Chapter 708 | Eleven Matches

Chapter 708: 708 | Eleven Matches

Petra Lang lay face down on her ruined pillowcase for exactly four minutes after the door closed. She counted. She always counted. Numbers gave her structure when everything else had dissolved into sweat and the particular frequency of Lukas Belmont’s voice telling her to say please.

She had said please.

Fourteen times.

The number sat in her head like an audit finding that refused to reconcile. Petra Lang did not beg. Petra Lang signed federal documents in emerald ink and had once told the daughter of a sitting Senator that her footwork lacked refinement. That version of her existed somewhere outside this room, dressed properly, holding her posture, and absolutely not lying naked on a bed that smelled of sex and the faint ozone of Aspect discharge.

She pushed up on trembling arms. Her hair fell forward and stuck to her collarbone where his mouth had been. Her thighs ached in a way that meant the six o’clock conditioning run would need a creative explanation. The emerald lace lay crumpled on the floor next to her silk shorts and what was left of her dignity.

The business card waited on her desk where he had set it, white and ordinary, holding the fear of nine children.

Petra stood. Her legs complained and held. She walked to the desk naked, because there was no one left to perform for, pulled her laptop close and opened a secure connection to Lang Industries’ private network before she could talk herself out of it.

The login screen asked for a twenty-four-character password and biometric confirmation. She gave it both. The interface loaded in three seconds, which meant her father’s servers were running at optimal capacity despite the hour, which meant Heinrich Lang was probably awake in Munich reviewing quarterly projections and would receive a notification that his daughter had accessed the spectral database at three thirty-eight in the morning, California time.

He would not call. Heinrich Lang expressed paternal concern through courier packages and invoice attachments, never through conversation. The lamp on her desk had arrived within seventy-two hours of her mentioning headaches on a call about stock options. He cared. He cared in a language that required translation.

Petra opened the spectral analysis module and typed parameters.

Black-violet passive emission. Negative output signature. Suppressive or spectral-range Aspect. Verano metropolitan area. Registration status: active within past thirty-six months.

The database returned forty-seven initial matches.

Too broad. She narrowed it.

Right-handed. Manual dexterity consistent with sorting work. Core emission wavelength between 380 and 420 nanometers.

Nineteen matches.

Still too many. Petra pulled the card toward the laptop and tilted it under the lamp, squinting at the surface even though she could not see what Lukas saw. His ability read signatures and layers, the stored fear of children whose names sat in a blue spiral notebook on the other side of the river. She had none of that. She had the card itself, its pulp and print, and its area code.

She added parameters.

323 area code. Print source analysis: commercial quick-print operation. Paper stock: standard 80lb cardstock available at office supply retailers.

The database cross-referenced and returned eleven matches.

She opened the first. A forty-three-year-old woman registered as a Channeler-Suppressor, Core documented in the forearms. She worked as a paralegal in Century City and had no documented connection to the Eastside or to biological procurement.

Eliminated.

The second was a nineteen-year-old student at USC whose black-violet signature came from a rare mutation in his Aspect’s spectral range. It had no suppressive function at all. He had never set foot in the Eastside, and his social media placed him at a party in Santa Monica on the date the most recent card layer was laid down.

Eliminated.

Petra worked through eight more in forty minutes. Each one fell apart under scrutiny. Wrong geography. Wrong timeline. Wrong dexterity profile. Wrong everything.

The eleventh made her stop.

Leonard Kask. Male. Fifty-seven. Registered Class I Channeler, suppressive subtype. Core documented in palms and fingers. Black-violet emission at 397 nanometers. Occupation: licensed pawnbroker. Business address: 812 Rourke Street, Eastside District, Verano.

Petra stared at the screen.

Kask. A name she had seen in the Eastside incident filings she read and pretended not to read. The man who ran Eastside Pawn. The distribution point for a network that had been buying shed biological material from Branded children for at least four years.

The database had matched the signature to the man Lukas was already investigating.

So the black-violet on the card was Kask’s own. He was the distributor, the man whose cards ended up in the hands of desperate parents in waiting rooms while their children’s hands still shook.

It ran under every layer because Kask handled every card. He sorted them himself and packed them into the same containers that held the material he was collecting, and his Aspect bled into the pulp over months of proximity.

Which meant the actual buyer was still invisible. The person at the far end of the chain, purchasing the material and shipping it up the pipeline to whoever sat at the top.

Petra needed another approach.

She reached for her phone and hesitated. Calling her mother’s analysts would create a paper trail. Calling Heinrich’s legal department would create a bigger one. Every official channel led back to Lang Industries’ compliance protocols and, eventually, to a notification at the IHC.

The unofficial channel was one person.

She dialed a number she had memorized from her mother’s private directory three years ago, during a family emergency involving her grandmother’s medical records and a hospital administrator who refused to cooperate. It belonged to someone who appeared on no Lang Industries org chart and had never been documented in any official capacity.

It rang twice.

"Miss Lang." The voice belonged to a woman in her sixties who sounded like she smoked a pack a day and ate incompetence for breakfast. "It is four twenty-two in the morning."

"I am aware of the time, Mrs. Albrecht."

"Your father’s servers flagged your database access forty-four minutes ago. He has not called."

"He never calls."

"He is concerned."

"Then he should use his words like a normal person instead of sending furniture by courier."