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© Leo Lubavitch, 2026
ISBN 978-5-0069-4578-4
Created with Ridero smart publishing system
Chapter 1. The Gilded Cage
The conditioned air in the boardroom on the eightieth floor of the Kronos Group tower was so sterile it felt dead. Beyond the panoramic glazing, the metropolis lay spread out like a construction set scattered across a rug. From this bird’s-eye view, people were invisible, their fates insignificant.
Lara sat at the head of the ebony table. Her spine was pulled taut as a bowstring, her face betraying nothing but polite professional interest. Her hair was styled to perfection, not a strand out of place; her Armani suit fit like a second skin. She was the standard, the icon, the deity of this technocratic pantheon.
«Optimizing human resources will allow us to cut costs by fifteen percent in the first quarter,» the CFO droned monotonously, flipping through holographic slides.
Lara gave a barely perceptible nod. Twelve people sat around the table. The twelve apostles of profit. They weren’t just discussing numbers right now. They were carving up the carcass of a beast they hadn’t even killed yet.
«What’s the status on Project Steppe?» Her voice rang out evenly, slicing through the silence.
Mike took the floor – her deputy. And the man who, just a month ago, had been warming her bed. He leaned back in his chair with an air of lazy arrogance, toying with a gold pen.
«We’re all set, Lara. The geologists confirmed the rare-earth metal deposits. It’s a jackpot. The only problem is the Altyn-Emel National Park in Kazakhstan. It’s a protected zone – unique singing dunes, some sort of rare fauna.»
«And how do we solve this ’problem’?» Lara asked, feeling a knot of cold dread forming in her stomach.
«The lobbyists are already on it,» Mike smiled, a look that resembled the bared teeth of a well-fed shark. «We’ll prove the environmental impact is minimal. And then… who’s going to count lizards when we’re talking about billions? We’ll just level the landscape, gut the earth, and pave over the whole thing with concrete.»
Mike caught her eye and winked. Smug. Conspiratorial. As if inviting her to be an accomplice in the rape of the natural world.
In that moment, something clicked in Lara’s mind. Loudly, like a gunshot. The voices around her – the figures, the percentages, the plans for destruction – suddenly merged into a piercing white noise. The blood drained from her face. She lowered her gaze and saw her reflection in the black polish of the table.
A stranger looked back at her. A woman with the eyes of a dead fish. This wasn’t Lara. It was a shell, a hollow doll that had wasted ten years of life raising this monster – the Kronos Group. Nausea rose in her throat, bitter and viscous.
«Your grandfather was a romantic, Lara,» came the raspy voice of the board’s oldest member, jarring her from her trance. «But romance doesn’t pay dividends. We’ll commence construction shortly. The bulldozers are already at the park’s border.»
Lara inhaled slowly. The air smelled of ozone and expensive leather, yet all she could smell was rot.
«I need five minutes,» she said, standing up. «Carry on without me.»
«Everything okay?» Mike raised an eyebrow.
«Perfect,» she tossed over her shoulder without turning.
She didn’t head for the ladies’ room. Her heels rang sharply down the hallway leading to the east wing. To the place where time had stopped.
The office of the company’s founder – her grandfather – had been preserved like a museum. Only a handful of people had access, and only via biometrics. Lara pressed her palm to the scanner. A bar of green light swept across her skin, the lock clicked, and the heavy oak door swung inward.
She stepped inside and immediately closed the door behind her. The smell here was different. Old paper, tobacco, and, somehow, the sea. The scent of adventure she had traded for EBITDA charts.
Lara didn’t waste time on sentimentality. She walked to the bookcase crammed with volumes on archaeology and history. Her fingers unerringly found the spine she needed. The safe was hidden behind a false panel.
The digital display demanded a code. Lara entered the numbers quickly, without thinking. 12051991. Her date of birth. Her grandfather had trusted only her.
The mechanism turned. Inside, bundles of bonds and stock certificates glimmered dully – worth a fortune. Lara didn’t spare them a glance. She reached her hand deeper in, feeling for a ridge at the bottom of the safe. A click. The false bottom lifted.
There it was. A battered leather journal, bound with twine. Officially, it had been «lost» during her grandfather’s last expedition in 1995. The one he came back from a completely different man.
With trembling fingers, Lara untied the twine. The pages were yellowed, filled with a sweeping hand. She opened it at the bookmark – a worn airline ticket.
A map. A hand-drawn sketch of a region. And coordinates.
Across the map, in red ink, in her grandfather’s handwriting, was scrawled: «Never develop. Too dangerous. Hide from the board. This is not metals. This is a story that could destroy the world if it falls into Kronos’s hands.»
Lara’s heart was pounding somewhere up in her throat. She pressed the journal to her chest. The rough leather scraped her silk blouse, and that tactile jolt felt more real than the entire glass skyscraper around her. She slipped the journal under her blazer, holding it to her heart like a shield.
«I won’t let them destroy this, Grandpa,» she whispered into the empty office. «I won’t become one of them.»
The private elevator carried her down, swallowing floors as it went. From the eightieth to sublevel three – the parking garage. She had less than two minutes.
Lara pulled out her smartphone – the latest flagship model her company had released just a week ago. The perfect tracking device people willingly carried in their pockets.
Her fingers flew across the screen.
Bank app. Offshore account in the Caymans. Voice-key access only.
«Transfer all personal funds. Confirmed,» Lara said, her voice steady.
Transaction complete.
Now Kronos security would have no leverage over her. But that wasn’t enough. They’d trace her location in seconds.
The elevator doors opened onto the half-lit underground parking lot. Lara stepped into the lobby, pulling a sharp hairpin from her updo as she walked. Freed from its strict constraints, her hair tumbled over her shoulders in a dark wave.
She pried open the SIM card slot. The tiny plastic rectangle fell into her palm. Lara drove the tip of the pin hard into the chip. It cracked with a faint crunch. The pin slipped, stabbing into the pad of her thumb.
A bright red bead of blood welled up. Vivid, alive. The pain brought her fully back to herself. Blood was the only real thing left in this place.
Lara walked over to a concrete trash can by a support column. The two-thousand-dollar smartphone clattered into the bin, hitting the metal bottom. Her smartwatch followed.
She slid into her sports roadster waiting in the shadows. The engine roared to life, echoing off the concrete walls.
Only one thought pulsed in her mind, sharp and clear as a beacon:
«If I don’t disappear now, I’ll be trapped here forever. I’ll become one of them. A dead doll in an expensive suit.»
Lara slammed her foot down on the gas. The barrier lifted, releasing her from the glass prison into the real world – dangerous, and alive.
Out on the city’s edge, the rain was meaner than downtown. Here, at the old private airfield, the air smelled of wet concrete, cheap aviation fuel, and hopelessness. Lara left the car by the chain-link fence. Kronos would locate the roadster within an hour, but by then her trail needed to be cold.
Her private jet waited in another terminal, gleaming white and ready to take off at the first call. Stepping on board would be the same as snapping the cuffs on herself. She headed the other way, toward the rusted hangars where small cargo planes and «gray» charters were based.
The wind whipped the edges of her blazer and slapped wet strands of hair into her face. She walked fast, stepping over oil slicks in her Italian heels, which looked as out of place here as a diamond in the mud.
By one of the hangars, an old twin-engine freighter was warming up its engines. A man in a worn leather jacket was smoking nearby, shielding the tip of his cigarette with his palm. Weather-beaten face, eyes sharp and heavy.
Lara came right up to him.
«Where you headed?»
The pilot exhaled a slow stream of smoke, giving her a once-over from head to toe.
«Hanoi, with a refuel in Dushanbe. Why, ma’am? You’re lost. VIP lounge is about three miles north.»
«I need a seat. Now.»
The man let out a rough laugh and flicked his cigarette to the ground.
«This isn’t a cab and it’s not a tour bus. We’re hauling drilling equipment. No seats. No insurance. And no desire to babysit a princess in a three-thousand-dollar suit.»
Lara didn’t blink. She slipped the watch off her wrist. Patek Philippe Nautilus, platinum, diamonds. Worth about as much as a small house in the suburbs. She held it out to him. The metal caught a dull glint from the lone floodlight.
«That’ll cover the fuel. And your silence. No flight records with my name on them. I’m just cargo.»
The smirk faded from his face. He took the watch, weighed it in his palm, appraised the movement like a pro. Greed and caution wrestled in his eyes for all of three seconds. Greed won.
«Get in,» he grunted, nodding at the open ramp. «If you freeze or go deaf, that’s on you. Wheels up in five.»
The cargo hold was dim and cold. Lara found a relatively clean spot on a wooden crate marked «Fragile.» She drew her knees up to her chest, trying to hold on to what warmth she could.
The engines roared, and the plane shuddered like it had a fever. The takeoff was rough, heavy-handed. This wasn’t the silky ascent of a business jet where you hardly feel the moment you leave the ground. Here, gravity slammed her into the hard bulkhead, a reminder that flying is nothing but a fight against nature.
When the landing gear thudded up into the bays, Lara finally exhaled. She pulled her grandfather’s journal out from under her blazer. In the dim glow of the emergency light, the pages looked almost orange. She flipped through the entries, and suddenly a black-and-white photograph slipped from the middle of the block.
Lara caught it midair. Judging by the clothes, the picture had been taken in the early nineties. Three people stood against the backdrop of a desert dig site. Her grandfather – still sturdy, a mischievous squint in his eyes. Her father – very young, smiling that open, easy smile she had almost forgotten.
And the third.
A tall man, his face circled thickly in red marker. The ink had soaked into the paper like blood.
Lara turned the photo over. On the back, in her grandfather’s shaky hand, it read:
«Trust no one who wears this mark. They’re watching. They’re always close.»
Beside the note was a rough sketch of a symbol: an eye inside a triangle, but the pupil of the eye was slashed through with a lightning bolt. A strange, ominous sign she had never seen before. Or had she? A vague deja vu jabbed at her mind.
She leaned her forehead against the cold window. Below, the megacity sprawled – a giant glowing web, its highways pulsing like veins. The city she controlled was shrinking into a toy circuitry diagram.
«I got out,» Lara whispered, watching the lights of Kronos Group vanish into the clouds. «You won’t be able to reach me.»
She believed that. She was smarter than they were. She had calculated every move.
There was only one thing she didn’t know.
On the ring finger of her right hand, an elegant sapphire ring gleamed – a gift from the head of security on the company’s tenth anniversary. «A modest souvenir for our queen,» he’d said.
Deep in the setting, beneath the gemstone, a tiny tracker the size of a grain of rice had awakened. It had been triggered by the pressure drop at takeoff. A second later, cutting through the interference of the cargo hold, the signal pinged the Kronos server.
On the massive monitor in the very room she’d left an hour earlier, a red dot lit up.
The web had not released its prey. The hunt had only just begun.
Chapter 2. Island of Oblivion
Forty-eight hours.
That’s exactly how long it had been since Lara stepped into the void, leaving behind her empire, her identity, her life. Now she was at the edge of the world – a tiny island in the Palau archipelago, where time moved like thick, sticky syrup instead of a fast, digital stream.
The heat here felt physical. It pressed against her temples, glued the cheap cotton sheet to her skin, and turned the air into hot soup. The stilted bungalow had no AC, just a ceiling fan lazily grinding through the humidity with a rhythmic, maddening squeak.
Lara lay on the bed, staring up at the bamboo ceiling. The ocean was roaring right under the floor. In travel brochures they called it «the soothing whisper of the waves.» To Lara, it was chaos. Unregulated, loud, meaningless noise. The ocean had no schedule, no mute button, no quarterly reports. It lived by its own rules, and that irritated her down to her molars.
She tried to focus on the paperback she’d grabbed from the airport book-swap shelf. A mystery novel. Boring. Predictable.
Her left hand twitched. Her gaze shot to her wrist.
Empty.
Where the titanium body of her smartwatch had sat for years, there was only a pale band of untanned skin. A phantom vibration flickered along her nerves. Her brain craved its fix of data: stock quotes, urgent emails from legal, meeting reminders, heart rate, step count.
Nothing. Silence. Digital withdrawal was worse than nicotine.
Lara flung the book onto the floor. She stood up with sharp, clipped movements, like she was in a crisis war room, not a beach shack.
Her grandfather’s journal. It burned her hands even through the cover. Leaving it in her suitcase was out of the question. Too obvious.
She pulled out the bottom drawer of the dresser and flipped it over. The roll of tape she’d bought at the local shop peeled off with a nasty tear. Lara taped the journal to the underside of the drawer’s bottom. Secure. If someone just rifled through her things, they wouldn’t find it.
But it wasn’t enough.
Paranoia, her new loyal companion, whispered in her ear: «They’re already here. They’re looking.»
Lara filled a glass with water to the brim and set it on the floor right up against the door, so that the slightest movement of the door would knock it over. Simple, old-school alarm system. The sound of shattering glass or splashing water would wake her faster than any ringtone.
Someone knocked.
Lara froze. Her muscles turned to stone. Her hand instinctively reached for the fruit knife lying on the table.
«Miss Eva?» The voice outside was soft, sing-song. «Room cleaning. Fresh towels.»
Lara stayed silent. Eva. That’s right. Her name was Eva now. The name of the first woman, the name of beginnings. But it fit her like someone else’s dress borrowed off someone else’s shoulders – awkward and false. She didn’t feel like an Eva. She was still Lara – the empress of the corporate world, just without weapons or a budget.
«Miss Eva? You there?»
Lara exhaled, letting go of the knife handle.
«Leave it by the door,» she called. Her voice came out hoarse. «I don’t need anything. Go away.»
Footsteps faded, slapping along the wooden walkway. Lara rested her forehead against the wall. Getting out of the office had been easy. Evicting the CEO from her own head was proving almost impossible.
By evening, hunger had grown stronger than fear. Her stomach cramped – she hadn’t eaten real food in two days, surviving on duty-free protein bars.
Lara got dressed. A simple sand-colored linen dress she’d bought at the local market for five dollars. No makeup. Her hair twisted into a messy bun. She looked into the cloudy mirror. She could pass for any tired tourist, worn out from a long flight.
But the moment she straightened up, the illusion shattered. Her posture. That damned steel rod inside, forged by years of meetings and public appearances. She didn’t know how to slouch. She didn’t know how to walk loose and easy. Even in cheap linen she looked like she was about to fire half the island.
Lara stepped out into the thick tropical night.
The Rusty Anchor bar sat at the far end of the beach strip. It wasn’t one of those glossy traps for rich tourists with thirty-dollar cocktails. It was a hole. Ship-plank walls, fishing net drooping from the ceiling, the smell of fried fish, cheap beer, and old tobacco.
Exactly what she needed. No one here was looking for the CEO of a tech giant.
Lara went inside. Loud music – a mashup of reggae and early-200s pop – slammed into her ears. The place was crowded: tanned divers, loud expats, local fishermen.
She didn’t go up to the bar. Too exposed. Too vulnerable.
The eyes that were used to scanning charts and reports were now scanning the room for threats.
One entrance. Windows without bars. Emergency exit – through the kitchen.
Subjects:
Group on the left – drunk Aussies. Safe.
Couple in the corner – lovers. Safe.
Solo guy at the bar…
Lara’s gaze lingered. Straight back, clothes too clean for this place. No, he turned his head – just an ordinary face, bored expression. False alarm.
She slipped into the darkest corner of the room and sat with her back to the wall. It was the only spot that let her control the entrance and keep the whole bar in sight. The instincts of hunted prey were working flawlessly.
A waitress approached with a notepad.
«What can I get you, hon? We’ve got great tuna tonight.»
«Water,» Lara said crisply. «Sealed bottle. Factory cap. Bring it closed, I’ll open it myself.»
The waitress blinked, surprised, but nodded.
«And the tuna. Grilled, no sauce. And the check right away.»
Lara didn’t even look at her.
The bar reeked of smoke and the sweetish stench of tropical rot, cut with cheap perfume. Perfect camouflage. She leaned back in the wooden chair, never losing her grip on the room. In the eyes that used to track seven-figure profits, there was now only the cold glint of a cornered predator.
«Here’s your water,» the waitress said, setting the bottle down hard enough to almost crack the glass. «On vacation? You look like you’re running from someone.»
Lara lifted her gaze. The waitress – a stocky local woman with kind eyes – was looking at her without a hint of gloating. Just plain curiosity.
«Yeah,» Lara whispered, snapping the plastic seal. «Vacation. From the whole world.»
The Rusty Anchor was exactly the kind of place the Lara from her old life would’ve ordered bulldozed for violating every health code in existence. It smelled of burnt oil, cheap tobacco, and sour beer. The ceiling fan lazily pushed the heavy tropical air around without making it any cooler.
Lara sat in the shadows, and even though she’d traded her Armani suit for plain linen, it hadn’t made her any less visible. Her posture gave her away. Her gaze, trained to skim reports and fire people, sliced through the room. She was a diamond dropped into a pile of smashed beer-bottle glass.
The danger didn’t come from Kronos Group security, the ones she was afraid of. The threat wore an expensive watch and smelled of the very world she was running from.
The group of men at the next table was laughing too loud. Polo shirts with designer logos gaping at the neck, faces shiny from heat and booze. «Corporate offsite,» Lara thought with disgust. «Middle managers who feel like kings of the universe as soon as they land in a third-world country.»
One of them, a heavy-set man with a flushed face and hair plastered down with sweat, broke away from the pack. He swayed, struggling to keep his balance, and headed straight for her. His eyes held that same clammy arrogance that always made Lara sick to her stomach during board meetings.
He slumped into the plastic chair opposite her without asking.
«Hey, gorgeous, why all alone?» His speech was slightly slurred, but a greasy smile played on his lips. «You look way too expensive for a dump like this. Lose your five-star hotel?»
Lara didn’t even blink. She slowly raised her gaze from her glass of water.
«I’m not looking for company. And you’d better get back to your friends while you can still walk straight.»
The man chuckled as if she’d just told a hilarious joke.
«Oh, feisty! I like that. Don’t be a bitch, let’s have a drink. It’s on me. They probably don’t have Veuve Clicquot here, but I can order us something a little more fun.»
He reached across the table and covered her hand with his damp palm.
«Come on, babe. Don’t play hard to get.»
A cold coil tightened inside Lara. Years of Krav Maga training, taken just to blow off steam, suddenly felt more relevant than ever. She knew exactly what to do. Grab the thumb, a sharp twist outward, palm strike to the nose. Three seconds, and he’d be on the floor, choking on his own blood.
Her muscles tensed. She had already started the motion, ready to snap his finger…
But the strike wasn’t necessary.
The air around their table shifted. It felt suddenly crowded. Someone had approached from behind, but so silently that Lara only noticed him when a shadow fell across the table.
She looked up and saw him for the first time.
He was the exact opposite of the office drone currently gripping her wrist. Tall, sinewy, and tanned so dark it was as if his skin had soaked up the sun of every ocean in the world. He wore only faded board shorts hanging low on his hips and a simple white tank top. Barefoot, his feet were broad and steady, accustomed to hot sand and ship decks.
On his right shoulder, snaking out from under the tank top, was an intricate Polynesian tribal design – black lines, sharp as shark teeth.
He looked like a typical beach bum, a surfer living from wave to wave. But Lara, used to sizing people up in a split second, saw something else.
He stood completely relaxed, but within that ease lurked the readiness of a cobra about to strike. His eyes – unnaturally light against his dark face – betrayed nothing. No anger, no irritation. Just the icy calm of a predator who knows his prey isn’t going anywhere.
The stranger didn’t raise his voice. He simply placed a heavy hand on the drunken manager’s shoulder. It looked light, almost friendly. But Lara saw his knuckles turn white as he squeezed, digging his fingers into the man’s trapezius muscle.
«Buddy,» the guy’s voice was soft, quiet, almost affectionate. Like the low rumble of surf before a storm. «You’re in my seat.»
The tourist jerked, trying to shrug off the hand, but the grip was like iron. He whipped around, ready to protest, but the words died in his throat the moment he met the «surfer’s» gaze.
«And you’re breathing my air,» the guy continued in that same silky tone, leaning in close to the man’s ear. «Too loud, and too often. Fix it. Now.»
There was so much latent, concentrated threat in his voice that the alcohol fog in the tourist’s brain cleared instantly. He paled, his eyes darting around nervously. He snatched his hand back from Lara’s wrist as if he’d been burned.
«I… I was just trying to be friendly,» he stammered, standing up and clumsily banging his chair into the next table. «No problem, man. We’re good.»
«Sure we are,» the guy smiled, but the smile never reached his eyes. «As long as you keep walking in the other direction.»
Backing away, the tourist hurried over to his group, frantically explaining something to his friends. Within a minute, they had settled their tab and cleared out of the bar.
The guy watched them go, then turned back to Lara. The predator’s mask vanished, replaced by lazy curiosity. He sank into the empty chair, rested one ankle on his knee, and looked at her as if he could see right through her.
«Don’t mention it,» he said, nodding to the bartender for a beer. «Although, judging by the way your forearm tensed up, you were about to break his finger. I just saved his insurance company the paperwork.»