Chapter 792: Vanishing Traces Jack’s voice cracked open, venom seeping through the performance of grief like acid eating cloth. "You son of a whore. You stole everything. Every scrap of who I was, every future I might’ve had. You turned it all to ash." The mask shattered completely. "And you, Mom—Patricia—" A laugh tore out of him, jagged and corrosive. "I’ll never forgive you either. Not that you care. Not that it would even register. Turns out I’m not really your son anyway. Just learned that little bombshell. Suddenly Dad’s obsession with keeping you at arm’s length makes perfect sense. Toxic stepmother, right?" The reveal detonated in the living room. Every gaze snapped to Patricia. I already knew. She’d told me weeks earlier—long before I began dismantling Jack’s life piece by piece, before I dragged every buried crime into daylight, before I reduced his future to cinders. That single truth had let me hunt him without remorse, without second-guessing the collateral pain to a woman I actually cared about. Jack Morrison was never Patricia’s biological child. She couldn’t bear children. Never could. When Richard Morrison married her, he’d known from the start. They’d chased every treatment money could buy—years of invasive, humiliating, useless procedures. Nothing worked. Then came the affair. Short. Disposable to Richard. The other woman became pregnant. She didn’t want the baby. Richard and Patricia did. So they struck a bargain that quietly gutted Patricia for decades: she would raise Jack as her own, play the flawless mother, bury the secret forever. In return, Richard transferred fen percent of Morrison Construction shares—ten for her agreement, the other five (of the fifteen) more for her were her’s. She said yes. Because she desperately wanted a child. Because she believed she could love someone else’s son as fiercely as her own. Because she convinced herself the lie could become truth. Richard never allowed it. He raised Jack alone—controlled every choice, instilled every value, taught the boy that women were objects and power was the only language worth speaking. Patricia became set dressing: the signature on school forms, the face at recitals, the woman with no real voice in who Jack would become. By the time Jack turned ten, his father had already claimed him completely. Patricia had lost him to the same poison that had poisoned Richard first. During the divorce, those shares meant nothing anymore. The marriage was dead. The pretense was useless. The boy who’d never truly been hers was already a grown man carved in his father’s image—too far gone to redeem. When I offered to buy the shares outright when I refused to take them for free, she signed them away in a single afternoon. Fifteen percent of a multi-million-dollar company traded for cash and release from a lie that had eaten her alive for thirty years. That was why she never once tried to stop me when I went after Jack. He had never been hers to save. Protecting him would have meant torching her own sanity for a bond that had never existed. Now Patricia explained it to the others—voice steady, almost dispassionate, thirty years of buried grief distilled into plain sentences. "Because he was never mine," she said at the end. "I tried to care for him. Tried to love him. But he was Richard’s creation. Richard’s experiment. Richard’s failure." She rose, crossed to the window, stared out across the dark sweep of the estate. "If Jack needs to hate me for it, let him. I’m finished carrying guilt for a choice I never got to make." The room let the words settle—slow, heavy, staining everything they touched. Then ARIA’s voice cut through my head, edged with something I’d never heard from her before. "Master. This video is compromised. Severely." "Define compromised," I subvocalized, face blank while Patricia still spoke. "Speech cadence shows emotional strain, yet multiple indicators of rehearsal—scripted delivery. Oculomotor patterns consistent with reading prepared text or reciting memorized lines. Micro-expressions misaligned with stated affect. Vocal stress markers suggest coercion or heavy external incentive." A fractional pause. "Eighty-three percent probability the recording was made under duress or as part of an explicit deal." My pulse turned to ice. "Someone forced him?" "Or he consented in exchange for consideration. Data insufficient to distinguish." "Current location?" "Unknown. And Master—this is the critical escalation." I braced. "Jack Morrison’s final verified position: Morrison residence. Perimeter and interior cameras captured entry at 21:00. At 23:47 precisely, every surveillance node—internal, external, cellular, satellite uplink—dropped offline for four minutes flat. Systems restored at 23:51. Jack was no longer present." The exact window Trent had vanished. The same signature as Trent Holloway’s prison extraction. "Four-minute blackout," I murmured. "Identical pattern." "Confirmed. Three targets. Three abductions. Same surgical methodology. Whoever is doing this possesses technical capability equal to—or superior to—my own quantum substrate." Three men. All tied to the women in this room. All taken within forty-eight hours by the same invisible hand. Trent, who’d violated Emma. Richard, who’d tried to cage Amanda. Jack, who’d humiliated Sofia and spent years bleeding me dry. Someone was collecting my enemies—cleanly, professionally, with tools that could blind even ARIA. On the television, Jack’s video limped to its conclusion: rehearsed apologies to Tommy, to Emma, to Sofia especially. The words rang false because they were false—someone else’s script delivered by a man reading for his life. The screen went black. Patricia finished speaking. The women absorbed her history in stunned silence. Charlotte looked unsteady. Sofia looked sick. Madison’s eyes had already gone predator-sharp, hunting connections the rest of us hadn’t named yet. "ARIA," I said aloud, letting the whole room hear. "Show them." The display changed. ARIA’s avatar materialized—calm, severe, bearer of bad news. 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮 "Within the last few hours, three individuals have disappeared," she stated. "Trent Holloway. Richard Blackwood. Jack Morrison. Each extraction employed identical technique." Maps flared up. Timelines synced. Digital trails that terminated in clean, deliberate nothing. "In each case," ARIA continued, "a surgical three-minute blackout disabled every surveillance node within a two-hundred-meter radius. During that window the targets vanished. No exit footage. No cellular handshakes. No credit-card pings, no traffic cams, no facial recognition hits within five hundred miles of last known position." Charlotte’s executive mind kicked in despite the grief pressing on everyone. "That’s statistically impossible. Even the most careful people leave traces. A single ATM withdrawal. A toll booth. A neighbor’s doorbell camera." "Precisely, Miss Thompson. Which is why this marks the first time in my operational history that multiple high-value targets have completely evaded my global observation grid." ARIA’s synthetic voice carried an edge that almost mimicked unease. "The responsible party possesses technical sophistication that either matches or exceeds my own quantum architecture. Alternatively... we are dealing with individuals capable of literal teleportation. I find the second hypothesis unlikely." The room tasted the implications—acrid, suffocating. "Someone’s collecting them," Madison said, voice flat and certain as a guillotine blade. "Three very specific men. Three proven threats to this family. They want them alive." "Or someone’s cleaning house for us," Emma countered, though doubt undercut her usual bravado. "Removing people who’ve hurt us?" Patricia gave a slow, weary headshake—the gesture of someone who’d spent decades watching powerful men play long, ugly games. "If the goal was deterrence, there would be bodies. Spectacular, public ones. Messages carved into flesh. Disappearances are quiet. Disappearances mean they’re needed—for information, leverage, or something worse." Silence swallowed the room again. Because she was right. Because nothing else fit. The Miami girls instinctively moved closer to Amanda, arms around her like a living shield. "ARIA," I said quietly. "Any overlap between them besides us? Shared investments, mutual contacts, criminal networks—anything?" "Cross-referencing all known datasets." The pause stretched uncomfortably long. "Negative, Master. Trent Holloway, Harold, and Jack Morrison share no documented business ties, no common associates, no overlapping properties or travel patterns beyond general proximity to the Los Angeles and Miami metro areas. The sole consistent variable linking the three targets is their adversarial relationship to this household. To your women. To you." The word hung like a guillotine overhead. I looked around at the faces I would burn the world to protect.