Liam came home from school today, and he won't be returning.

He tested out of every class. Every single one. I sat in the headmaster's office while his teachers filed in one by one, each holding a stack of examinations, each looking more bewildered than the last. "He's finished the curriculum," the mathematics instructor said, as if he couldn't quite believe it himself. "All of it. He's been doing the work in his spare time since."

Charles sat beside me, silent and still as always, but I could feel the pride radiating off him. Liam is only fifteen. Almost sixteen. He has the mind of a man twice his age, and I don't know whether to weep with joy or terror at what that means for him.

Elena's breath caught. Liam had been fifteen when his formal schooling ended. She stared at the page for a moment, trying to reconcile the boy Amara described with the man she knew now. Almost sixteen. Barely more than a child, and already so far ahead of everyone around him that the adults had stopped trying to teach him and started trying to keep up.

The next entry was dated three weeks later.

Charles has begun teaching Liam the family business in earnest. The properties. The investments. The companies and the people who keep them running. Liam absorbs everything. He asks questions Charles says most men twice his age never think to ask. He doesn't just want to know what the family owns. He wants to understand how every piece fits together, how decisions are made, and what keeps the whole machine moving.

He is so much like his father. I watch them at the desk in the study, heads bent over ledgers, and I see the future of the Thorn name. I should be proud. I am proud. But sometimes I catch myself wishing he could be a boy a little longer. That he could keep something of the child who used to run through the garden with his cousin, laughing.

She read on.  Now a few months had passed.

The lessons have deepened. Charles is teaching him the structure of the Underworld now—the families, the territories, the agreements that keep the peace. Liam takes to it like a language he was born speaking.

He asked me last night if the Sterns had always been so difficult to work with.

I told him the truth. The Sterns are not our enemies. They are powerful, and they have their own interests, just as we do. There will always be disagreements between families like ours. That is the nature of doing business at this level. What matters is knowing where the lines are, and knowing when not to cross them.

He considered this for a long moment.

Then he asked, "What happens when someone crosses one?"

I told him that depends on who crossed it—and why.

The next entry continued almost a month later.

He closed his first negotiation this week—a warehouse dispute that should have gone to arbitration. Liam saw the weakness in the other party's position and pressed it until they had no choice but to concede. Charles says he has a gift. I say he has his father's patience and my ruthlessness. A dangerous combination.

Elena smiled despite herself. It was easier now to imagine him as a boy who had learned to watch people carefully, notice what others missed, and think three steps ahead before he was old enough to understand why.

Charles brought Liam a problem today that had been sitting on his desk for nearly a week. Two of our companies were fighting over the same resources, and neither side was willing to give ground. One needed the materials for a contract that would bring in money immediately. The other had already promised them to a client the following month.

Liam listened to both arguments without taking either side.

Then he asked how much material each company actually needed and when they needed it.

He spent the next hour comparing their schedules. The first company could finish its contract with less than half of what had been set aside. The second wouldn't need the remaining materials for another three weeks.

Liam suggested moving what the first company needed now, then replacing it with the next shipment before the second company's deadline. He also pointed out that the first company could return the equipment once the contract was finished rather than ordering more.

It wasn't complicated. Both companies got what they needed. No one had to give anything up. Charles told him he'd found a solution instead of choosing a winner.

Elena set the journal down for a moment, staring out the window without really seeing the view beyond it. She'd always known Liam was intelligent. You couldn't spend months around him without noticing. But this was different. Even as a teenager, he hadn't needed to be the loudest person in the room or the one making the final decision. He listened. He asked questions. And somehow, he found a way to make everyone else's problems fit together.

She continued to read.

Iredessa's death is seven years behind us now, and somehow her absence still fills this house. Charles rarely speaks of her, yet I find myself thinking about her more often than I care to admit. She was my sister, and there are days when I still expect to hear her footsteps in the hall or find her sitting beside the water with a book in her hands.

Liam remembers her, too. The games she played with him, the stories she told, the way she could make him laugh when nothing else could. He was young when she died, but I know he has never let her memory fade.

For years, I told myself that losing her was simply something our family would have to learn to live with. The house grew quieter. Liam grew older. Life moved forward, even when none of us were ready for it to.

But lately, I have been thinking about those years again.

Because the abductions have started again.

Three girls in the last two months. All young, all from families in our territories. The first I dismissed as a runaway — teenagers disappear; it happens. The second made me uneasy. The third made me certain. The pattern is too clean, the victims too carefully chosen.

Our people have been tracing the disappearances, following the threads back to where they lead, and they lead in a direction I didn't want to believe.

The Sterns.

The word sat on the page like a stain. Elena read it again, her brow furrowing as she tried to reconcile what she'd just learned. Veya was searching for missing friends, people who had vanished without answers—just as others had nearly ten years ago. And now the Sterns were appearing in both stories. A chill crept down Elena's spine. Was it a coincidence, or were the disappearances connected? Had whatever happened back then never really stopped, or just starting up again? She stared at the page, suddenly wondering how much of the past was repeating itself right in front of them.

For years, we have followed fragments of this operation. A missing girl here. A shipment that vanished there. Names that appeared on one ledger and disappeared from another. We have never been able to see the whole picture.

But now we have found the connection.

This couldn't be Arthur. Arthur would never sanction this—he has his faults, and I would be the first to name them, but he is not a man who traffics in children and women. No. The trail points to his younger brother, Xavier. A man who has always lived in Arthur's shadow, always hungry for more, someone who seems always convinced he deserves what his brother was given.

It appears Xavier has been running his own operation. Quietly. Carefully. Using the Stern infrastructure without Arthur's knowledge, routing his profits through accounts that would take years to trace. Our people found the evidence in a warehouse on the eastern docks, in a ledger that should not exist.

Elena's mouth went dry. The Sterns. They controlled New Haven, the city through which the missing Valmont shipment had been routed. Everything kept pointing to the Sterns. She forced herself to keep reading.

We reached out to Arthur. Charles went to him personally, laid the evidence before him, and asked him to rein in his brother.

Arthur studied the ledger. He looked through the photographs, then read the names of the missing girls one by one. When he finally looked up, he told Charles that Xavier would never do such a thing.

He insisted there was no way Xavier could have been running an operation of that size without Arthur knowing. Someone had forged the ledger. Someone had taken the photographs and planted the names. The trail had been built to point toward his brother.

Arthur had two children of his own, and whatever concern he might have felt for the missing girls never seemed to reach beyond the edges of his own family. His attention remained fixed on protecting his brother and preserving the world he'd built around his children, as though the suffering of others could not possibly outweigh the threat to his own.

“He's my brother,” Arthur said. “I would know.”

Charles came home with those words still ringing in his ears. I have never seen him so still, so quiet. He sat in his study for hours without lighting a lamp, and when I finally went in, he said, “We cannot trust the Sterns. Not Arthur, not Xavier, not any of them.”

The next entry was dated a few days later.

Charles and I have decided that Liam cannot stay here.

He knows too much now. Not about the disappearances, not yet, but enough about the family business to understand when something is wrong. He has started asking why Charles is meeting with people behind closed doors. He noticed the extra men around the house before I did. Yesterday, he asked why Victor had been told to change the security schedule.

Charles says Liam is becoming too valuable to leave exposed.

I hate hearing him say that.

He is our son. He should be worrying about books and business and what he wants to do with his life, not whether someone is watching the gates.

So we are taking him to the island.

It is isolated, quiet, and far enough from the city that anyone looking for him will have a difficult time finding him. There are people there we trust, and for the first time in weeks, I think perhaps Liam might be able to sleep without knowing how many men are standing outside his door.

He isn't happy about leaving. He argued with Charles for nearly an hour, insisting that he is old enough to understand what is happening and old enough to help.

Charles finally told him, "Being old enough to understand something does not mean you need to carry it."

Liam didn't answer.  But tonight, I heard him packing.

The next entry was dated two days later.

We cannot rely on the authorities. They may answer to us in some matters, but the Sterns hold too much influence for any official investigation to go far without their interference. Even with evidence in hand, challenging a family of their standing is not something the authorities are likely to risk. If we want answers, we will need help from those who can stand against them.

The other families are an option, but going to them carries its own risks. The Agreement keeps the peace; it does not make us allies, and information is worth more than loyalty. Asking for their help could expose our own vulnerabilities as easily as it exposes the Sterns.

That leaves the north.

The Orleths are still my family. If anyone can help us challenge the Sterns without immediately asking what we are willing to give in return, it is them. It is a risk, but perhaps the only one we can afford to take.

My family has not always seen eye to eye with me, but blood is blood, and the Orleths have always hated the Sterns more than they have ever disliked me. If anyone can pressure Arthur into seeing the truth about his brother, it is my own brother, Dorian. He does not suffer fools or monsters, and he has the power to make his displeasure known.

Elena moved to the next entry.

We have been on the island for several days now. Liam seems calmer here, though he would never admit it. He spends most of his time reading or walking along the shore, and for the first time in weeks, I have seen him relax.

Charles and I have decided that we cannot stay here much longer. We need to return home, gather everything we have on the disappearances, and then continue north to see my father.

I know the risks. I know what we are asking of the Orleths, and what it could mean if they refuse to help us. But we cannot ignore what we have found, and we cannot leave this matter unresolved.

We will leave the island in the morning. Liam will come home with us. Once we have everything we need, Charles and I will travel north to the Orleths.

The handwriting stopped mid-page, leaving a blank expanse of aged paper. Elena turned the page, expecting more, but the next leaf was empty. And the next. And the next.

Elena sat in the quiet of the library, the journal open in her lap, the final words hanging in the air like smoke.

She closed the book slowly, running her palm over the worn leather cover. The weight of it seemed to have doubled. She stood, carried it back to the shelf, and slid it between the two leather-bound volumes where she'd hidden it before. The spine disappeared into the row as if it had never been moved.

She was still standing there, one hand resting against the shelf, when a sound from somewhere below made her pause.

A door opened. Then came the muffled sound of voices rising through the stairwell, followed by the hurried footsteps of someone crossing the lower hall. Another door opened, and a moment later she heard Presley speaking to someone she couldn't quite make out.

Elena's heart skipped. Liam!

The thought hit her like a pulse. He was back. He was home. A smile tugged at her mouth before she could stop it. She hadn't seen him in days—too many days, if she was being honest—and she'd missed him more than she'd expected. She'd been so absorbed in the journal, so lost in the past, that she'd barely noticed the time passing.

And she couldn't wait to see him.

She smoothed her dress, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, and walked out of the library. The hallway was dim, the lamps casting long shadows across the marble floor. Below, she could hear the heavy front door swing open and Presley's low voice instructing as he stepped in.

Elena reached the top of the stairs and began to descend. Her heart beat fast—excitement and dread and a fierce, aching want that she couldn't quite name. She'd been so alone in this house, so deep in the past, that the thought of his presence felt like sunlight on cold skin.

She was halfway down the stairs when the door swung open again, and Liam walked in.

He looked different. Not in any measurable way—the same black hair, the same blue suit, the same broad shoulders that seemed to fill the doorway—but in the way he moved, the way he held himself. There was a stillness to him that she hadn't seen before, a coldness that seemed to radiate off him like frost.

“Liam—” she said, her voice brighter than she'd intended.

The word died in her throat when she saw his expression.

He looked at her for a moment, his face unreadable, his eyes giving nothing away. Then he offered a small, polite nod.

“Elena.” His voice was flat, stripped of the warmth she'd grown accustomed to hearing from him. He moved past her, his shoulder brushing hers in an impersonal touch that might as well have belonged to a stranger. “Excuse me.”

She remained frozen in front of him, her smile fading as she watched him walk away. She had spent days missing him, imagining the moment he would return, and now that he was finally home, he had looked at her as though she were no more than an acquaintance.

His footsteps carried him toward the east wing, each one taking him farther from her.

Elena didn't move.

She couldn't understand what had changed.

END OF BOOK 2

Thank you for reading The Thorn’s Secret! I hope you enjoyed the read and read “The Thorn’s Offer” first! If not, go read it!

Book 3 is under writing now, and if you're interested in reading more, please check out my Discord: https://discord.gg/nhMtHKHyZE

Special thanks to my readers! And special thanks to TattooedRose and Kitsune for Alpha reading and helping make the story great!