Page 53 of Controlled Drift
Ethan felt something tear loose inside his chest.He forced himself to breathe through it, slow and steady, the way he did when the aircraft shook and everyone else panicked.
“What do you want?”he asked.
Gregory smiled.Ethan could hear it.“Come home,” he said.“A family reunion is long overdue.”
Silence followed.Heavy.Expectant.
Ethan looked around the room.
At Kael, already mentally mapping routes and exits.At Luca, fingers flying across unseen systems, hunting angles.At Victor and Drew, coiled and ready.At Niko—who was watching him, not his father, eyes steady and fierce and full of trust.
Ethan swallowed once.
“I’ll be there,” he said.
The line went dead.
For a moment, no one spoke.
The hum of the room returned slowly—the systems, the quiet click of someone shifting their weight, the distant sound of the building breathing around them.Reality seeped back in, sharper now, edged with blood.
Niko didn’t let go of Ethan’s arm.“You okay?”
Ethan shook his head once.“He thinks he’s won.”
Kael straightened, all command now.“Then we let him think that, and we show him that he is dead fucking wrong.”
Ethan drew a slow breath, spine settling, fear transmuting into something harder, cleaner.Resolve.
“He wants me,” Ethan said.“He wants control back.”
Niko’s mouth curved into something dangerous.“He doesn’t know what he’s inviting.”
Ethan met his eyes, felt the certainty lock into place.
“No,” he said.“He doesn’t.”
He turned toward the door, toward the hangar, toward the jet already being readied.Toward the man who had shaped his nightmares—and the team who would help him end them.
“Let’s go,” Ethan said.
And this time, as they moved, it didn’t feel like a chase.
It felt like a reckoning.
****
Kansas City greetedthem with darkness and distance.
The private airstrip sat low against the land, a long strip of asphalt cut into farmland that stretched away into black nothingness.No lights beyond the bare minimum.No signage.No noise.The kind of place that didn’t exist unless you knew exactly where to look.
Pathfinder connections.
Niko felt the Aquila settle beneath him, wheels kissing the ground with barely a whisper, and for the first time since Vermont, his pulse slowed.Not because he felt safe — but because they were finally where they needed to be.
The hangar doors were already open when they rolled in.
Two SUVs waited beyond them, matte black, wide-bodied, unapologetically armored.They didn’t scream military.They didn’t need to.Everything about them said survive first, ask questions never.
