The Empire's Ransom

Five years. Half a decade of shadows, whispered lullabies, and looking over her shoulder. Elena lived in a remote fishing village in Nova Scotia. She was known as Nora, a quiet widow who baked bread for the local diner and raised two impossibly smart, beautiful five-year-olds. Leo and Mia were the center of her universe. They knew nothing of marble foyers, diamond rings, or the blood-stained legacy of their last name. They knew only the smell of sea salt, the rough sand of the beach, and the fierce, all-consuming love of their mother.

But five-year-olds need schooling, and schools need records. Elena had been careful, using forged documents purchased from a smuggler in Montreal. But the smuggler got sloppy. He reused a sequence of numbers on a forged tax document.

A continent away, in a windowless room humming with servers, a red light flashed on the screen of one of Gabriel Knox’s analysts.

“Boss,” the analyst called out, his voice shaking. “I got a hit. A forged SIN matching the biometric algorithms of the aliases we’ve been tracking. It pinged a school registration in Nova Scotia.”

Gabriel was in Dominic’s office within three minutes. Dominic was staring out the floor-to-ceiling windows of his Manhattan high-rise, a glass of water in his hand. He had stopped drinking five years ago. He had stopped sleeping around. He had become a monk holding onto an empire of sin, waiting for a single prayer to be answered.