Chapter 10
10
ATLAS
I wasn’t built to be distracted.
Not when the city still harbored the ghost of Department 77. Not when the men who wanted my brothers dead were somewhere in the cracks of Charleston’s polished veneer, slipping through antique doors and sipping bourbon behind closed clubs where they talked of power and prestige.
But here I was.
Sitting alone in the Dominion Hall library with an untouched cigar, staring at an open dossier on the mayor’s family—and thinking about her . Again.
Anna.
The wedding.
My mother.
All of it bleeding together.
My head was a minefield, and I was running out of safe paths to walk.
I pushed the cigar aside and leaned back in the chair, my shoulders too wide for its antique frame, the leather creaking beneath me. I should’ve been planning next steps, tracing connections between shell companies and shadow donors who funneled cash into arts programs and offshore research labs.
Instead, my mind was full of music. The kind Anna played. Gentle. Haunting. The kind that filled a room without ever raising its voice. The kind that called to me like?—
Don’t.
I pressed my palms into my eyes. Hard.
There was too much. Too much noise in my head, too much ache in my chest, and not enough intel on the people who wanted Dominion Hall destroyed.
The mayor’s family was gone. Vanished. And every contact we’d chased in her orbit had gone radio silent.
Marcus thought the trail was cold. Ryker begrudgingly conceded the same.
I didn’t.
I didn’t believe in coincidence. Not in Charleston.
And yet … I wasn’t moving. Wasn’t chasing. Wasn’t plotting.
I was sitting.
Stuck.
And that scared the hell out of me.
I got up, pushing back from the desk and walking to the window. The trees beyond the grounds swayed in slow rhythm, and the sea breeze moved like breath over the city’s skin.
For a moment, I didn’t see the trees. I saw the beach.
Sullivan’s Island. Low tide. The sun glinting off shallow pools where hermit crabs skittered, and seafoam danced over my ankles.
And her.
My mother.
Laughing.
I was a boy again, all limbs and bare feet and sand-caked knees. I’d made a face—some ridiculous expression that only made sense in a child’s mind—and she’d burst into laughter so warm it melted the air around her. I’d run into her arms, burying my face in her neck. She’d held me like I was the whole damn world.
God, she was beautiful. Not in the ordinary sense. Not just striking or elegant. She was angelic. The kind of beauty that felt like light. Pale hair. Sea-glass eyes. A voice that hummed lullabies and Shakespeare in equal measure.
And then she was gone.
Poof.
Disappeared one night without a sound.
No blood. No body. No note.
Just a space in the house where her light had been.
I had stood at the bottom of the stairs for an hour the next morning, waiting to see her come back down. Waiting to hear her voice say, There you are, my darling boy.
She never did.
Byron, our father, refused to speak her name after that.
“If you boys want to play pretend, do it when I’m not in the room.”
And we had.
Hushed whispers between bunk beds, stories whispered like myth beneath creaking wood. Marcus always claimed she’d been taken by pirates. Noah swore she’d gone on a grand adventure, like in the stories she used to read.
But me?
I’d just waited.
Day after day.
I was the biggest even then. The mountain of the Danes. But my heart ached like it was too large for my ribs, and there wasn’t a single hour that passed where I didn’t wonder if she was thinking about me. About us.
That ache never left.
When I met my fiancée years later, I thought I’d finally found a piece of that light again.
She smiled like my mother did. Touched my face the same way. Said the right things. Looked the part.
I believed her.
I let her in.
I trusted her with everything.
And she walked away from me. Betrayed me in the worst way. Left me at the altar and climbed into someone else’s bed like I hadn’t spent years building a future for her in my mind.
The ache doubled. Hardened.
And now … Anna.
She didn’t look like my mother. Didn’t sound like her. But something in the way she felt when I touched her, the way she didn’t flinch at my silence, made that old ache stir again.
I didn’t know what to do with it.
I closed the dossier on the mayor’s family and left the library. My boots echoed against the marble hall, down through the main corridor of Dominion Hall and out into the morning sun. I didn’t stop to tell Marcus or Ryker where I was going. They wouldn’t ask.
Sometimes I disappeared.
It was a Dane thing.
We hunted ghosts in different ways.
* * *
The streets of Charleston shimmered beneath the early sun as I moved past rainbow-colored houses and ivy-covered balconies, through neighborhoods that had raised me. It wasn’t hard to retrace her path. My mother had loved little cultural nooks of the city—hidden cafés, shadowed bookstores, antique shops that smelled like dust and violets.
I started with the corner café near the French Quarter where she used to read poetry to me when I was too big to sit in her lap but too small to understand Neruda. The place was still there. Still painted the same soft rose shade. I didn’t go in. Just stood across the street, remembering her silhouette behind the glass.
From there, I walked past the waterfront where she used to feed the gulls, stopping every few feet to smile at old women with floral hats and give quarters to the street musicians. She never missed a chance to tell a stranger they mattered.
It made me wonder what she would’ve thought of Anna. A musician. A little reckless. Full of feeling. Smart enough to know when a room was turning on her. Brave enough to stand still anyway.
Would my mother have seen the fire in her?
Would she have warned me away?
I wasn’t sure anymore.
I ended up at an old used bookstore on Church Street. Not my mother’s favorite, The Lantern Room. Another one—smaller, more cluttered. A place my mother used to take me on Thursdays after piano lessons. The front still had its original green door and its faded brass bell. I opened it slowly, letting the scent of old pages and dust wrap around me like incense.
The shopkeeper didn’t look up as I stepped in. Good. I wasn’t here for conversation.
I wandered the narrow aisles, trailing my fingers over the spines of books too weathered to read. Poetry. Russian lit. Music theory.
I pulled a book down at random and flipped it open to the center. A line in worn ink stared up at me:
“We are all made of wounds and wonder.”
I stared at it for a long time.
The pages blurred.
When I finally left the store, I didn’t take the book. I didn’t need to. The line had already lodged itself in my chest like a nail.
I walked for a long time after that.
Thought about the mission. The mayor. The vacuum of intel. The whispers.
But more than that, I thought about readiness.
How I hadn’t been ready the first time my life shattered. Not when my mother disappeared. Not when my fiancée betrayed me. Not when Anna looked up at me with eyes full of everything, and I’d left her without a word.
That wouldn’t happen again.
If the world was closing in, then I needed to be ready. Not just for war.
But for the weight of wanting something again.
Someone.
I wasn’t sure I could handle that.
But I was sure as hell going to find out.