Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Erik
Two months ago…
The world ends the moment I know she’s gone. Not with fire. Not with screaming. Not even with a warning. Just with silence. Claire’s phone call to voicemail. Claire’s location is frozen at the clinic. She was supposed to be home. Resting. Eating. Safe.
My Claire always keeps her promises. So when she breaks this one, the one about staying inside, staying protected, and staying mine, I immediately know something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong. I’m already trembling by the time I reach the clinic.
The car my guards drive her around in is still in the parking lot. The sight of it nearly folds me in half. Her purse is in the passenger seat through the window.
The sweater she keeps with her. Her favorite lip balm was tucked into the cup holder.
Everything she touches is here. Except her. I force myself to breathe. Once. Twice.
Then I shatter through the clinic doors like a storm.
The receptionist startles so violently she nearly knocks over a stack of charts. I don’t apologize. I don’t slow down.
“Where is Claire Bennett?” I roar. My voice is deep and dangerous in a way that makes the receptionist blanch.
“S-she, she hasn’t checked in today.”
“She was called in,” I bite out. “By your office.” Dr. Madsen appears from a hallway, pale and frantic.
“Erik,” she breathes. “I swear to you, she didn’t check in.”
“Then who,” I growl, leaning in close enough that she flinches, “took her?!”
She shakes her head desperately. “I don’t know. But we’ll cooperate. Whatever you need. Whatever you want. Just, please, tell me she’s okay.”
“I don’t know if she’s alive,” I say in a deadly tone.
The raw honesty of it makes Dr. Madsen collapse into a chair. I don’t comfort her. I’m already walking away, barking orders at anyone who is in my direct path.
Ten minutes later, Bjorn arrives after securing Grace safely with her father, followed by the arrival of the other brothers fifteen minutes later. Nurses scatter as we move down the corridor like a wolf pack. Security footage loads. And then time stops.
She’s on camera, walking through the clinic's doors. She walks toward the hallway, toward the private patient rooms. And then, she vanishes. No image of her walking out. Just gone.
A glitch? No. Someone wiped the footage. Someone removed the part where she disappeared. Leif exhales shakily. Bjorn curses under his breath.
My voice sounds like gravel. “She was taken.”
Everyone falls silent. “She was taken,” I repeat. “And she was taken inside this building.”
Dr. Madsen tries to speak again, but Bjorn steps forward. “You’re shutting this clinic down,” he says calmly. “Today. Permanently. If you value your medical license, you will cooperate.”
“This isn’t fair.”
“You hired Dr. Rhys,” I snarl. She flinches like I struck her.
“We didn’t know.”
“You hired Dr. Rhys,” Bjorn repeats, his voice like winter. “And now one of ours is missing.”
The lawsuit is drafted before we reach the parking lot. Endangerment. Negligence. Improper hiring protocol. Failure to protect patients. Failure to report fraudulent medical credentials. Suspicious activity in patient communication logs.
The clinic will burn in court, but that doesn’t bring Claire back to me.
When I return to our home, Grace rushes to the door, hands on her belly, eyes wide with fear.
I am surprised to see her there, yet when her father steps out from the bathroom, I realize that Bjorn must have texted her dad, asking him to bring Grace to him.
I don’t blame Bjorn for wanting to keep her as close as possible.
“Erik, please tell me you found her.”
I can’t even form the words. Grace covers her mouth, tears spilling instantly. Bjorn pulls her into his arms, cradling her as if she were porcelain.
“She’s not safe here,” I say tightly. “Lock your doors. Don’t leave your penthouse for any reason.”
A midwife and doula arrive an hour later, hired by Bjorn with terrifying speed. Grace protests at first, but then she looks at me, really looks, and whispers, "You look like someone ripped half your soul out.”
They did. They took Claire. They took my heart and caged it somewhere I can’t reach.
I go into the bedroom to breathe. But breathing hurts. Every inhale feels like glass shards digging into my insides.
I don’t cry. I haven’t cried since I was twelve years old. But when I walk into our room… When I see the pajama shirt she left on the bed… When I smell her perfume on her pillow… I fall to my knees.
My fists are in her blankets. My forehead presses against the mattress. A broken sound escapes me, raw, inhuman, helpless. “Baby girl… please… hold on.” My voice breaks.
“I’m coming. I swear to you. I’m coming.”
In the weeks following, I can't sleep. I barely eat and I don’t stop moving. We tear through phone logs, financial data, and old camera footage from the parking lot. Axel hacks into systems he has no business entering. Bjorn begins to leverage his corporate contacts throughout Houston.
And me? I become something feral. Cold. Sharp. Hungry for answers. I’ve interviewed thirty people. I’ve shaken down two lab suppliers. I threatened a pharmaceutical executive in such a way that he began confessing before I asked a question.
Everyone tells me the same thing: We don’t know where she is. But I assume they’re lying. Someone knows something. Someone saw something. Someone touched her. And I will find them.
One month in, all I have left is a whisper of her. I speak into the night like a prayer, “Hold on, sweetheart. I’m coming for you.”
One month ago…
I stop pretending I'm functioning. Sleep becomes a rumor other people believe in. Food is something I shove into my mouth only when Bjorn threatens to sedate me himself. And every minute that passes without Claire feels like a countdown to something catastrophic inside my chest.
Time doesn’t move normally anymore. It pulses. It claws. It hurts. Every hour she’s gone, I feel it, a tightening in me, a burning within my body, a hollow warmth in the space where she’s supposed to be lying in our bed.
I don’t recognize myself when I catch my reflection. My eyes look like something where madness has taken root inside them. Bjorn doesn’t comment on the change; none of my brothers do.
And Leander watches me with a silent worry that only makes me more unhinged because he loved her too in his own way, a loyal, earnest, almost childlike devotion.
And I know he can feel it. The absence. Her capture, right under my guard's nose, was wrong, despite all the careful ways I thought I had calculated to protect her.
The truth is that Claire is out there somewhere, hurting, frightened, and alone, and I’m not with her.
Every morning, we meet in the kitchen, the place Claire used to make tea while humming under her breath, barefoot on the tile.
Now it’s a war room. A map of Houston covers the dining table. Red strings connect properties owned by shell companies. Markers show sightings of SableCorp vans over the last six months. Axel’s laptop shows codes spilling across the screen like rainfall.
“Nothing still?” I grit through my teeth, already knowing the answer.
Axel shakes his head. “Their digital trail is too clean. Too intentional.”
“Meaning?” I bark.
“Meaning they prepared for this day long before they took Claire," he sighs; our patience is straining.
My jaw flexes so hard I hear something pop in my ear. “They knew....”
Bjorn solemnly states, "They were aware that you would go to great lengths to locate her… They planned around it.”
The air goes still. He’s right. Someone who studied me designed the entire operation, including the fake call, the timed location jump, and the wiped footage.
Someone who knew how I’d react under threat. Someone who wanted my rage pointed in exactly the wrong direction long enough for them to disappear.
Claire wasn’t stolen randomly. She was hunted… My hands shake.
In the middle of the second month, we finally get our first real break.
My brother bursts through my door, Axel’s laptop pressed to his chest like a holy artifact.
“I found something,” he says breathlessly. “A location ping. The location ping was hidden beneath six layers of routing. Right after the security footage cuts, there is a connection to a private network that lasted for eleven seconds before the trace was cut.”
My pulse stutters. “Where?” I whisper. Axel flips the screen. A red dot blinks on the outskirts of Houston. A derelict industrial warehouse district. SableCorp has previously traced test shipments to this location.
I’m already grabbing my keys. Bjorn steps between me and the door. “No. Not alone.”
“Move,” I snarl.
“Absolutely not.”
“If you don’t fucking move…”
"Think, brother. Think. He snaps, "This is beyond us, and the outcome won't be the same as Grace's. Rushing in without us will get her killed.”
I stop breathing. Because I know he’s right. I just don’t know how to stop the part of me that wants to rip the world apart with my bare hands.
There’s a warehouse we have a lead on, so we go together at night in the rain. Our weapons are drawn; the rest of our brothers are behind Bjorn and me with surveillance equipment.
We breach the side door, and we see a lot of dust, empty crates, and metal. A smell like chemical antiseptic clinging to the walls. But not Claire. Just a ghost of something. A filing cabinet.
Leif yanks it open. Inside: shredded papers. Burnt fragments. One intact document was burned at the edges but legible.
Project Cerelia, Maternal Division Phase One: Collection. Phase Two: Conditioning. Phase Three: Breeding.
My blood runs ice-cold. Bjorn swears under his breath. Ivar stumbles back a step, face ashen. I grab the paper so tightly it tears.
Someone did this to Claire. Someone planned it. Resourced it. Funded it. Someone believes they own her now. I want to kill them.
My vision blurs at the edges, not with tears, but with rage so sharp it feels like a blade pressing against the inside of my skull.