Page 144 of Anchor
Vos turned back to the window and watched the white build on the trees. “It ends in Denver,” he whispered. “With a birth and… a death.”
FORTY-SEVEN
0530 HOURS LOCAL TIME
Heather Bowman watched the pale sliver of dawn bleed across the windowpane, her reflection half-swallowed by the growing light.
The villa was quiet, its silence unnatural and sterile, like the rooms had been wiped clean of humanity long before they arrived. She pulled the knit shawl tighter over her shoulders, hiding the surgical tape that still clung behind her ear. The ache throbbed, dull and constant but not as sharp as what twisted in her chest.
Vos had disappeared. So had Scour.
Heather sat on the edge of the bed they never shared anymore and slid open the drawer he rarely touched. Inside was the thin file folder. Photos. Scans. Notes from the Prague clinic. Bloodwork. And the sonogram he stole—the blurry grayscale curve of a spine, a faint hand curled in the dark. Claire’s baby. Her grandchild.
She ran her thumb along the edge of the printout, fighting the pull in her chest. A child she would never hold. She shouldhave stopped this months ago, years ago. But the truth was harder—she hadn’t.
She had carried a child of Lucien’s, lost it, and that loss hollowed her. Afterward, she didn’t want to try again. Joe wanted a child, so she listened to Lucien. She told herself it was strategy. Joe adored Claire. Heather convinced herself that was enough. Lucien whispered that Claire could serve a larger purpose, and Heather believed him.
By the time Claire’s genius burned bright, Joe was dead, Lucien was in a Russian pit, and Ian Chase was the one giving Claire the life she deserved. Heather told herself that made sense. That it was balance. That it wasn’t her fault.
And yet, when Lucien came back, twisted with vengeance, she let him in again. She told herself she had no choice, that she was surviving. But even now, staring at the sonogram, she knew that wasn’t the whole truth.
She had naively and selfishly thought she might hold her grandchild. That some piece of what she lost could be mended through Claire’s child.
But Vos never wanted healing. He wanted design.
He never broke people with force. He peeled them open, found the creases in loyalty, the hunger for relevance, the ache for redemption, and he had found hers.
For him, Claire’s baby wasn’t family. It was a blueprint. The child would be a genius like her mother, with strength like her father, shaped without compromise. The baby would not be raised but engineered. A weapon where Claire had failed.
Heather pressed the sonogram flat against her palm, the longing rising sharp as grief.I should have stopped this. But I... I didn’t.And maybeit was too late anyway.
Heather closed the drawer softly. She didn’t believe in redemption, just consequences. And they were coming.
She glanced down at her hands, spotting the faint tremor, not age but fear. Guilt, that was worse. In the mirror, her face was new. A stranger had survived the surgery. But behind the eyes, she was still Heather. And she was finally starting to regret it.
She slipped into the guest bath, locked the door, and turned on the water. Her hands shook as she pulled the encrypted device from her makeup case, hidden in the false bottom. It was coded to an old diplomatic frequency.
She keyed in the contact. She didn’t need to write a message. She only needed to hit send. The signal would piggyback on a dormant embassy protocol and ping Ian’s private queue at Chase International. Just one small signal. Was she too late? She had one tiny tendril of remorse.
A shadow passed behind the frosted glass. “Everything alright in there?One of the guards called.”
CHASE INTERNATIONAL – D.C. OPS HUB – 2333 HOURS
The alert came in as a ghost-ping on a forgotten diplomatic channel. Kieran, still in Denver, caught it first, flagged in the vault queue under a legacy encryption only one person would know.Heather.He was immediately on the phone to Ian.
Ian leaned over the terminal. “Time stamp?”
“Three minutes ago,” Kieran replied, pulling the signal. “Origin—Montenegro. No content.”
“She’s trying to warn us.”
The perimeter alert sounded next, but not from Montenegro. From Denver. Ian’s breathing went still.
Kieran’s voice dropped to lethal calm. “Ian… he’s not over there. He’s here.”
CHASE DENVER – REHAB SUITE, PRIVATE WING – 2103 HOURS
The pain never truly left Reid. It shifted instead, coiling beneath his skin like hot wire through old wounds. His leg ached from standing too long. His ribs burned each time he drew a breath. His hand, the one fractured during the attack, trembled from the strain of holding weight. None of it mattered because something was wrong.
