A financial prodigy, it read.Made his first million in the stock market by age twenty, a billionaire by twenty-five.
Photos showed him shaking hands with world leaders, lecturing at investment conferences, standing beside yachts and gleaming jets.
The bio was brief—too brief.Born in France.Raised in the U.S.in poverty.The only son of a postman and a stay-at-home mother, both deceased before his rise to fame.
Neat.Tragic.Sanitized.
But it didn’t fit.The name Montverre pulsed on the screen like a warning.
Desi leaned closer, scrolling deeper into the web’s labyrinth.She opened ancestry sites, genealogy archives, and obscure historical records.An hour passed.Then another.Her coffee grew cold beside her.
Finally, there it was.
The Montverres were an ancient French noble family tracing its lineage to Sir Géraud de Montverre, knight of the Order of the Temple, Second Crusade.
Her pulse quickened as she scrolled through the centuries of descendants, the names blurring together, until one leapt off the screen like a cannon blast.
Louis-Étienne de Montverre.
Her stomach lurched.
She clicked the name.
Louis-Étienne de Montverre, Marquis de Montverre.Inherited the Montverre fortune and Château de Montverre in the Auvergne region of France.The estate included Roman ruins and a private chapel built atop an ancient Templar commandery.Later in life, the marquis moved to an island in the West Indies, where he squandered the family fortune, leaving little to his daughter Geneviève and son Marcel.
Desi sank back in her chair.“So… he never got it,” she whispered.“He never got the Ring.”If he had, he wouldn’t have died penniless.Which meant it had sunk with theSentinel, right where she’d found it.At least that much of history had not changed.
But did that also mean Caleb’s life had ended at the bottom of the sea?Her heart shriveled.
She kept scrolling.Her eyes traced the dwindling bloodline, generation after generation, until the name Briar Emrys Montverre appeared at the end.
A chill slid down her spine.
He knew.He had to know.The Ring, its legend, its power.He wasn’t after an artifact.He was after the same thing his ancestor sought.
Pushing away from the desk, Desi crossed to the window.Sunlight spilled across the floor, catching dust motes that drifted like tiny worlds in orbit.
But why?she wondered.He already had billions.What more could he want?
The answer came unbidden.Power.
It was never about money.Never had been.
She let out a shaky laugh.“Funny how greed runs in the family.”
Five million dollars.Enough to save Daria.Enough to save everything that mattered.
But how could she get the Ring?
If it was still in theSentinel’swreck, would touching it again send her back through time?And why did it work only sometimes?
Her temples throbbed.She rubbed them and collapsed onto the bed, frustration pressing against the inside of her skull.Think, Desi.Think.
Her gaze drifted to the glow of her laptop, and memory tugged at her—Montverre’s library, the old map she’d found there.The one with red circles marked across the globe.
Her eyes fluttered shut as she pictured the ones in the Caribbean.
One circle near the wreck of theSentinel.Another south of Puerto Rico.And the third aroundÎle Du Crâne.
