“Fuck, she took out the power,” Aiden barked, static hissing in the comms.
“Comms are still active,” Noah said, fingers flying uselessly over his dark console. “We’ve got backup generators, but we’ve lost the feed for the next thirty seconds. Hang tight.”
The air pressure in the war room shifted, an invisible weight dropping into the space. The fans and air conditioning groaned to a stop. The faint hum of machines died, leaving the mansion eerily silent.
Without the white noise of electricity, the quiet felt alive, breathing, waiting. Noah could hear his own heartbeat and Zane’s uneven inhale beside him. Somewhere deep in the walls, something ticked like a dying clock.
Lights on the remaining monitors dimmed one by one, the mansion descending into darkness room by room, like the sky itself rolling shut. The air filled with the faint metallic tang of overheated circuits and dust, the scent of hot copper and ozone clinging to the back of Noah’s throat.
For one stretched-out heartbeat, there was only quiet, raw and endless.
“Backup generator,” Calliope said, voice cutting through the dark. “Stand by.”
Outside on the live mics, the silence deepened. Shoes stilled. No breathing. No chatter. Just a faint scuff, a dragged inhale, the entire house holding its breath with them.
Then—boom—the generator hummed to life.
It caught with a grinding hum, and then the world blinked back in a stuttering rush of light and mechanical hum.
A chorus of reboot chimes filled the air like a thousand heart monitors restarting at once. Monitors flickered in staggered bursts—bedrooms, hallways, stairwells—each camera rejoining the grid like survivors crawling back from the dark.
Adam’s frame snapped back onto the cam, static washing over him in ribbons as he approached the electrical room door. He hovered just outside, poised and ready to ambush. But she was ready too.
Noah watched with a nauseating dread as someone—Bev—burstnotfrom the electrical room, but from the pantry across the hall. She came screaming like a banshee, knife flashing in the low light as she surged toward him.
Noah’s throat went bone dry. For a heartbeat, everything froze, like the feed itself had paused in disbelief. Adam’s hand came up to block; Bev’s eyes were wide and rabid; the overhead light carved their faces into sharp relief.
“Adam!” Noah’s voice cracked the silence, a sharp, terrified sound.
The blade hit flesh. Adam jerked, shoulder flaring red on the feed as Bevtwistedthe knife into him. The camera shook from the impact, or maybe Noah was the one shaking.
And then, impossibly, Adam snarled and threw her like she weighed nothing. She slammed into the wood-paneled wall hard enough to rattle the picture frames, then staggered upright and bolted, a guttural sound tearing out of her throat, half scream, half sob, all feral.
“Adam!” Noah barked again, louder this time.
Reality blurred. There was movement behind him, voices, the scrape of chairs, but no one was fast enough. Noah tore off his headset and sprinted out of the war room, past Felix’s startled shout, past Zane’s wide eyes. The door banged open behind him like a gunshot, and the marble hall swallowed him whole.
Every footstep slammed against the floor like a drumbeat. The mansion’s gold light flickered through open doorways, breaking across his vision in stripes of shadow and flame. Shouts echoed down the corridors—orders, confusion—and then Atticus’s voice, sharp and distant: “What the fuck happened?”
“She stabbed Adam,” Noah gasped into his comms, voice rough from running. “Outside the electrical room. Someone get that bitch to the gardens for the twins to play with.”
By the time Noah rounded the corner, Adam was still upright, but only barely. The camera hadn’t done him justice. In person, he looked pale, smaller somehow, his body human in a way Noah hated seeing. Blood slicked his shoulder and dripped down his chest, red soaking into white fabric.
As soon as their eyes met, Adam’s back hit the wall, sliding down until he sat against it. His breathing was uneven, harsh.
He still managed a grin. “Forgot how bad getting stabbed sucks.”
Even bleeding, he was impossible, grinning like a devil mid-defeat, still making Noah’s pulse skip between terror and affection.
Bev was gone. Of course she was. She was smart enough to know that aninjuredAdam was far more dangerous than a healthy one.
Noah dropped to his knees beside him, the marble cold and slick under his palms. The hallway smelled too clean, too normal, like expensive air freshener and lemon polish insteadof blood. The contrast made Noah’s stomach twist. This place wasn’t supposed to feel civilized anymore.
“Jesus,” Noah whispered, grabbing a stack of white kitchen towels from a console table and pressing one hard to the wound. The fabric soaked through almost instantly, pink spreading like watercolor.
He tore open Adam’s shirt, buttons scattering. The wound sat high on his shoulder, bad, but not heart or lung level. Still, the way it bled…
The towel was thin, too thin. The warmth slicked between his fingers. His hands were steady, practiced, but his chest thundered, breath coming sharp and shallow.
