Theo had lived in a vacuum, in a lonely, silent world, for the past year. She rarely left their Paris home now and hadn’t set foot in their château since the kidnapping. It was empty and closed, and too full of terrible memories for her now. She had met with Jacques, her CEO, to continue to keep track of her business, and Matthieu’s CEO too, to keep an eye on his affairs and enormous enterprise. The rest of the time, she wandered her home like a ghost, playing over and over again in her mind everything that had happened, and thinking how it could have been different. The French authorities had made all the wrong assumptions, with disastrous results.

The police had told her at the time that her son’s death was an “unfortunate accident of the event” and proved that the kidnappers were amateurs. Professionals would have negotiated more efficiently, and come to some agreement with her rapidly, and neither Matthieu nor Axel would have gotten hurt. French, British, and other European authorities as well as a network of informants had been looking for answers, underground information, and the culprits for the past year, to no avail. No one knew who the kidnappers were or where the fifty million euro she’d paid them had gone. They had wanted a hundred. The only motive that seemed likely to the police and DGSE was one of vengeance for a business venture that had gone wrong. Matthieu had long been leery of opening stores in Russia. Their economy was too unstable, and their business practices too unreliable and often shady. Despite his misgivings, a Russian investor had come along, offering to put up a hundred million euros to help defray the costs of setting up two flagship stores in Russia, an idea Matthieu had begun to like increasingly, and finally agreed to, against his initial better judgment. The investor, Dmitri Aleksandr, was a billionaire himself and knew the Russian market. It was no secret that there was a great deal of money there, and people eager to spend it.

Setting up the two stores had rapidly become a nightmare, with people squandering money on bribes, delayed construction, and the cost being multiplied beyond all reason, with quality building materials being substituted with inferior ones. Matthieu had finally lost patience and abandoned the project before the stores ever opened. It appeared to be the wisest decision, rather than continuing to throw money at the project and losing even more than the two hundred million he had already put in. Matthieu had lost a vast amount of money but was relieved once he decided to get out. Their investor did not accept his losses with equanimity. He lost the hundred million he’d invested, and a little more. Matthieu graciously accepted his own losses, and could afford to. His investor claimed he couldn’t, and said the loss would ruin him, which Matthieu did not believe.