Glass rained like silver shards across the matte-black hardwood of the penthouse bedroom. Adrien didn't flinch. His body had already shifted, a wall of dense muscle and tailored wool pressing Lena down against the plush rug behind the mahogany bed frame. / Chapter 2 / 20

Chapter 2 - THE GHOST OF BROOKLYNHook: A locked safe in Marcus’s abandoned apartment yields a passport with Lena’s face—and a name that makes even Marco turn pale.

While Dr. Bell tended to Lena’s cracked ribs in the secure medical suite, Adrien’s elite extraction unit tore Marcus Blake’s luxury high-rise apartment apart.

Marcus was currently locked in a soundproof holding cell in the basement of The Velvet Crown, sweating through his expensive designer suit. But the real secrets weren't in his head; they were buried inside a biometric floor safe hidden beneath his walk-in closet.

Marco tossed a heavy manila folder onto the steel interrogation table where Adrien sat sharpening a hunting knife with rhythmic, terrifying precision.

"We cracked the safe," Marco said, his voice unusually strained. "You need to see the identification documents, Boss."

Adrien flipped open the worn leather passport. Inside was a younger face—Lena at age ten, with the exact same defiant hazel eyes. But the name printed across the laminate was not Lena Vance.

It was Helena Vane-Rostova.

Adrien’s knife stopped moving. The metallic scraping sound died instantly, leaving only the hum of the fluorescent lights.

"Rostova," Adrien murmured, testing the syllables like poison on his tongue. "The Brighton Beach syndicate. The family that was wiped out in a warehouse fire twenty-two years ago during the docks war."

"Not entirely wiped out," Marco corrected, sliding a second photograph across the table. It was a polaroid of a burning dockside warehouse, smoke billowing into the night sky. In the foreground, a man with a scarred cheek—Nikolai Rostova, the Bratva’s most ruthless logistics boss—was handing a crying toddler to a younger, terrified-looking man wearing a corporate suit.

"That's Marcus's uncle," Adrien deduced instantly. "Arthur Blake. A corporate lawyer who specialized in laundering Russian blood money before he mysteriously vanished."

"More than vanished," Marco added, leaning against the cold concrete wall. "Arthur took the child, wiped her identity, planted her with a suburban couple who died in a staged car crash ten years later, and handed her off to his nephew Marcus to keep her under permanent surveillance. Marcus wasn't just her boyfriend, Boss. He was her jailer."

Adrien stood up so fast his chair screeched against the floor. His eyes darkened into a storm of absolute wrath. "Marcus didn't just abuse an innocent woman. He tortured the last living heir to the Rostova fortune—right under my nose in New York."