My lower lip trembles so violently that I can’t even bite it down. He takes another step toward me, and instinct slams back into place. I grip the gun, fingers closing around cold metal, and I lift it, pointing the barrel straight at his chest.
“You take one more fucking step toward me and I’ll put a bullet in you.” The words scrape out of me, but they sound nothing like threats—they sound like I’m breaking.
Weak. Cracked. Lost. Like even I don’t believe I could pull the trigger.
Because I don’t want to hurt him. I want him to tell me none of this is real. I want him to tell me I’m wrong. I want him to undo the nightmare tearing through this bunker.
But he just stands there—close enough to see the pulse hammering beneath his skin, far enough to feel like a stranger carved from cold stone. And even stone breaks, crumbles if you hit it long enough, hard enough.
The strongest things shatter. I know this because I am shattering now.
“What the fuck is this?” I breathe out, every word trembling like a fractured glass edge. I hate myself for how much I shake. I hate that my voice cracks.
He lifts his hands slowly in surrender. A soft, broken exhale leaves him. “I will tell you everything you want to know, Estella. Just… keep calm?—”
“Keep calm?!” The gun jerks in my grip as I snap the words at him, my voice rising into something sharp and unhinged. “Are you out of your fucking mind, Dante?!”
Fear shadows his eyes for a heartbeat, but he nods. “You’re right. I know. I said it wrong. I’m sorry.”
My head shakes violently as I step closer, waving the gun between us like a blade of truth. “Start talking. Right fucking now. Or I swear to God, I will kill you. Is this your doing?” I gesture wildly to the map, to the files, the photos, the box, the grim reflections of every version of me pinned to the walls.
His face folds inward, sorrow pulling his features tight, his lips thinning to a line. “Yes,” he says.
One word.
Sharp enough to cut bone.
And it slices straight through me.
My knees buckle so hard the floor tilts, and for a moment, it feels like gravity might rip me in half. A strangled, tear-soaked sob claws its way out of my chest.
“Who the fuck are you?” I choke out.
A single tear slides down his cheek, gleaming under the sterile lights almost theatrically. My gaze follows it, wondering whether that drop of sorrow is just another piece of the performance. Another trick.
“Me and my former team were hunting down The Order,” he begins, voice low, raw, and the words slam into me like fists. The room tightens, and the walls shrink inward, stealing air from my lungs. I shut my eyes, but the cold of the bunker presses into my pores, seeping through my skin like poison.
It was a lie. Every moment. Every confession. Every touch.
A way to get whatever he needed from me.
“Our plan was to move forward and take them all out,” he continues, and I feel the floor vibrating under me like a beast waking up. “But it changed. For me, Estella. I was?—”
“You were using me,” I cut in, slicing through his sentence like a blade. “Oh, right—because you have a noble reason to do what you do, but when I do the same, suddenly I’m the monster? It’s wrong? It’s unforgivable?!”
He doesn’t answer. He just trembles, faint, barely perceptible, as if the truth is shaking him from the inside out.
“Murder is still fucking murder,” I spit, pacing around the map, my voice cracking into ugly laughter. “But you probably thought you were some righteous fucking saint. Spying on us. Building an entire base to track every kill, every move, and what? You really thought you were doing something good?!”
“No. I never said I was noble, Estella,” he says quietly. “I did what I?—”
“You needed me to get closer to the top,” I snap. “You killed Cane, didn’t you?”
His eyes widen so sharply it’s almost comical—a dizzying spin, like a merry-go-round losing control. He steps forward on instinct. “No, no, baby, I didn’t?—”
“Don’t you fucking call me that.” My finger shifts onto the trigger with a smooth, deadly slide. “Tell me. What did you do to him?”
His face crumples, and his hands slap against his own skull. Before I register it, he collapses, his knees crashing into the wooden floor with a thud that rattles through the bunker.
