The air in Valencia tasted of dust and salt-tinged decay. The Villa del Acuerdo was not grand; it was a husk. A two-story stucco structure with crumbling arches, its garden long surrendered to aggressive, thorny vines. It didn't look like the seat of a vendetta. It looked like a forgotten promise, left to rot in the sun.
Cassian stepped from the rented sedan, the heat pressing down like a hand. Two of his most trusted operatives, Lev and Chen, flanked him, their eyes scanning the shuttered windows, the silent terrace. The only sound was the buzz of cicadas and the distant, mournful cry of a gull.
"Clear approach," Lev murmured into his comms, his hand resting on the weapon concealed beneath his jacket. "No thermal signatures within fifty meters."
"It's empty," Cassian said, his voice flat. He knew it. He could feel the hollow ache of the place. But he had to see. He had to stand on the ground of the grievance.
He pushed open the rusted iron gate, its hinge screaming a protest. The path to the front door was cracked terra cotta, reclaimed by weeds. The door itself was unlocked. It swung inward with a sigh of damp wood.
The smell hit him first—old paper, mildew, and beneath it, the sharp, clean scent of recent electronics. The interior was a study in eerie juxtaposition. The furniture was sparse and shrouded in yellowed sheets. But the walls… the walls were alive.
Covering every inch of peeling plaster were timelines, charts, and photographs, meticulously arranged like a museum of resentment. Newspaper clippings of Thorne corporate triumphs were pinned next to grainy surveillance shots of a boy, then a teenager, then a man—Julius—always on the periphery, always in shadow. School reports with high marks were annotated in red pen: Not good enough for the name. A faded photo of Cassian's grandfather shaking hands with a diplomat was circled, with an arrow pointing to a corner where a young, dark-haired woman stood, her face blurred: Her.
One entire wall was dedicated to Alister Thorne, Cassian's father. His childhood, his successes, his marriage, his death. Each milestone was a pinprick in another life.
"It's a shrine," Chen whispered, a chill in her voice despite the heat. "A shrine to the life he didn't get to live."
Cassian walked slowly through the first-floor rooms, the ghost of his grandfather's betrayal whispering from the walls. He felt no anger here, only a profound, unsettling sadness. This wasn't the war room of a mastermind. It was the archive of a ghost.
He found the study at the back of the house. Here, the past gave way to the present. The sheet over the desk was tossed aside. On a modern, minimalist glass table sat a high-tech console, its lights winking in the dim room, utterly alien amidst the decay. A single, plush office chair faced a large, dark screen.
"Sir," Lev said, his weapon drawn now. "This is live. It's drawing power from a separate, shielded grid. It's waiting."
Cassian didn't hesitate. He walked to the chair and sat. He would look this ghost in the eye.
The screen flickered to life with a soft hum.
The face that appeared, was not what he expected. It wasn't the grizzled, aged profile of a lifelong outcast. It was young. Startlingly young, perhaps twenty-seven. Handsome, with sharp, intelligent features, dark eyes, and hair styled with an almost artistic care. He wore a sleek, black turtleneck. He looked like a visionary tech CEO, not a specter from the past.
"Ah," the young man said, his voice smooth, lightly accented with Spanish cadence. It was chillingly courteous. "Right on time. Welcome to the house of the agreement, Mr. Thorne. Or should I say… cousin?"
Cassian's face betrayed nothing. "Where is Julius?"
The young man gave an elegant, dismissive wave. "Papa J is… occupied. He sent me to host. He knew the architect would see the symbolism. You came for the heart of the grievance. How poetic." He leaned forward, his expression one of mild, intellectual curiosity. "But the heart is no longer here. It's in New York, I'd wager, beating a rather frantic rhythm at the moment."
"Who are you?"
"A fellow student of the family history. You can call me Mateo." He smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. "Papa J told me exactly what to say to a tall man named Cassian Thorne. A script. But, between us?" His smile turned conspiratorial, almost playful. "I find scripts so… limiting. I want a little more drama, you see? It's more fun that way."
Cassian's blood ran cold. This wasn't the calculated fury of J. This was something else: the gleeful, unpredictable zeal of a true believer. "Is he really your father?"
Mateo's head tilted. "If not by blood, then by worth. He plucked me from an orphanage in Seville when I was twelve. Abandoned. Unwanted. He saw my mind—my talent for systems, for patterns. He showed me this." He gestured off-screen, likely to the walls of the villa. "He showed me the ledger of a life stolen. He gave me a purpose. A family. So yes, in every way that matters, he is my father. And you are the villain in our story."
"He used you," Cassian stated flatly. "He filled you with his poison."
"He gave me truth!" Mateo's composure slipped for a fraction of a second, a flash of fervent fire in his eyes. "He showed me that legacy isn't given, it's taken. And that the world is just a series of systems to be hacked. Including family." He settled back, regaining his eerie calm. "He knew you would come here. This villa? It was bait for you, Cassian. Just as the penthouse was such delicious bait for Marcus's rather blunt instruments. A two-front theater. Papa does love his symmetry."
The pieces slammed together in Cassian's mind. A diversion within a diversion. The attack on the penthouse—loud, violent, terrifying—was to pull all resources, all attention, into one desperate, defensive knot. To make them look inward.
"What is his play, Mateo?" Cassian's voice was low, a threat in the quiet room.
"Ah, to the point. He also sends his regards, and a message." Mateo's face became a mask of solemn recital. "He said: 'You see, Cassian, I don't need to kill your children to end your line. I simply need to ensure they are never yours to raise.' his exact words. A clean cut is better than a messy blow, don't you think?"
Legal. Social. The threat crystallized. Not murder. Erasure. They would take his children through courts, through lies, through public opinion. They would make Elara seem unfit, unstable, and Cassian a dangerous magnet for violence. They would make the world believe they were saving the twins from him.
"It won't work," Cassian said, the words tasting like ash.
Mateo laughed, a soft, genuine sound. "The wheels are already in motion. The right judge, the right social worker, the right narrative planted in the right ears. A tragedy befalls the troubled Thorne household… and concerned, anonymous parties step in to save the innocent babies from the cycle of violence. It's a better story, really. More nuanced. Papa is a traditionalist in his hates, but a modernist in his methods."
At that moment, Cassian's phone, which had been a dead weight in his pocket since they neared the villa, suddenly vibrated. A single, frantic bar of signal appeared, then vanished. But it was enough. A voice message auto-downloaded.
He didn't want to play it in front of Mateo's watching eyes, but he had no choice. He put it on speaker.
Thomas's voice erupted, stripped of all its usual cynicism, raw with panic and gunfire in the background: "Cassian! They're inside! The door's breached! Elara's in labor, we're falling back to the nursery! And… Cassian, Sophie's gone! They took her in the chaos! I lost her! I—" The message cut off, severed as the jamming reasserted itself.
The sound of his cousin's despair, the confirmation of the siege, the mention of Sophie—it was a triple-pointed blade to the gut. Cassian's composure, the icy control that had carried him across an ocean, shattered. He surged to his feet, his chair screeching back.
On the screen, Mateo watched him, his expression one of rapt, artistic appreciation. "Ah," he breathed, delighted. "The frantic rhythm. Perfect. The distraction is performing beautifully."
Cassian lunged, not at the screen, but at the console itself. He ripped wires from the wall, seized the monitor, and with a roar of pure, unleashed fury, hurled it across the room. It shattered against the wall of photographs, exploding in a shower of glass and plastic over the image of his grandfather.
He stood there, chest heaving, the silence now absolute and accusing.
"Sir," Lev said quietly from the doorway. "We have to go. Now."
Cassian looked at his hands, then at the wreckage of the screen. He had come to confront a ghost and found a puppet, and the puppeteer was already pulling strings a continent away. He had walked into a beautifully set trap, and while he was staring at the past, the present was being stolen from him.
He turned and strode from the room, from the villa, from the suffocating weight of the grievance. The flight back would be an eternity. And he knew, with a certainty that froze his soul, that the battle for his children's future had already begun without him.