I open it first.
I don’t open all of it. There’s too much, and my brain isn’t a sieve anymore – it’s a blade. I skim. I let phrases catch the light like fish flashing under water.
And what surfaces…
What surfaces changes everything.
My lungs forget their job. The room tilts slightly, as if the building just took a single, bracing breath. I scroll again, slower this time, just to confirm I didn’t misread. I didn’t.
Of course it was him. It was always going to be him. I was just the last one to admit it.
My pulse stays steady. My hands don’t shake. But something old and sharp wakes up behind my ribs…
I close the folder before the urge to break the computer grows teeth.
A soft, steady ache pulses low in my stomach. Not pain. Not warning. Awareness. The parasite shifts – small, deliberate, like a reminder that I’m not just reading for myself now. Or maybe it doesn’t and I just have gas.
Whatever.
Across the room, a framed photograph sits half-hidden behind a stack of files. I pull it free. A group of suited men stand outside an unfamiliar building. Two of their faces are blurred like someone scrubbed them with solvent. One has a hand on his colleague’s shoulder, casual, confident, almost affectionate.
I flip it over.
There’s handwriting on the back. Neat. Masculine. A date. A signature.
I feel something inside me go incandescent.
“Oh,” I whisper, smiling even though there’s no one here to see it. “Of course you are.”
It makes perfect sense.Toomuch sense. The kind of sense that has weight behind it – years, infrastructure, secrecy, investment. The kind of sense that has been circling me like a wolf since long before I arrived.
He didn’t want Kayla the patient. He wanted Kayla the variable. Kayla the anomaly. Kayla the mother. He wanted the baby.
Mybaby.
My hand tightens around the photograph until the glass cracks.
I take what I need. Files. Notes. The Director’s private communications. A handful of printed reports stamped with the symbol I saw in one of the locked corridors weeks ago – three interlocking rings, no words, just geometry pretending it isn’t a threat.
I don’t let myself read further. Not yet. Later, when there’s room to be furious without distraction.
As I turn to leave, something on the monitor catches my eye. A live feed. Grainy. Angled from a camera high in a tree line. The timestamp is real-time.
Night. Wind moving through branches. Movement at the lower right corner – vehicles. Headlights cutting through dark.
My heart lifts, sharp and unexpected.
“My boys,” I murmur, the smile widening. “Right on schedule.”
They must have cracked something open. Or Nightshade followed the scent of blood I left behind. He’ll smell me the moment he steps out of the car. He’ll smell what I’ve done. What I’ve become. What I’ve learned.
I glance at the computer screen one last time. At the blurred faces. At the folder name glowing back at me like a dare. Downstairs, the doctor is still breathing in shallow, frightened little sips. Outside, headlights slice toward the facility like knives.
No. I won’t tell them. Not yet.
Some truths need to be delivered in person.
I step out of the office, the files under my arm, the keycard still warm between my fingers.
