Posts about her.
Missing this brilliant human. Come back soon, evening star.
Posted two days ago. With one of the photos from the program.
The comments are full of people asking who she is, where she went, if she's okay.
He's making her public. Claiming her publicly.
My fingers hover over the keyboard.
I could ruin him. Easily. A few keystrokes and Ben Rosen's life becomes very complicated. Failed background checks. Flagged accounts. A misdemeanor charge that appears on his record—nothing major, nothing violent, just enough to cause problems.
I start typing.
Stop.
Start again.
Stop.
What the fuck am I doing?
I close the browser. Close the laptop. Sit in the dark and try to remember who I am.
Corvus Barclay. Analytical. Controlled. Rational.
Not this jealous, possessive creature who wants to destroy a Beta boy for the crime of being kind to a girl who needed kindness.
But maybe that's who I've always been. Maybe the control was always just a mask. And Vespera—brilliant, defiant, dying Vespera—has stripped it away and shown me the monster underneath.
I think about the data. The facts.
She's our fated mate. Triple compatibility. One in fifty million odds.
She's dying from rejecting us. Terminal rejection sickness.
She had a life in Columbus. Friends. Theater. A Beta boy who called her evening star.
We took all of it.
And now I'm sitting in the dark at 3 AM, hacking her phone and planning revenge against someone whose only crime was caring about her.
I am a monster.
Just a more analytical one than Dorian. A more calculated one than Oakley.
But still a monster.
Thenextmorning,Ifind her by the pool.
She's swimming laps. Slow, deliberate strokes that shouldn't be possible given her condition. But she's always been stubborn. Always pushed past what biology said she could handle.
I watch from the terrace. Tell myself I'm monitoring her health. Ensuring she doesn't push too far.
But really, I'm just watching her. The way water streams off her skin. The grace in her movements despite the rejection sickness eating her alive.
She surfaces at the shallow end. Sees me.
