(Marcus's POV)
Three days.
Three days without word from Serena, and the silence had become a knife I kept pressing into my own chest.
I sat in the back office of the café, her café, though she didn't know it yet. The desk buried under satellite images, shell company records, and financial audit trails Raphael had pulled from offshore banks that officially didn't exist.
Derek's files were spread across the left side of the desk. The right side held a single photograph from the archive he had flagged: two boys standing side by side at a formal gathering, the grainy timestamp reading thirty-two years ago.
I had studied it for hours now.
The boy on the right was unmistakably me, or rather someone who wore my face but was much younger. Same jaw. Same emerald eyes. Same build.
Except that
