Chapter 9
nine
Daphne reached for her coffee mug and found it empty. Again. She set it down with a thunk, frustration bubbling up beneath the exhaustion. Dom had been gone for thirty-six hours now. Thirty-six hours in Praetorian’s hands. Anything could have happened in that time.
Don’t think about it. Focus on the data.
She pushed her glasses up and turned back to the screens.
Helios Properties stared back at her — a shell company three layers deep, registered in Cyprus but with banking ties to Greece.
Specifically, property acquisitions in the Cyclades islands over the past eighteen months.
She’d found it two hours ago and had been pulling threads ever since, watching the program build its visualization: a web of interconnected nodes that brightened where patterns emerged.
She wasn’t imagining it. There was a concentration in Naxos.
She expanded the Naxos connection, pulling property records, satellite imagery, shipping manifests — anything that might indicate unusual activity or security upgrades consistent with Praetorian’s operational signature.
The images populated her leftmost screen, downloading in chunks of gray and blue.
The Tech Lab door whooshed open behind her, admitting a waft of fresh coffee smell that made her stomach growl. “If that’s not coffee for me, I might actually kill you.”
“Good morning to you, too, sunshine.” Celeste appeared at her elbow and set down a steaming paper cup and a bag that smelled like the bagels from the deli across the street. “Please tell me you haven’t been here all night.”
“Fine. I won’t tell you.”
“Daph,” Celeste sighed and perched on the edge of the desk.
Today’s hair color was a deep purple that faded to blue at the tips, pulled back in a messy bun that somehow looked intentional rather than chaotic.
She wore a cropped bright pink T-shirt that showed the navel ring she got when she was sixteen—their Dad had just about had an aneurysm when he found out—and tactical pants with more pockets than any human being needed. “You need sleep.”
“I’ll sleep when we find Dom.”
“Let me take over for a bit.”
“No.”
Celeste opened her mouth, but whatever she’d been about to say was lost when the Tech Lab door opened again.
Davey and Elliot stood in the doorway. Both brothers looked like they’d been through hell and back.
Davey’s button-down shirt wrinkled and untucked on one side, his hair sticking up at odd angles like he’d been repeatedly running his hands through it.
The dark circles under his eyes aged him by a decade.
Beside him, Elliot wasn’t faring much better.
His usually perfectly styled hair was flattened on one side as if he’d fallen asleep on it, and he hadn’t shaved in what looked like days, stubble darkening his jaw.
“Tell me you have something,” Davey said.
“Maybe.” Daphne turned back to her screens. “A Praetorian shell company is buying up a lot of land in Greece.”
“That’s it?”
Elliot elbowed him. “That’s not nothing. Daphne’s been working her ass off down here.”
“Yeah, I know. Sorry,” Davey muttered and ran a hand through his hair. It was a rare gesture of uncertainty from a man who prided himself on being unshakable. “We just… have nothing on Dom. No signal, no transmission, nothing. Thirty-six hours and complete silence. And now this shit with Sabin—”
“Wait, what happened to Sabin?” Celeste asked.
“He was on his way to Dubai for a security job,” Elliot said. “Had an overnight layover in Athens, and went MIA. We haven’t heard from him since, and he never checked in for the job.”
He was also in Greece when he disappeared. That couldn’t be a coincidence, and Daphne’s internal radar pinged. She was on to something with the shell company. “How long ago?”
“The night before Dom and Vivi were taken,” Davey said. “We only found out he never showed in Dubai when we tried to contact him about Vivi’s abduction.”
Daphne filed that away and turned back to her keyboard. “So Praetorian has all three of them.”
“Probably. But we don’t know why they’d want Sabin.”
“I’ll work on it.”
“Good,” Davey said. “Let me know the moment you have something actionable.”
With that, he turned and headed for the door.
Elliot followed, but paused only to squeeze her shoulder. “You really should sleep. You look like you’re about to collapse.”
“That’s what I said,” Celeste chimed in. “But will she listen? Nooo. She’s stubborn.”
Elliot smiled. “Runs in the family.” He squeezed her shoulder again. “Intel is important, but so is your health. Davey forgets we’re not all super-soldiers like him. Take care of yourself, Daphne.”
The moment the door closed behind him, her laptop dinged an alert.
Celeste pounced. “Is that Mystery Man?”
“Go away. You’re annoying me.” Daphne pulled the laptop toward her and opened the lid.
Titan: You’ll find your cousin in Greece. Specifically, the islands.
She stared at the words, reading them once, twice, a third time.
What?
“Daph?” Celeste’s voice had lost its teasing edge. “What is it?”
Daphne turned the laptop slightly so her sister could read the message. Celeste’s eyes widened.
“How does he know that?” she asked quietly.
“I don’t know.” Daphne’s fingers hovered over the keyboard, uncertain for the first time in their year-long correspondence. “I didn’t tell him.”
“Then how—”
“I don’t know.” But she was going to find out.
Lovelace: How do you know that?
The reply came almost immediately.
Titan: Because I’m looking there too. For entirely different reasons that just happened to converge with yours.
Lovelace: That doesn’t answer my question.
And, in fact, only raised more.
The typing indicator appeared, disappeared, appeared again. He was choosing his words carefully.
Titan: I can’t explain in this format. Look up a name for me. Strauss. Heinrich Strauss.
Daphne was already typing before she’d consciously decided to.
She launched the specialized search tools she’d built for exactly this kind of intelligence gathering, pulling databases faster than most people could open browser tabs.
Heinrich Strauss. German. Neurologist. She narrowed her search further, discarding the clean academic record and going for what came after — the ethics violations, the Max Planck censure, the work that had made legitimate scientists run in the opposite direction.
“What are you finding?” Celeste leaned over her shoulder.
“Give me a minute.”
The information populated her screens in fragments, some of it heavily redacted, pulled from secured servers her program had found its way into.
Neural mapping. Biological regeneration.
Identity anchoring. Synaptic stabilization.
The research was groundbreaking and deeply wrong in a way that was hard to articulate but impossible to miss — the kind of work that treated human beings as engineering problems.
Based on what she could piece together through the redactions, Strauss had developed theoretical frameworks for preserving and transferring neural pathways — essentially the components of personality, memory, and identity — during extreme physical trauma.
Her mouth went dry. She grabbed her cooling coffee to wet it before speaking.
“They’re trying to create unkillable soldiers,” she said and looked up at her sister. “I think… Praetorian wants to build an army that can’t die.”