The world didn't feel real anymore.
The air tasted like ash. The sky outside my office windows looked too still. I could hear my own heartbeat over everything else.
Adrien was gone.
And this time, it wasn't just fear whispering in my chest.
It was fury.
I stood at the head of the boardroom, heels clicking against marble, every executive of my company seated like nervous schoolchildren. No one dared speak. Not when they saw the look in my eyes.
"I need every one of you to listen carefully," I said, voice low, deadly calm. "My son has gone missing. And I don't care if you're a fashion house or a war machine—you work for me. And right now, I'm both."
No one blinked.
I slammed a folder onto the table. "I want full access to our global security division. Traffic cameras. Airport logs. Satellite imaging if we have it. I want a list of every person Adrien has ever come into contact with in the last year. If they so much as looked at him funny, I want their name, number, and blood type."
One of the assistants stammered, "But—Miss Langford—that would violate—"
I turned to him slowly. "I do not care."
He shut up.
"I want the best hackers. I want mercenaries if I have to. I want movement. Not sympathy. Not press releases. You find him."
I left the boardroom to the sound of a hundred phones lighting up at once.
And then I walked.
Like a storm.
Like a queen who had lost her heir and was ready to burn every kingdom until she found him.
I called private security, called in favors from politicians I'd once dressed for campaign galas. I made the NYPD look like amateurs with the people I hired.
I shut down roads. Called in no-fly lists. Froze traffic in a twelve-block radius around his school. I bought out three private investigation firms before sunset.
I sent drones over the city.
I sent men to question Nolan's drivers, to tap into phone lines, to tear through the guest logs of every hotel on the Upper East Side.
And all the while… he sat beside me.
Nolan.
His hand brushed mine too gently. His voice calm, reassuring, poisoned sugar. "We'll find him, Ava," he murmured. "We always do."
I wanted to scream.
I wanted to claw the skin off his face.
But I smiled. Like I didn't notice the twitch in his jaw when I mentioned Adrien's name. Like I didn't feel that slow, creeping certainty curling like barbed wire in my stomach.
He had something to do with this.
And he didn't know yet that I knew.
But soon, he would.
And when that moment came?
I would be the storm he never saw coming.
Because I was Ava Langford.
And no one—no one—touched my son.