Chapter Ninety-Four: The Hunt
The city became a hunting ground.
I moved through it like a ghost—no, like a god of vengeance, unseen until the moment of striking, absolute in my judgment. The funeral was barely cold, the empty coffin still lowering into Grace family soil, when my war began.
Leo drove. Leon handled communications. And I sat in the back of the armored vehicle, a tablet in my hands, the faces of my enemies glowing like targets in a scope.
First: Dmitri Volkov.
I found him in a penthouse overlooking the river—the same river where an unknown woman's body had been pulled from the water and dressed in my wife's identity. Dmitri was celebrating. Champagne. Women. The smug satisfaction of a man who believed he had won.
He stopped believing when my men breached his doors.
I didn't speak at first. I simply walked through the chaos—guards neutralized, women screaming, Dmitri backing against the window—and stood before my rival with the patience of an executioner.
"You took my child," I said quietly.
Dmitri's face went pale. "I don't know what you're—"
"You took my child from her body. You drugged my wife. You framed her for murder." Each word was measured, deliberate, a nail in a coffin yet to be built. "Where is she?"
"I don't know!" Dmitri's voice cracked. "The procedure, yes—I paid for that, I wanted you to suffer—but the woman, your wife, I never touched her after. She was alive when my people left. I swear it!"
I studied him. The terror in his eyes was real. The truth, for once, was in his voice.
"Then you're useless to me."
I turned and walked out.
Behind me, Leon stayed. The sounds that followed were not ones I needed to witness. Dmitri Volkov would not be celebrating anything ever again. But his death was incidental—a punctuation mark, not the sentence.
The real hunt continued.
---
The hospital burned that night.
I stood across the street, watching flames consume the building where my child had been murdered, where my wife's name had been forged onto lies. The fire trucks arrived too late. The evidence—the records, the footage, the room where it happened—all of it turned to ash.
I didn't feel satisfaction.
I felt nothing.
Nothing but the cold, burning need to find her.
---
Next: The Graces.
I found Lucas first.
His brother-in-law was in his penthouse, surrounded by security that evaporated the moment my men appeared. Lucas stood in his living room, a glass of whiskey frozen halfway to his lips, as I walked through his front door like a man entering his own home.
"You." Lucas's voice shook, though he tried to hide it. "You have no right—"
My gun was in my hand before Lucas could finish. The cold metal pressed against his forehead, forcing his head back against the wall.
"Where is my wife?"
"I don't know!" Lucas's eyes were wide, his composure shattering. "I swear to God, Rowan, I don't know. We threatened her, yes—we wanted her to come home, to end the pregnancy, to—" He swallowed hard. "But we didn't take her. She's my sister. My blood. Whatever I am, whatever I've done—I wouldn't—"
I pressed the gun harder.
"She was on the news. In the river. Dead." My voice was flat, empty, the voice of a man who had moved beyond emotion into something colder. "Was that your doing?"
Lucas shook his head frantically, the motion scraping skin against metal. "No! No, that wasn't us. We thought—when we saw it—we thought it was really her. We claimed the body because—because we had to control the narrative. But we didn't put her there. I swear it. I swear on our mother's grave."
Something in my chest flickered. Not warmth—but a shift. A recalculation.
Lucas was a murderer. A manipulator. The man who had destroyed Lyanna, who had set this entire tragedy in motion years before Aira ever entered my life. But in this moment, looking into his eyes, I saw the truth.
He didn't know where she was.
"Get out of my city," I said quietly. "You have forty-eight hours. If I see your face after that, I will end you. Not for Aira. For Lyanna."
I lowered the gun.
Lucas slid down the wall, gasping.
I walked out.
---
Marcus Grace was easier.
The old politician sat in his study, exactly where Aira had faced him weeks ago. He didn't beg. Didn't deny. He simply looked at me with the cold calculation of a man who had spent his life weighing risks and accepting losses.
"I don't know where she is," Marcus said. "If I did, I would use her. That's what you came to hear, isn't it? The truth? She's a liability to me now. A loose end. If I had her, I would leverage her. I don't. So she's either dead, or she's beyond my reach."
My hand tightened on the gun.
"If you had killed my daughter," Marcus continued, his voice steady, "I would hunt you to the ends of the earth. But you didn't. The men who took her—who did that to her—they're not connected to me. They're not connected to anyone. They're chaos. And chaos, as you well know, is the hardest enemy to fight."
He leaned back in his chair.
"So go. Hunt your chaos. Find her if she's still alive. But don't waste time pointing guns at old men who've already lost everything that mattered."
I stared at him for a long moment.
Then I turned and left.
---
Julian Thorne was out of the country. His alibi was ironclad—hotel records, flight manifests, interviews with business associates. He hadn't been anywhere near the city when Aira disappeared.
Another dead end.
Another thread leading nowhere.
---
The frustration was a living thing, coiled in my chest, strangling me slowly. I had the names of the men who'd taken my child. I had the proof of their conspiracy. I had burned their hospital, destroyed their evidence, scattered their organization to the winds.
But I didn't have her.
And every hour that passed, every trail that went cold, the fear grew colder and sharper in my veins.
Then the video went viral.
---
Leo brought it to me in the war room—a converted warehouse on the industrial waterfront, now covered in maps, photos, and the faces of everyone who might have touched Aira's life.
"Boss." Leo's voice was strange—tight, urgent, almost afraid. "You need to see this."
The screen glowed.
A dark street. Graffiti-covered walls. The fisheye lens of a security camera mounted high on a building.
And a woman.
She was struggling. Fighting. Her dark hair flying as she thrashed against two larger figures, their faces obscured by shadows and the camera's angle. Her dress—thin, simple, the one she'd been wearing when they threw her out—tore at the shoulder as she fought.
Aira.
My Aira.
Alive.
The footage was grainy, half-lit, barely thirty seconds long. But it was unmistakable. The way she moved. The set of her shoulders. The desperate, furious energy of a woman refusing to go quietly.
Two men dragged her toward a car. She kicked one in the knee—he staggered, cursing—and for a moment, she almost broke free. Then the other caught her, his arm around her throat, and the chloroform rag appeared from his pocket.
She fought even then. Held her breath. Twisted. Clawed.
But the rag found her face.
Her body went limp.
They shoved her into the back of the car. The door slammed. The vehicle disappeared into the night.
The footage ended.
The room was silent.
I stared at the frozen frame—her face, just before the rag took her, frozen in a rictus of defiance and terror.
She had fought.
She had fought so hard.
And somewhere in this city, those two men still had her.
I turned to Leo, my face carved from stone, my eyes burning with a fire that would consume worlds.
"Find them."
The hunt had a new target.
Not her family. Not my rivals. Not the men who had taken my child.
The monsters who had taken my wife.
And when I found them—
The video showed struggle. It showed survival. It showed that she was alive when they took her.
It also showed faces. Partial, shadowed, but enough. Two men. Distinct builds. The way they moved. The car's make and model, visible in the final frame.
Leo was already working, pulling DMV records, cross-referencing with known offenders, feeding the images into every database we could access.
Leon was on the phone with contacts in the underworld—the informants, the rats, the men who heard things in the dark.
And I stood before the frozen image of my wife's face, committing every pixel to memory, letting the fire build.
The serial killers. The opportunists. The men who had snatched a grieving, abandoned woman from the streets and made her their prey.
They didn't know who they'd taken.
They didn't know what was coming.
But they would learn.
They would learn that Rowan Royce's wife was not a victim.
She was a detonation waiting to happen.
And when I found them—
The city would burn.