“How romantic,” Kian muses from behind his desk, flipping open another folder like we’re not drowning in death. “Love, lacerations, and legally binding contracts. It’s all so terribly poetic.” He clicks his tongue, surveying Dom’s condition with clinical detachment. “Though I must say, son, you’re looking a touch anemic. All that heroic bleeding really takes its toll, doesn’t it?”
“Stay with me,” I beg, pressing my forehead to his. His head lolls against my palm, too heavy and limp. His pulse stutters beneath my touch. “You can’t die, you understand? Not because of me.”
For one heartbeat, his gaze clears. His lips part. “L-love . . . go . . .”
“If he dies,” I snarl, whirling around, “there will be no marriage. No contract. Nothing.”
“Oh, Aria.” Kian rolls his eyes, examining his nails. “Do stop being so melodramatic. You think I don’t know exactly how much blood a body can lose before death comes calling?” He waves a bloodstained hand in Dom’s direction, voice breezy. “I’ve perfected this process over the years. Learned each threshold and boundary. Trust me, I know my son’s limits down to the last delicious drop.”
My fingers tangle in Dom’s blood-soaked hair as his head slumps against my hand. “He’s dying!”
“He’ll be perfectly peachy for the big day.” Kian doesn’t even glance up. “A little exsanguination never killed anyone. Well . . .” His smile sharpens. “Not anyone important, anyway.” He slides the weathered folder across his desk. “Now, because I’m feeling generous, here’s a parting gift. Everything your parents created. Every note, prototype, and failed trial. All the pieces of the Apex Initiative they died to protect.”
He leans back, temple resting against steepled fingers as he smiles down at me like a god admiring a sacrifice.
“And you, dear Aria, are the final component.”
Dom manages one last gurgling whisper. “Go.”
Kian claps his bloody hands together, the sound wet and sticky. “Now run along, little deathbird. Daddy needs some quality bonding time with his boy. Plus, you’ll be busy anyway—wedding preparations, ceremony details. Octavia will be in touch about fittings, guest lists, and security rotations. All terribly important.”
“I hate you,” I choke out. My legs barely hold me upright, knees slick with Dom’s blood. “If he dies—”
“You’ll what?” Kian chuckles, already reaching for another blade. “Cry? Scream? Look at you. You can barely stand. Face it, sweetheart, you’ve lost. Now be a good girl, show up for the ceremony, and maybe I’ll throw in those security tapes from the night your parents died. Wouldn’t that be a treat? Finally knowing what really happened?”
Through the blur of tears, I gaze at Dom one last time. His chest barely rising, blood dripping in a slow, rhythmic patter from what’s left of him. The chair beneath him squelches with every strained movement, leather and wood stained beyond recognition.
He won’t kill him, I tell myself, the thought a desperate prayer. He’s his heir, his only son. Even Kian wouldn’t . . .
But then I see it: the way he studies Dom’s open wounds like a sculptor admiring raw marble. The slow smile curving his lips as he turns the blade, imagining where to carve next. The only thing keeping Dom alive is his usefulness, and the moment that runs out . . .
“You can leave now,” Kian sing-songs, already turning back to his canvas. “Unless you’d prefer to watch what happens next?”
The hallway tilts beneath my feet as I stumble out, clutching the folder to my chest. Every step feels like treason, but staying would only make it worse. He’d bleed Dom dry just to watch me break. If I walk away, at least there’s a chance he survives.
That has to be enough.
I barely make it around the corner before my knees buckle. I crash against the wall, the marble unforgiving against my shoulder. I retch, bringing up nothing but bile and broken promises. Thescent of blood clings to me, embedded in my skin, soaked into my clothes, matted in my hair. I can still feel it drying on my hands, see it pooling beneath Dom, hear Kian’s laughter. The sound of flesh parting under blade.
And he’s right. I’ve lost everything: my parents, my freedom, and now Dom. Even my own sister stands with Alexander, leaving me truly alone.
But Dom’s alive. He has to stay alive.
I press my forehead to the cold stone, breathing through the horror and grief threatening to hollow me out from the inside. Tears slip free. This is the taste of true defeat—bitter and metallic, blood and betrayal thick on my tongue.
Kian has won. Every piece of me that mattered is still in that room, bleeding beside the boy I couldn’t save.
Somewhere behind me, Kian’s laughter echoes like a victory hymn, followed by the wet sound of another blade finding flesh. I’ve just signed away my soul and I walked out alive, but I’m not sure any part of me survived.
Dawn spills through theconference room windows, igniting the edges of scattered datapads where I’ve laid my triumph bare across the glass table. Fourteen days of work or more accurately, fourteen days of near-insomnia, of Alexander wordlessly delivering coffee and food, of him intercepting every potential interruption with surgical efficiency. The results are irrefutable: formulas decrypted, patterns restored, my parents’ legacy exhumed from the wreckage of misinterpretation.
My father’s paranoia was always his sharpest weapon. I remember him hunched at his desk, muttering about intellectual vultures while encrypting his discoveries in mathematical misdirection. A man who trusted no one except my mother with the unredacted truth. And Aria, of course. She absorbed every hushed revelation, every hidden variable, and fed them to me not out of trust, but out of carelessness. She never believed I’d grasp their weight.
The records span three months of catastrophic failure. Twisted hybrids shrieking through genetic collapse, their essence rejecting integration, nothing like the flawless specimens my parents once designed. The other researchers saw only data. Clean sequences, tidy numbers they thought they could mimic. They didn’t understand my father’s codes, his deliberate obfuscation.
Each breakthrough was buried in noise, formulas spliced across unrelated documents, scattered fragments only he could read. They were trying to translate scripture with half the alphabet missing.
The door opens without a sound. Alexander steps through, smoke given flesh, elegant and dangerous in the same breath. His suit is midnight blue, the color he reserves for moments that matter. It sharpens his gaze into something cold, a weapon edged between storm and ice. Even his black hair is tempered by it, long enough to hint at rebellion yet too exact to be anything but deliberate.
