11. CHAPTER 10
Orion
Days passed after the extraction, but the world insisted on pretending it hadn’t happened.
There were no headlines, no shaky clips on social media, no bloggers gossiping, no whispered scandal spreading through Parisian society.
Everywhere was quiet, and things were back to normal. Or whatever normal was seen to be. It felt arrogant in some way, that things had carried on despite the fact that a girl was pulled out from a rented house like something illegal.
At least that part was done effortlessly.
Severin and his men had erased the evidence. Thoroughly, discreetly, no fingerprints left behind. There was nothing to find, nothing to ask and no witnesses with stories to tell.
It had been three days since I watched her disappear into an SUV, kicking, screaming and crying.
Stratum had kept eyes on her and the Fernández entourage, from Corsica, to the safe house in Marseille where her brothers kept her to recuperate before heading back to Paris. Our eyes on the ground confirmed movement in the next 48 hours.
The Marseille safehouse was new to us, so coverage wasn’t perfect. There was no time to seed the walls. We had perimeter eyes, vehicle tags, a hijacked phone or two.
It was enough. We’d concluded then that her brothers wouldn’t keep her there for long, since her father was expecting them in Paris.
Stratum didn’t need cameras in every ceiling to own a building.
Most of what I was seeing wasn’t ours in the legal sense—municipal CCTV rerouted through dead servers, a borrowed signal from a neighbour’s smart doorbell, a guard on Severin’s payroll wearing a key fob with a pinhole lens.
Severin’s people came out of governments and defence labs with NDAs they had no intention of honouring; they preferred miniaturisation and deniability.
That was why Fernández security never found anything when they swept. They were looking for devices. Stratum was a system.
I’d watched the twins deliver her safe and sound at the safehouse.
Then watched them afterwards arguing about something.
Most of the conversation was muffled but from Laurent’s stance, I could tell the night was far from over.
He held a cigarette between his fingers, looking like a maniac that was about to blow up something.
Je vais tuer ce batard.
That was the only word I could make out from the entire conversation. While Laurent’s temper ran hot and reckless, Blaise was the opposite. He was calmer and more calculated. I wonder where he gets it from. Their father is everything but.
I switched clips back to the rental, where Yves had been left behind like rubbish against a wall—barely breathing, broken, and stupid enough to still think he was the hero of his own story.
It didn’t take a clairvoyant to know that the batard Laurent was referring to was Yves. I picked up my phone and dialed Severin.
“Get him to a hospital,” I said. “Keep it as discreet as possible.”
There had been a pause on the line.
“You want him treated,” Severin said, as if he needed to hear the words again to make sense of them.
“I want him out of her head, not dead.” I replied. “A dead lover would complicate things for me.”
He understood the language I was speaking, as always.
Severin’s men drove Yves to an emergency unit two towns over, under an alias and left him there with enough cash to keep questions polite.
Then, separately, Severin arranged something else, an anonymous tip, dropped with a family friend Stratum’s systems was able to pull up.
This family friend would notify his parents.
Hopefully they talk some sense into their son to stop reaching for pedestals that don't belong to him.
Because if it were up to Demola and his sons, Yves would already be dead in a ditch, and I understood the instinct. If a man had touched my daughter, I’d want him erased too.
I’d seen Léonie scream enough that night to know what his death would do to her. So yes, he was more useful to me alive.
I had no interest in dealing with a bride so distraught she couldn’t function. I preferred my peace over Fernández’s theatrics. If keeping Yves in one piece meant she cried less and screamed less and slept occasionally, then so be it.
And if the Fernández find out later that he’s alive, they’ll assume its the locals, pure chance or his own fucking luck that saved him.
I'd keep Yves alive a thousandfold if it would prevent Léonie from splintering further.
I wanted her intact. Or as close to intact as she could be, given the circumstances.
It was maintenance, not mercy.
“The Dupré family has been notified, according to my source.” Severin informed me later the next afternoon.
“Perfect.”
Her brothers had called in a doctor to examine her, a day after they arrived the safehouse.
From the live clips on my monitor, I saw the doctor arrive and exit the premises in less than thirty minutes.
An older man probably in his late fifties.
He looked exhausted, maybe from work or the hell Laurent was unleashing non-stop in the name of rage.
“Send in a doctor. Preferably young and female,” I said to Severin. “No one ties her back to us.”
“You don’t trust theirs?” he’d asked.
I don’t trust any of them.
“I want her intact,” I said, more to myself than to him. “Her mind clear. Her body unharmed. She needs a more attentive doctor.”
Not the one who looked like he hadn't slept in days and had spent most of them drinking.
Plus she could benefit from having someone around she could actually talk to, someone she could relate to that wasn’t her brothers.
She put herself in harm's way by taking a risk that could have been avoided. Every distress she carries from here on should come from choices she makes in my house, not from the incompetence of hers… or anyone else.
“Understood,” Severin replied.
By the next morning, the doctor had arrived, examined Léonie thoroughly, prescribed something mild for sleep, something for the headache she suffered from the sedation.
Those fuckers had sedated her heavily it seemed. I made a mental note of the toll I would exact once I had them all in a room.
The doctor left behind instructions written carefully and Severin forwarded me the report, as I sipped my morning coffee.
No physical complications, mild dehydration resolved, sleep disruption, throat irritation consistent with prolonged screaming, and significant emotional distress.
All clinical language for trauma.
I archived the report as maintenance. I told myself that if I was going to own the problem, I needed to know the exact dimensions of the damage.
A second message came through.
Severin: One more note. The doctor spoke briefly with éliane while examining Léonie. Lady Kade has insisted on a pregnancy test before the wedding. éliane termed it mandatory. In her words, “necessary assurance.”
The temperature in the room dropped.
My mother. Always finding ways to intrude.
She held no legal sway over the alliance documentation, nor did she have the standing to dictate terms to my counsel. Her interference was as baseless as it was relentless. And yet, here she was inserting herself… again.
A pregnancy test wasn’t about the truth. It was about exerting control and ownership over the line of succession. The kind of humiliation my mother believed could be prevented with paperwork and proof. As if my name could be protected by a lab result.
Léonie’s body wasn’t a document my mother could demand to review.
I didn’t need my mother prodding around in my future wife’s body via some whispered woman to woman arrangement. This wasn’t the nineteenth century, where women were inspected like horses before a sale.
The presumption bothered me. My mother moving pieces on a board that belonged to me.
Reducing Léonie to a womb so bluntly it made my own calculations look almost gentle by comparison.
Me: My mother has no say in my marriage. She certainly has no say over the body of the woman I intend to marry.
Severin: Should I intervene?
Me: No. I’ll handle her.
Severin: And the test?
Me: There will be no test. If my mother attempts to run any more instructions through that doctor or any others, I want to know first. And I decide what happens next.
Not her. Not éliane. Not even Demola.
Severin: She’ll fight you on it.
Me: Let her try.
If anyone was going to turn Léonie into a condition, a clause, a vessel, it would be me alone. Definitely not my mother.
The day she left the safehouse for the Fernández mansion, I watched her walk into one of the black SUVs with her brothers. It had been days since I had a full view of her.
Zooming in on the grainy still, I could see her eyes swollen, her mouth set in a line that looked too young to hold the kind of grief she had held on to for days.
For a second, I didn’t feel like a man doing business. I felt like a man who’d made a decision and expected the world to comply with it.
But that was who I needed to be to see this through to the end.
There was no room for a conscience in the game of power and leverages.
My father would say: only the devil who refuses to blink gets to walk away with the prize.
In this calculated wreckage, I am the devil.
I helm the ship, and the world bends to my cause.
Compliance isn’t a choice; it’s survival instinct.
I have the final word because when all is said and done, I’ll be the only thing standing between them and the abyss.
Stratum followed Léonie’s transport without losing her once, till the convoy made it to the gates of the Fernández residence…all the way to the rooms upstairs where they had planned to keep her out of sight like a stain they needed to bleach out before company arrived.
Her mother had met her in the foyer in all her elegance. It almost looked like she was going to hold her daughter, but her hand stopped short in a false show of concern that did nothing to mask her disappointment.
Léonie tensed a bit.
“Don’t let them see you cry,” I said to the room, knowing she wouldn’t hear me. Hoping she would.