you leave when you don’t want to be found, but still need to be just visible enough to pass as real.
He turned to a different toolset. Sifted through Maxim Thorne’s known contacts. Unmarked visitors. A narrow window of unscheduled meetings logged by front desk staff in late November. One of them was blacked out in the visitor log. No photo. Just a ten-letter string for a name.
Not Everett Lysander.
But it didn’t look random either.
He copied the alias into a cipher tool.
Then paused.
Something about this felt… personal.
And Lucian hadn’t told him why the name mattered. Just that Kristina had mentioned it.
Sebastian’s fingers hovered over the keys. Then moved again — steady, quiet.
If this Everett existed, Sebastian would find him.
But something told him he wouldn’t like what he uncovered.
The soft hum of the Dominion database server was the only sound in the room. Sebastian sat in front of three screens, a mug of half-drunk coffee going cold beside his elbow. The name echoed like a riddle that didn’t want to be solved.
No last name. But Sebastian had traced enough anomalies to know: real or not, people always left shadows.
And eventually — he found it.
One archived enrollment record from a private high school in Monterey, California. Class of ’99. Top marks in logic, math, and engineering aptitude. No photo. Just a signature line that read:
Everett Lysander Voss.
Sebastian sat up straighter, reading it again.
His fingers froze above the keyboard.
The surname clicked — like a pin tumbling into place.
But that didn’t make sense.
Eli was loud. Casual. Smirking at chaos. Sure, he was clever — but this Everett kid… he was quietly exceptional. Like he built worlds in his head and kept them hidden.
Sebastian frowned, trying to dismiss the gut feeling rising in him.
Coincidence. Maybe. But in their world, coincidences rarely stayed innocent.
He dug deeper.
The trail picked up again two years later — a tech internship at a mid-sized biotech facility in Palo Alto. Funded, interestingly, by a shell company that had gone dormant after a lab fire. No further records after that. Not in the U.S., at least.
Sebastian leaned back in his chair, tension in his jaw.
“Why the hell would Lucian be asking about this guy now?” he murmured.
And why did he have the same last name as the team’s most unpredictable operative?
His eyes dropped again to the name.
He opened a new tab and quietly ran a parallel query.
One for Everett.
One for Eli.
Let’s see what shakes loose.
The room was cold. Not from the temperature, but from the sheer sterility of it — windowless, light humming from fluorescent panels, the terminal screen casting pale blue against Sebastian’s face.
He’d been combing through layers of obfuscated data for over an hour. Public records had nothing. No driver’s license. No address. No school enrollment. Everett Lysander might as well have never existed.
Until a deeper dive, through a backdoor Maxim once taught him to use.
The keyword “Everett Lysander” finally pinged something.
Entry #1 – Internal Incident File [Restricted Personnel Note, 1993]
Name: Everett Lysander VossDate of Birth: February 3, 1975Linked residence: Riverside Apartments, Unit 5BApartment log entry: Repeated complaints of a teenager questioning tenants.Incident flag: Disappeared from listed residence April 1993. No forwarding information.Follow-up status: Dropped. No missing persons report filed. No further trace.
Sebastian blinked.
His pulse picked up.
He opened a second file.
Entry #2 – Internship Archive [Quintis Biotech Labs – Closed]
Name: Everett Lysander VossInternship Type: Unpaid observer, partial clearanceDuration: May 1993 – February 1994Terminated upon internal audit.Notes: Frequently seen loitering near restricted research wings.One lab tech flagged him in a handwritten note:“That Voss kid is always watching. Knows more than he should.”
That was one of the biotech firms flagged in the old dossiers tied to Kristina’s parents.
Sebastian scrolled faster, tension rising.
Entry #3 – Photo Tag [Unlabeled, Internal Archive Snapshot]
It was grainy. Black and white.A teenager — maybe 17 or 18 — hunched near a corridor full of old machines. Glasses. Longish hair. Looking straight at the camera, though the angle suggested he didn’t know it was there.
The tag beneath read:
“Voss?” (scanned from physical backup, unconfirmed ID)
The name alone would’ve been enough.
Sebastian leaned back, pulse tight in his throat.
But now he had three pieces:
A teenager who disappeared the same month Kristina’s parents died.
An unpaid intern nosing around a biotech facility tied to the cover-up.
And a shadow with no paper trail — except a name that had just slammed into Sebastian like a freight train.
He whispered it aloud, almost afraid of the sound:
“Everett Lysander Voss.”
His stomach flipped.
Because he knew one other Voss.
Eli. Eli Voss.
But that couldn’t be.
Eli was… Eli.
Sebastian shut the terminal with trembling fingers and copied the files to a cold drive, buried them in layered encryption
As the screen dimmed to black, he sat there, staring at his reflection.
That name echoed through his head.
And something deep inside him whispered:
If this is true, everything changes.
Some secrets leave fingerprints, even after decades of silence.
—To be continued.
