He smashed out words on his keyboard, one last pair of texts.
Reece:You made that promise to the weak little empath who couldn’t bear to say murder. It doesn’t mean shit anymore. Not to me.
Reece: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.
He stabbed the Send icon, then shoved the phone into his pocket, following Alex into Jason Owens’s house.
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 ofboth 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, smotheringher 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.”
