The King's Lost Princess

Chapter 9: The Ghost Girl

Three months later

The jet hummed like a contained storm around him.

Kendrick sat alone in the leather seat by the window, jacket off, shirt sleeves rolled to his forearms. A file lay open on the table in front of him, pages clipped, notes in his sharp handwriting edging the margins.

He hadn’t turned a page in twenty minutes.

The city lights below Europe were reduced to scattered sparks under a blanket of clouds. From this height, borders didn’t matter. Empires, flags, dynasties—they all blurred into the same darkness.

Sam moved quietly in the aisle, setting a coffee on the table.

“You’re not sleeping,” he said.

“I don’t sleep on flights,” Kendrick replied.

“That’s a lie,” Sam said calmly.

“You just don’t sleep when something bothers you.”

Kendrick didn’t answer.

He picked up the coffee but didn’t drink it. His eyes remained on the window, on the nothingness beyond the glass.

Three months.

Ninety-two days.

Two thousand two hundred and eight hours.

Since Leonardo’s car “accident.”

Since the emergency directive.

Since the night a girl with no name vanished in Milan and left behind a trail of erased data and dead men.

Three months, and she was still a ghost.

Sam sat opposite him, watching.

“What’s on your mind?” he asked.

Kendrick’s jaw flexed.

“The same thing that’s been on my mind for ninety-two days.”

Sam leaned back. “The missing piece.”

Kendrick didn’t correct him.

He didn’t have to.

The jet cut through the night. The seatbelt light was off, but Kendrick’s chest felt strapped tight.

He closed the file.

He didn’t need to read it.

He knew every word, every line, every redacted section by heart.

The girl who wasn’t supposed to exist.

The heir Leonardo hid.

The ghost the enemy tried to erase.

He rested his head against the seat, eyes half-lidded—not in exhaustion, but in a rare, almost dangerous stillness.

And one by one, the past three months unfolded in his mind.

The Hospital

The first time he saw Leonardo after the crash, the old man looked nothing like the figure from the gala.

No suit.

No cane.

No sharp glint of authority.

Just pale skin, bruises blooming under bandages, wires attached to thin, shaking arms. Machines breathed rhythm into the room—steady beeps, mechanical sighs, the background music of fragility.

The private hospital wing had been cleared.

Sam had waited outside.

Kendrick had walked in alone.

The doctor, a thin woman with tired eyes, stood near Leonardo’s bed, flipping through charts.

“Mr. Peterson,” she greeted quietly. “Thank you for coming.”

He glanced once at the monitors. “How bad?”

“Multiple fractures. Significant head trauma. Internal bleeding. We stopped the worst of it, but…” She hesitated. “…we had to induce a coma to control swelling and stabilize him.”

“How long?” Kendrick asked.

“We don’t know,” the doctor said.

“He could wake up in a week. A month. A year. Or never.”

Kendrick stared at the still figure on the bed.

The last time they’d met, Leonardo’s eyes had burned with sharp, almost maddening urgency. He’d offered a marriage, a crown, an empire—if Kendrick would protect a girl he’d never met.

Kendrick had refused.

He’d walked away.

Now Leonardo lay between life and death while someone else hunted the girl he’d tried to protect.

A lawyer stood in the corner, wringing his hands.

“Mr. Peterson,” he said. “The directive—”

“I read it,” Kendrick said.

“You understand what it means?”

“It means,” Kendrick replied, “that in his absence, I control everything he built.”

“Yes, sir.”

The lawyer swallowed.

“You also understand you can decline.”

Kendrick looked at him.

The man took a step back.

“You think I run from responsibility?” Kendrick asked softly.

“N-No, sir. Of course not, sir, I just—”

Kendrick turned back to the bed.

Leonardo’s fingers were wrapped in gauze. A faint bruise marked his throat, like someone had tried to strangle the last words out of him.

“You chose me,” Kendrick said under his breath.

“Without my consent. Without explanation.”

The machines continued their indifferent beeping.

He leaned closer, voice dropping so low only the unconscious man and the machines could hear.

“You were right about one thing,” he murmured.

“Something is wrong in your world.”

His jaw tightened.

“And I don’t like unanswered questions.”

He straightened.

To the lawyer, he said,

“Get the board in order. I’ll be at the European headquarters tomorrow.”

“Yes, Mr. Peterson.”

“And keep his condition off public channels,” he added.

“Last thing we need is vultures circling before I’ve secured the bones.”

The lawyer nodded quickly.

As he turned to leave, Kendrick glanced back once more at Leonardo.

The old man didn’t move.

Didn’t know.

Didn’t see the one man he’d gambled everything on walking out of that room with his empire in hand.

The Boardroom

The Wilson European Headquarters looked like a bank built by a kingdom.

Polished marble floors.

Heavy wood doors.

Glass walls that saw everything but revealed nothing.

The boardroom was full when Kendrick walked in.

They were all there—European council members, senior executives, legal advisers, heads of security, finance, operations. Men and women who had built and defended the Wilson empire for decades.

They went silent as Kendrick entered.

No one sat at the head of the table.

They had left that chair empty.

Waiting.

Hoping.

Kendrick walked to it like he walked into any room he planned to dominate.

Casually.

As if nothing could touch him.

He didn’t bother sitting right away. He let the tension stretch, his gaze sweeping the room, reading faces like spreadsheets.

Fear.

Disapproval.

Confusion.

Calculation.

Perfect.

Finally, he spoke.

“Let’s skip the condolences,” he said. “This is not a funeral.”

One of the older board members nodded stiffly. “Of course, Mr. Peterson. We’re grateful you came so quickly. The… directive took us by surprise.”

“It took me by surprise,” Kendrick said. “But here we are.”

A woman with sharp eyes and too-calm hands raised her voice.

“With all due respect, Mr. Peterson, the board still needs to understand why Mr. Wilson chose you—”

“So do I,” he cut in. “But he’s not available to answer the question.”

A muscle in someone’s jaw twitched.

“We have protocols,” another man said. “Succession plans. Internal candidates—”

Kendrick tilted his head. “How did those plans work out when his car exploded?”

Silence.

He let it sit.

“Whatever attacked him,” Kendrick continued, “wasn’t interested in your protocols. It was interested in him. And in something he was protecting.”

He finally took the head seat.

It felt… strange.

Not heavy.

Just unfamiliar.

“I don’t care if you like me,” he said. “I don’t care if you agree with his decision. What I care about is this: someone made a move against Leonardo Wilson and got away with it.”

His gaze sharpened.

“That is not going to happen again.”

He placed both hands flat on the table.

“From this moment, I have full operational control. You will give me access to every internal system, every file, every off-the-books operation, every ‘ghost’ account you think I don’t know about.”

Somebody swallowed.

“If I find you hiding something from me,” Kendrick continued calmly, “you will not be fired. You will be erased.”

Sam, standing behind him, didn’t flinch.

He’d heard that promise before.

“We’re clear?” Kendrick asked.

Nods.

Murmurs.

“Yes, Mr. Peterson.”

He sat back.

“Good. Then start with this.”

He slid a piece of paper across the table. A list of dates and locations.

Milan.

Zurich.

Vienna.

Prague.

All within the last year.

All marked with one word.

“Missing.”

“These are your Shadow Team disappearances,” Kendrick said.

“Every one of them tied to a person—or people—Leonardo considered critical.”

The head of security stiffened. “Sir, some of those are presumed dead, some are—”

“Presumed isn’t good enough,” Kendrick said.

“Whoever did this,” he went on, “has been dismantling your protection network for months. Years, maybe. The crash was not random. It was the final move in a series of calculated strikes.”

He tapped the list.

“Somebody is burning your defenses. I want every detail about each incident. And I want to know what they were protecting.”

An executive cleared his throat.

“I—We… we don’t know the specifics. Mr. Wilson kept that information extremely restricted. Even from us.”

“Who had access?” Kendrick asked.

Silence.

Finally, the security head answered.

“Leonardo himself. And… a handful of off-record operatives.”

“Names,” Kendrick said.

More silence.

Then, reluctantly, they gave him a few.

None of them alive.

Every lead ended in a corpse.

Except one.

A codename.

No gender.

No nationality.

No photograph.

Just a designation in a redacted file:

“Subject A – Priority Asset. Hidden. Non-traceable. Never recorded.”

Kendrick remembered the first time he’d seen that on a screen.

“How many ‘priority assets’ did he hide?” he’d asked.

“Just one,” the tech analyst had whispered. “Everything else is blacked out. It’s like… he didn’t want even the system to know she exists.”

Then the analyst had looked up at him, nervous.

“We think it’s a she,” he’d corrected. “Some of the language… it suggests…”

He didn’t have to finish.

Kendrick had already made the leap.

Leonardo didn’t risk his life for contracts.

He risked it for blood.

The House in Milan

The phone call had come two weeks later.

“Sir? We found something in Milan.”

Kendrick had flown overnight.

Rain had washed the alley clean of most sins, but some stains clung like ghosts.

The officer lifted the police tape for him. “This is where she was last seen.”

She.

They still didn’t have a name.

He walked down the narrow alley, footsteps echoing softly off the walls. The broken streetlight above flickered weakly, as if trying to restart a memory.

“This camera,” the officer said, pointing up, “was cut at 23:14. Power severed at the source. Clean job. No prints.”

“And there?” Kendrick asked, nodding at the other end.

“We lost her. She never appears on the next camera. Either she was taken here… or pulled into a vehicle off this angle.”

They’d found nothing.

No phone.

No bag.

No body.

Just a partial report from months ago about a young woman who never made it home, filed by desperate friends and handled by overworked officers.

A missing person among many.

Except this one had an empire’s blood in her veins.

From there, he’d gone to the safehouse—the one Leonardo had quietly funded under a false name.

The one Lucian had found first.

The smell hit him before the scene did.

Burnt fabric.

Metal.

Gunpowder.

Blood.

Charred walls framed the entry. Furniture reduced to skeletons. Bullet holes pocked the remaining plaster.

Bodies had been cleared, but their outline remained in the faded stains on the tiles.

“Shadow Team,” Marco had said quietly, standing beside him. “We identified four. No survivors. Weapons gone. Hard drives melted. Backup servers destroyed.”

Kendrick walked deeper into the ruins.

The pattern of the blood told a story—the way some trails led toward the back door, then stopped abruptly. Someone had been dragged.

He stopped near the far wall, where scorched plaster formed a rough ring.

“What was this?” he’d asked.

“A bed,” Marco said quietly. “We think it was hers.”

Kendrick’s gaze dropped.

Among the ash, something tiny glinted.

He crouched, brushed aside soot with his gloved hand, and lifted it.

A melted piece of metal, fused with glass and plastic.

The remains of a phone case.

He turned it, and for a brief second, caught the faint outline of pressed flowers trapped in clear silicone.

Not expensive.

Not important.

Except it was.

Because someone had tried to burn even this.

He remembered the strange pressure in his chest the moment he’d held that little fragment.

Something hot.

Unwelcome.

Sam had watched him carefully. “You okay?”

Kendrick had straightened, voice flat.

“They killed every guard here. Took the only person who mattered. Then they wiped her from the file system, burned her room, melted her phone.”

He looked around the blackened walls.

“Someone really doesn’t want her found.”

Three Months of Nothing

The jet shifted slightly in mild turbulence.

Kendrick blinked, returning slowly from the memory.

Sam was still watching him.

“These three months weren’t a waste, you know,” Sam said quietly.

“You’ve done more than anyone else could.”

Kendrick’s mouth curved in something that wasn’t a smile.

“Have I brought her back?”

Sam exhaled.

“No.”

“Then it’s not enough.”

He’d chased every whisper.

Moved covert teams through half of Europe.

Torn open accounts, front companies, and shell corporations.

Traced weapons sales and encrypted calls.

Every time, he’d arrived to find the same thing:

Burned locations.

Dead assets.

Erased data.

And a growing signature.

A pattern of cruelty, precision, and control.

Lucian Thorne Wilson.

He didn’t have the name yet, not officially—but he recognized the mind.

This enemy knew how to stay one step ahead.

He enjoyed it.

Like a game.

Only in the last forty-eight hours had something changed.

A small, almost insignificant report.

A local police note from a small European coastal city. Barely a dot on the map.

Unidentified young woman found wandering near the industrial docks.

Mid-twenties.

Malnourished.

Signs of prolonged restraint on wrists and ankles.

No ID.

No memory.

The officer had written in broken English: “She says she doesn’t know her name.”

They’d almost missed it.

It was just one report in a massive data sweep.

But the word restraint.

The blank name.

The timing.

Three months to the day since the Milan disappearance.

It wasn’t proof.

It wasn’t enough.

But it was something.

It was more than he’d had yesterday.

And that, for Kendrick, was enough to move.

Back to the Present

Sam broke the quiet.

“You’re sure this isn’t a trap?” he asked.

“It might be,” Kendrick said.

“And you’re still going.”

“Yes.”

Sam huffed softly. “You’re getting predictable.”

Kendrick’s eyes slid to him.

“Careful,” he said. “I might start developing a personality next.”

Sam’s lips twitched. “Wouldn’t mind. Makes you easier to market.”

Kendrick ignored that.

He looked down at the report again, at the blurred photograph attached at the bottom.

It wasn’t clear.

Just a shape on a hospital bed.

Long dark hair.

A hospital gown too big for a small frame.

A bandage at the side of her head.

Face turned away.

Unrecognizable.

But something in him reacted anyway.

A tightening.

A jolt.

Not affection.

Not attraction.

Pure instinct.

There you are.

He didn’t know where the thought came from.

He didn’t like it.

Sam studied him a long moment.

“Why her, Kendrick?” he asked, voice softer than usual. “You’ve seen worse. You’ve walked past victims, bodies, entire collapsed companies. Why chase this one ghost?”

Kendrick stared at the photograph.

Because somebody erased her, he thought.

Because Leonardo risked everything to hide her.

Because an enemy keeps setting the board on fire to keep her invisible.

Because somewhere, three months ago, in a ruined safehouse in Milan, holding a piece of her melted phone in his hand, something inside him shifted, like a locked door rattling once.

Out loud, he only said:

“Because whoever went to this much trouble to make sure she never existed…”

He closed the file.

“…chose the wrong man to challenge.”

The jet’s intercom crackled.

“Mr. Peterson,” the pilot’s voice came through. “We’ll be landing in thirty minutes.”

Kendrick nodded once, though the pilot couldn’t see it.

“Good,” he said.

He picked up the file again, but this time, he didn’t open it.

He didn’t need to.

He’d been chasing a shadow for three months.

Tonight, he intended to give the ghost a face.

And somewhere on the other side of the clouds, in a small hospital she didn’t remember entering, a girl with no name stared at the ceiling, heart pounding with fear she couldn’t explain.

The empire thought she was dead.

The enemy wanted her erased.

Her own memories had abandoned her.

But the one man she’d never met was flying straight toward her,

and for the first time in months,

the game was about to change.