THE PRICE OF HIS NAME

CHAPTER FOUR: ASTERION

I didn't sleep that night. Instead, I sat at my laptop in my apartment and searched for every reference to Asterion that I could find. The company had been registered thirty years ago as a consulting firm. The founding documents showed two names: Victor Voss and Sebastian Voss.

It had operated for approximately five years before being officially dissolved. The dissolution paperwork was clean and thorough. Assets liquidated. Accounts closed. Everything tied up neatly. The kind of dissolution that suggested careful planning and legal expertise.

But the most recent transaction I'd found in Voss International's system was dated less than two years ago. €1,240,000 moving through an account that shouldn't have existed, routed through a company that had supposedly ceased operations three decades earlier.

Someone was keeping Asterion alive.

I built a spreadsheet. Timeline on one axis. Financial transactions on the other. Asterion's supposed dissolution was marked clearly: 1994. After that date, there should have been nothing. No accounts. No transfers. No evidence that the company had ever existed.

Except the money kept moving.

My eyes burned from staring at the screen. The coffee had gone cold hours ago. My apartment was dark except for the monitor's glow. The city beyond my window had gone quiet. It was 1 AM, that dead hour where the city paused before preparing for morning.

At 1 AM, my phone buzzed.

"You found it," Adrian said when I answered. Not a question.

"Why are you awake?"

"I don't sleep well when there are active threats against my company."

His company. The way he said it suggested he wasn't just an employee or a caretaker. Voss International was his in the way that a person owns their own skin.

"Asterion was dissolved thirty years ago," I said.

"Officially."

"But not actually."

"No."

"And you didn't know about this until recently?"

There was a long pause. I could hear him breathing on the other end of the line. Controlled breathing. Measured. The breathing of someone accustomed to maintaining composure.

"My father died three years ago," Adrian said. "When I inherited the company, I found some irregularities in his personal accounts. Nothing criminal. Just strange transfers without explanations. I started looking deeper. Then I found Asterion."

"Did you ask your uncle about it?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because I didn't understand what I'd found yet. And because the moment I admitted I was looking, whoever's behind this would know I was a threat."

"But they already know. They're threatening me because I found their transactions."

"You found an entry point. The pattern. But you don't know what it means. You don't know who's doing it. You don't understand the historical context."

Adrian explained, slowly and methodically, as if laying out a case he'd been building for three years. Victor and Sebastian had created Asterion together. But somewhere in the first decade, things had fractured. Victor wanted complete control. Sebastian wanted equal partnership. They argued about it. They fought about it. And eventually, Victor won.

"And then?" I asked.

"And then Sebastian spent the next thirty years accepting his secondary position. Until my father died."

"And then what?"

"And then my uncle took control of something my father had left deliberately hidden. And he's been using it to systematically manipulate Voss International ever since."

The weight of what he was telling me became clear. This wasn't just corporate theft. This was decades of resentment finally finding an outlet. This was a man waiting thirty years for the opportunity to take back what he believed was stolen from him.

"How do you know it's your uncle?" I asked.

"I don't. Not yet. But the financial patterns all point to someone with intimate knowledge of Asterion's original structure. Someone who helped build it. Someone who understood how it works."

I thought about the spreadsheet in front of me. The transactions moving with mathematical precision. The amounts varying just enough to appear random but following a consistent pattern. Someone had built this carefully. Someone had learned from thirty years of experience how to hide money in plain sight.

"And your father?" I asked.

Adrian was quiet for a long moment. "My father died before he could tell me everything. Before he could explain what he was afraid of. Before he could help me understand what Asterion actually was."

There was pain in his voice then. Real pain. The kind that comes from losing someone before you've finished your conversation with them.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Don't apologize. Just help me understand what he was trying to protect. Help me figure out why my uncle spent thirty years planning this. And help me stop him before he destroys everything my father built."