SPECIAL ADMIRALTY ANNEX: TITLE 50 SOVEREIGN DEFENSE BEDROCK INQUEST
Marcus stopped dead.
His knuckles turned chalk-white, the paper tearing slightly beneath his thumbs.
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Natalie Eleanor Mercer.
For twelve years, Marcus had known her simply as Natalie Vance—an orphaned, soft-spoken woman who had lost her parents in a maritime storm off the coast of Maine when she was nineteen years old. When they met, she had been living in a modest wood-framed apartment in Redwood City, quietly painting watercolors and working as an independent archival researcher.
He had married her because she was serene. Because she had never questioned his eighty-hour workweeks, had never demanded a seat at his boardroom table, and had looked at him with an adoring, un-conditional warmth that calmed the feral paranoia of his corporate climb.
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He had never once heard the name Mercer.
“Who is Nathan Brooks?” Marcus rasped, his voice dropping into a dangerous, feral whisper:
