Chapter 134:


    In the elevator, he leaned his head against the cool metal wall and closed his eyes. Isolde’s face surfaced behind his eyelids — not the quiet, submissive wife he had ignored for five years, but the woman who had stood in that room ten minutes ago, cold and sharp and terrifyingly magnificent.


    Sophia.


    He pulled out his phone. His thumb hovered over her name — Isolde — which suddenly looked foreign to him, like the name of a stranger. Driven by apulsive need to reassert his connection to her, he deleted the contact and typed the name again, as though the act itself could rewind time.


    He pressed call.


    The number you have reached is not in service. Please check the number and try again.


    The mechanical voice was the final m of a door. She hadn’t merely blocked him. She had erased him.


    Grayson lowered the phone. A hollow ache expanded in his chest, filling the space where his certainty used to be. He had thought she was bluffing. He had thought she was negotiating.


    But staring at the ck screen in his hand, he understood with a jolt of pure terror that she wasn’t ying a game at all. She was ending it.


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    “Liam,” he said to his assistant as the elevator doors opened into the lobby. “Find out where she is. I don’t care who you have to bribe. Find my wife.”


    The air conditioning in the Orbital Systems server room was set to a bone-chilling sixty degrees, but Isolde didn’t feel the cold. She was burning with a feverish focus.


    On the monitors before her, the simtion for the Department of Defense satellite array was running its final stress test. The origami-style folding mechanism she had designed — the Valkyrie Hinge — was holding steady at four hundred percent structural load.


    “It’s beautiful,” ire whispered from behind her. The skepticism that had once clouded the senior engineer’s eyes was gone, reced by something closer to reverence. “I’ve never seen a deployment sequence this smooth. It’s like poetry.”


    Isolde didn’t smile. She simply nodded, her eyes scanning the data streams for any micro-fractures. Her left arm throbbed steadily in its brace — a dull, rhythmic reminder of the drone strike — but she pressed the pain into a small, locked box at the back of her mind.


    The inte on the desk buzzed.


    “Ms. Carson?” The receptionist’s voice came through tinny and uncertain. “There’s a Mr. Liam here. He says he has a delivery from Mr. Lancaster and insists it’s urgent.”


    The room went quiet. The other engineers nced at Isolde, their expressions caught somewhere between curiosity and pity. The office gossip mill had been churning since the Sophia reveal.


    Isolde’s fingers paused on the keyboard. “Tell him I’m not epting packages from that address. If he leaves it, send it to the bomb squad.”


    “He says it’s an apology, ma’am. He won’t leave.”


    Isolde stood. The movement was sharp and decisive. “Fine.”


    She walked out of theb, her heels clicking against the polished concrete floor. She bypassed the elevator and took the stairs down to the lobby, needing the exertion to burn off the sudden spike of adrenaline.


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