Chapter Three
Operations progress as anticipated. Four still-living thralls were recovered from Polaris and have been moved to join the
others. All salvageable documents and materials have been delivered to the location directed. Dr. Nichols himself has been
safely relocated to Victoria and will arrive in Seattle later today. He requested we remind you that the Dead Man is not our
ally and has shown compromised judgment, particularly in matters involving his empath brother and Reece Davies.
We have found no trace of Director Traynor. Our search continues.
—Message to [REDACTED] transmitted from [REDACTED]
Vivian Marist would admit that one of the top perks of being Stone Solutions Canada’s president—and of course, the entire
company’s current interim CEO—was a perk the public didn’t know about: the Orion Lodge.
Designed by Cedrick Stone for their most senior leadership to study strategy and emotional defense, Orion was a triumph of both luxury and anti-empathy engineering, a secret and guarded fortress set on more than one hundred acres in the British Columbia mountains, with two indoor pools, an on-call masseuse, a spa, meditation pods, and rooms with their own saunas and cold plunge tubs.
Orion, however, also had the top-of-the-line business facilities one might expect at a corporate lodge. And at 4:07 a.m.,
Marist was not, in fact, getting a massage. She’d just been woken by news of another break-in at Stone Solutions’ flagship
Bellevue campus and was hurrying down the hall to one of Orion’s conference rooms.
As she stepped into the room, she frowned. The coffee service had been set in the middle of the table, but the lodge’s IT
director should have been there, ready to patch her in for her call—
“Vivian.”
Marist glanced over her shoulder in surprise, to the doorway. For a moment, she had thought the voice belonged to Cedrick
himself.
But it wasn’t Cedrick Stone who had joined her. It was Charles.
She tried to keep the shock off her face as he stepped into the conference room. A tall and formidable-looking man in his
late sixties, Charles Stone was a legend in his own way, someone who’d witnessed the empath emergence in real time and moved
from military contracting into empathy defense. He’d been appointed the first director of the Empath Initiative, securing
Cedrick the grants needed to start Stone Solutions before entrusting the EI directorship to Charles’s own close friend, Holt
Traynor.
On paper, Charles had retired from the empathy business.
Clearly things had changed.
“What an unexpected pleasure,” Marist said, smothering her surprise as Charles stepped into the room. “I thought we’d be doing this virtually.”
“Given the events of the past few weeks, I felt it necessary to come in person,” Charles said. “My apologies for being late.
I was due for a check on Cedrick.”
“Of course,” Marist said a little more softly.
Given the need for secrecy around empathy, Stone Solutions operated a medical facility—complete with private morgue—in Kirkland,
not far from their Bellevue headquarters, where patients with empathy-related injuries could be treated. Cedrick Stone himself,
however, was here at Orion, in the small medical wing, receiving round-the-clock care while he was still catatonic after his
encounter with Reece Davies.
Naturally Charles had stopped in to see him; he was, after all, Cedrick’s father.
They sat together in two of the oversized white leather chairs that surrounded the conference table. “Have you had any word
from Holt since the Vancouver incident?” Charles asked Marist.
She shook her head. “He was supposed to meet us at the dock that night. I’m still not sure why he took his team to that warehouse
instead.”
“Given that several of his team were thralled and turned loose to rampage through downtown Vancouver not long after, I think
we can assume he encountered the corrupted empaths.” Like Cedrick and most of the Stone Solutions leadership, Charles kept
his voice and expressions exceedingly neutral, even when discussing the possibly unpleasant fate of a longtime colleague.
He’d likely helped develop some of the emotional control curriculums they’d all taken in this very lodge.
“Holt’s body wasn’t among the murdered,” Marist pointed out.
“That might be worse,” Charles said dryly. “If the empaths thralled him.”
“But even so, Holt will still be dead by now,” Marist said. “Empath thralls don’t last more than a day or two before burning
out unless we intervene with life support.”
“Perhaps,” Charles said enigmatically. “Nevertheless, I don’t enjoy uncertainty. I’m taking precautions, such as having Victor
Nichols moved to a safe place while circulating the claim that he’s presumed dead.”
“That’s wise. He’s likely in great danger.” Marist cleared her throat. “I’ve heard a rumor or two about Victor’s research
methods—nothing I’ve ever taken seriously, you understand, because he’s not an easy man to work with so I suspect people just
like to gossip. But if they know he’s alive, the empaths may feel they have reason to target him.”
“Genius is always slandered,” Charles said with a shake of his head. “Victor has given me invaluable input over the years.
I’ve never cared about methods when they deliver results like his.” He steepled his fingers. “Do we know what the empaths
wanted tonight?”
“Head of security saw three empaths go into the delivery room,” she said. “Though Mr. Smith also says the room was empty.”
“At my order,” Charles said. “Certain records should never available lest they be demanded in discovery by lawyers—or other
unscrupulous parties.”
Stone Solutions already had draconian document retention and destruction policies. But Charles was taking precautions, as
he’d said, and it had served them tonight. “Smith recognized Reece Davies. It appears Davies is now corrupted and working
with two others, suspected to be Alex Grayson and Cora Falcon.”
“And of course, I also have Mr. Davies to thank for Cedrick’s condition,” Charles said in a particularly unreadable tone. “I read the Dead Man’s report and other accounts of the rooftop incident in November.”
Agent Grayson’s report had also pointed out that Cedrick had engineered Cora Falcon’s corruption and planned to use Davies’s
half sister to conduct corruption experiments on him. But then, many might feel that simply another attack on a genius. After
all, Agent Grayson had questionable sympathies toward the empaths that had garnered him much resentment from others in the
empathy defense sector.
Marist generally gave Grayson more grace. Even before he’d been changed into the Dead Man, Grayson been altered by his own
empath sibling when he was just a child, and his protective streak toward empaths was very possibly a side-effect. That said,
his judgment in lying about his brother’s death and protecting Davies had tried even her good will.
“It’s past time that Mr. Davies was brought in,” she said. “Though as you’re aware, given the events at Polaris, we’ll need
a holding facility.”
“That will be handled,” Charles said confidently. “In the meantime, I want the heat turned up on all empaths. We’ll be tripling
our advertising spend, effective immediately.”
“I thought that was planned for Q2,” Marist said, somewhat delicately. Next year’s budget had been created in anticipation
of the passage of the big anti-empathy bill in the Senate, S.B. 1437—and with it, the much-needed rider that would pump piles
of funding into Stone Solutions. Even retired, Charles ought to have guessed their current budget was stretched.
“We can speed up that timeline, thanks to some good news. I can’t share yet, but you can drop hints at tonight’s board meeting.”
He tilted his head. “Though given the damage to Stone Solutions’ headquarters, I suppose we’re going to have to find somewhere
else to hold the meeting.” He picked up his coffee again. “Just one more thing I have to thank the empaths for.”
His eyes had narrowed, just at the corners. Marist picked up her own coffee. The empaths had brought Charles Stone out of retirement and pissed him off to boot.
She almost pitied them.
Stop jerking off to your own hair and pay attention: I am not your Care Bear anymore. Don’t you get it, Evan? I’m the bad
guy now.
Grayson sat in the parking lot in his rental Prius, gaze on Reece’s last text.
A memory rose, unbidden: twilight in the truck’s back seat, Reece under him, flushed and glowing, pupils blown so wide with
surging empathy that those big brown eyes had become onyx black, possibly the prettiest damn thing Grayson had ever seen.
Reece’s voice had been gravelly with desire as words had spilled into the no-man’s-land between their lips.
I can’t believe I ever thought it was hard to look at you. I can’t get enough now, can’t stop looking.
If we could touch, I’d fucking climb into you, lose my goddamn self, it’d be heaven.
I’d let you call me Care Bear forever.
Reece was right. He wasn’t that empath anymore.
“Leave my hair out of this,” Grayson finally muttered, as he tucked the phone away in his pocket and stepped from the car.
Breakfast pickings were slim at 5:09 a.m. on a weekday, but as a former detective who’d worked at all hours, St. James had
known of a coffeehouse that would be open. She was already inside, the lone customer ordering at the counter as Grayson opened
the door and slipped into the café’s warmth to join her.
“And an extra shot in that mocha,” she was saying to the barista. She glanced over her shoulder at Grayson. “On me.”
He shook his head and held up his credit card. “On Stone Solutions.”
St. James turned back to the barista. “Make it three extra shots. And a smoked salmon bagel. And a bear claw.”
Grayson ordered most of the items on the breakfast menu and the biggest latte they had. He’d already drunk half of it by the
time they’d carried everything over to a small table along the window and sat facing each other in rickety wooden chairs.
“Tonight was embarrassing,” St. James said as he unwrapped a breakfast sandwich. “I don’t know if I can handle empaths making