Page 126 of Anchor
Kieran hesitated.
Lincoln answered, “Vos and… your mother.”
Claire’s heart stopped. Everything in the room seemed to tip sideways. “No.”
Kieran’s voice softened. “It was from Prague. A quiet camera feed outside a private medical clinic. They were walking together. Not by accident.”
She swayed and caught the edge of the table.
Lincoln moved forward a step but didn’t touch her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We know this is more than tactical to you.”
Claire’s breath came in sharp puffs. “How long have you known?”
“Tiki waited to confirm it wasn’t a deepfake. Vos’s face has changed. But all his metrics are the same. Tessa pinged Chase Net at 4:13 a.m.,” Kieran said. “We didn’t sit on it.”
She nodded slowly, barely hearing herself speak. “She broke her agreement with Ian. Didn’t take her long.”
Lincoln’s voice was low. “And she’s with the man who tried to destroy everything you love.”
The room fell silent except for the hum of the lights. Claire stared past them both, into the cold shine of the glass. “I want every file on Prague in the last six months. Every Chase shadow contact. Every drone path we scrubbed.”
Kieran stepped forward. “Claire…”
She turned, sharp and clear. “You brought me here because you trusted me. Now let me do what I was built to do.”
Lincoln nodded once. “We’re already clearing the lanes.”
Claire didn’t move. She had blood in her mouth and fire in her spine. “If she’s with him willingly… then I will end them both.”
She stood at the window,arms folded tight against her chest, gaze locked on the mountains that no longer gave her calm. The silence only amplified the noise inside her.
Behind her, Lincoln Collier waited with his usual quiet patience. Kieran left, heading straight to analytics to run the Prague feed himself. She hadn’t asked twice. Ian was next. The minute he was available, he needed to see this, no matter how much it broke inside him.
Her mother had not been declared dead. She was exiled from Claire’s life, from the Chase ecosystem, and from any future that resembled legitimacy.
And now, she was sighted walking beside Vos. That truth hit harder than the footage itself.
Claire’s tablet was still in her hands. She scrolled, numb, through the blur of headlines and talking heads. Her mother’s resignation statement was composed, pristine, every syllable hers and yet not hers, and it had detonated across the networks. National anchors dissected it, Ann Arbor papers speculated, Sunday news shows looped it endlessly, each one trying to frame her disappearance as scandal or tragedy.
Her staff claimed ignorance. That was likely the truth. No one knew where she’d gone. The speculation churned louder. Was she gravely ill? Was she compromised? Did she resign under investigation? They dissected her face, her tone, and her silence.
And then there was the political fallout. The Governor of Michigan’s choice for her replacement, the scramble over who would chair the Armed Services Committee, and the op-edsmourning the loss of her hawkish steadiness on defense. Every angle was covered, and none of it reached the truth.
Claire’s thumb hesitated on a headline that cut sharper than the rest:Where is Claire Bowman?The articles speculated on her emergency leave filing. Reporters were hunting her, pundits spinning her absence into another question mark in the narrative of her mother’s collapse. Or they speculated that the shooting on campus sent her psychologically reeling. Was she more seriously hurt when she was shot than reported, or was it a hit that placed her in the witness protection program, and her mother’s resignation was related to that?
She chuckled. Ian would appreciate the crazier rumors. The one involving aliens made her laugh.
She closed her eyes for a beat, the glow of the tablet still burning her lids. Her mother’s actions had forced her to choose exile. Claire hadn’t chosen any of this. And yet, all of it was hurting her now.
She turned back toward Lincoln. “I want Tuck, Patrick, and Seth here now.”
“And the rest of the team?” Lincoln said.
“I don’t want the full team,” she clarified. “Not yet, just them.”
Lincoln paused. “You’re building a response?”
“No,” she said. “I’m figuring out how to tell Reid.”
