Almost three quarters of an hour had gone by and while Cristo had found many things in Justin Marius's office, he had not found Milana Nox.

"Aren't you going to bring in Liao Terra and Liao Tian?" asked Lien.

On the left side of the desk in the second drawer Lien had found a textbook bound in a three ring folder which on first glance seemed to be some business report but stuffed in between the pages were profiles on exactly the people Cristo was looking for. Details were sparse and encoded, but Cristo knew the cases well enough to read between the lines.

These were the targets that were being manipulated. He was scanning those documents with his eyeballs while he answered, "No, not yet. It will only take a minute. Two minutes," he corrected, doubling to account for the second child was about to kidnap.

"You can't really expect to find a paper trail. I'm surprised you even found this much."

"Paper can be burned. And this shit is cryptic. It's here somewhere. Some record of where she is or who knows where she is. A message ordering her abduction. They have a profile on every single target, but the documents are long and full of gibberish, the encoded information buried deep in this nonsense."

"It's not gibberish," Lien said, leaning over to look into the giant textbook's worth of information. "That's the Constellation corporate bylaws manual. Not nonsense, just standard legalese that's apparently way over your head."

"Where is Diana Aemilia's profile? Didn't Marius orchestrate this? Where are the plans, the orders? Everyone else's file is here. Where is hers?"

Most of the other papers Cristo had flipped through were plans for after the takeover: hierarchies, position appointments, promotions, a schedule for policy changes, speeches. He had hidden those away, thinking what these kind of documents might say about Lien's possible compensation, but once he was done looking at the profile pages he would have to go back to digging; he needed a lot more than these brief outlines, and he hadn't found anything to do with Diana and Milana here.

"You should go collect the Liaos. I can keep looking, or if you don't trust me, we can come back later."

"No," said Cristo. "It should be here, but it isn't."

"They wouldn't keep records of a girl's abduction. I'm telling you, it's too incriminating."

No, that wasn't it. Deep in the corporate bylaws folder Marius clearly never expected anyone in a million years to read past the first page were files on Ilan Potestas's assassination attempt, on bribing Exequi Cytheria and then threatening Liao Cytheria when that didn't work, on Calcus Donato and Claudia Solace. Benito Fortunato and Ignatius Varian. There was even a report on the old patriarch of House Dasilva, who was supposedly Nova Dasilva's father and was now dead.

It was encoded; it didn't say he had been murdered, but there wasn't much other reason for Marius to have a file on the man and an account of his death.

It was all here, even the darkest, grittiest, ugliest secrets. It wouldn't say much to someone who didn't already have the context, but Cristo knew exactly what was going on and could read between the lines. Only Milana was nowhere to be found. And he didn't have much more time to devote to a girl he would never find.

"For all I know, she could be locked here somewhere in the Constellation building, but there are thousands of offices. I need a clue where to look and I don't have all day." He shuffled the profiles again, but Diana's didn't appear. "At least you found these," said Cristo, intentionally giving Lien credit.

Lien nodded distractedly, then looked right at Cristo and said, "Wait, you don't think you're taking those papers with us."

"I don't need to bring them with me. All I needed was to see them."

"You must have a good memory," said Lien, eying the dozens of elaborate pages Cristo was flipping between.

"We all do, for approximately point-two seconds." Without explaining what that meant, he glanced down at his wristwatch. Extra time would be valuable if something went wrong at the Liao residence. But then, if the operation took more than one minute, it would probably be because something had gone irreparably wrong.

He opened the small top drawer now, last, expecting office supplies like pens and fresh paper, but nothing useful. It contained a few folders, and when Cristo picked one up he fumbled and almost dropped the several dozen photos inside. On second thought, he scattered the whole stack of them onto the desk and leaned forward to look.

Some were of people he didn't know but in places he recognized — Timepiece Plaza, the Solar Gnomon, downtown Soliara, or the university campus. Tossing those aside, he found several photos of Liao Cytheria and the company she kept and of her son and daughter and where they dined and shopped and drank, never without a small army detail.

The next photo he found showed a face he didn't recognize. In the picture, he was alone on a downtown patio in the middle of a square, having a drink. In the next, a woman had joined him and they were joined by a bottle of wine. The couple smiled. She could be his wife. But she actually looked about a decade older than him, not to mention if she was his wife, Cristo couldn't think of a reason for Justin Marius to posses this photo.

He showed the photos to Lien. "Do you know anything about this man?" he asked.

Lien glanced at it for one second before she said, "Ah!" and went for the profiles in the binder Cristo had just put down, turning to one he had barely glanced at. "Tony Solari," she said, and she passed the book to Cristo. At the top was a small official color portrait of Tony, and the pages outlined his whole life. Probably most relevant to Marius was his daily schedule, and everywhere he had gone in the past several weeks, as well as concise profiles of his family members. Next to the name Cordelia Solari there was a smaller profile picture that was almost uselessly difficult to make out, but her face was less round than that of the woman from the patio with the wine, and she had big brown eyes that would be hard to mistake.

Cristo gave the papers back to Lien and returned to the pile of images. The batch of photos featuring Tony seemed to be in a particular order, a sequence that had stayed intact when Cristo dumped the photos onto the desk. The dark facade of a building framed the next one, but the light was on in the window of a room where Solari danced with the woman who was not his wife. "I never heard of Tony Solari before, though," said Cristo. "He can't be very important."

"Marius authorized him to take over Constellation Italis, if he votes the right way," Lien said. "According to the profile."

"That's interesting," Cristo said, perking up.

The next several pictures told a perfect story. Tony and the woman on a balcony with yet another bottle of wine. They drank, and talked, and drank, and smiled, and made it to the bottom of the bottle. In the antepenultimate photo in the series, the woman had gotten up. She wasn't smiling anymore, though. The penultimate, she turned back inside. Tony stood up but almost didn't go after her. The last zoomed close through the balcony door to that of the apartment, Tony had followed her, apologized, and they shared a look that said goodbye. "He didn't go through with it. Of course, no one has to show his wife the last picture."

Lien leaned over to look. "Tough choice. Let the company ruin your marriage, or move the family into the director's estate in Italis. They're blackmailing him and bribing him at the same time."

"Why would they do that? The blackmail will be enough. Italis can be a reward for someone else."

About to go back to sifting through pictures, Cristo noticed Lien was grappling with something, caught between spitting it out or biting her tongue. The cogs in Cristo's head were beginning to turn. Lien wanted to argue the point; she knew something, some reason Marius would want to offer Tony Solari a reward he wouldn't turn down. Cristo didn't want to beat that much out of her, but he did need to know why.

"He's already threatened to blackmail, hasn't he, and Tony's holding out? Good for him," said Cristo.

That was something, but it wasn't enough. Lien had the look of someone who'd just been let out of a chokehold, but it didn't loosen her tongue.

"Look, you don't need to tell me, I'll probably figure it out on my own eventually, but you know you have a choice to make, and so far you haven't committed. Help me stop Marius. Not just because you want to play two sides and you want whoever wins to like you, but because it's the only way to save your own neck. If I lose, I'm bringing you down with me, and if I say you've betrayed Marius, I have a bad feeling Franco Justinian and Portia Nero aren't going to have your back. They're going to watch you suffer, just like they stood back and watched while Ilan Potestas had you locked up. They left you in your cell. The only chance you have at this point is to speed things along for me and pray that I beat him. So why would Justin Marius need to both blackmail and bribe Tony Solari?"

"I really don't know."

"I'll figure it out either way, but let's speed this along, shall—"

He stopped, caught movement approaching the door from the corner of his eye and turned to look at the man standing on the other side of the one-way link now; it wasn't Justin Marius, but that didn't stop the person it was from trying the doorknob. Cristo and Lien had been arguing, and neither of them had seen Exequi Angelus Gloriam approach up the hallway, but they could see through the one-way link that the exequi meant to get into Marius's office while Marius was out.

The only question was whether he could unlock the door, and if so, how fast.

The one-way link had been a precaution in case Cristo needed to use a backup escape route, but he really never wanted to. It would have been best to exit the way he came in, leaving Lien locked in an office or a broom closet where no one would find her for twelve to twenty-four hours.

That problem went on the back burner as he had just seconds to get Marius's office back in order, and although he hadn't gotten what he came for, he had found something else and wasn't about to leave it behind. "There's an easy way to free a man from blackmail," he said quickly, and he pocketed all of the pictures of Solari.

"They'll have copies of those," Lien promised.

"Oh, I know," said Cristo. "I'm not going to destroy them. I'm going to show them to his wife." He shoved the rest of the pictures back where they came from while Lien dropped the binder back into the drawer on her side and slammed it closed, and now it was time to go.

"How are we getting out of here?" Lien asked.

Cristo felt no need to answer that. He really didn't want to bring Lien with him, but he couldn't leave her sitting in Justin Marius's office. She knew a lot now.

Exequi Gloriam hadn't gotten the door unlocked yet, but he wasn't leaving either. Cristo stared at the door, willing it not to unlock, turning over additional solutions to the problem, although he knew he really couldn't interact in any way with his grandfather Angelus Gloriam Senior, wishing there was some other way than to bring Lien with him back to Cytheria Demarco's residence.

Some other way than to direct link with her and try to keep her in tow while he also maneuvered two strong and capable Liao children, taking his hostage situation from one on one to three on one — unless Lien took his side.

The lock clicked.

Senator Gloriam gave a satisfied sigh and turned the doorknob. He had gained access to Justin Marius's office. A quick glance over his shoulder told him the coast was still clear and no one was watching him. Then he pushed open the door and found the office, as he had been informed, empty.

Thank you for reading Stars Rise. If you love reading this book please leave a star as you pass by, thanks! <3