“I wish I were,” he whispers.
He taps a final file on the screen. An audio file.
Rec_004_Intercept.wav.
“Listen,” he commands.
He hits play. A burst of digital static hisses from the tablet’s small speakers, followed by the hollow, echoing sound of a connected phone call.
I stop breathing. My lungs lock. I stare at the tablet, completely paralyzed, as I listen to the smooth, distinguished voice of my father furiously negotiating the price of a siege with a Russian mercenary. Five million dollars. Five million dollars to storm the compound.
Then, Kirill asks about me. He warns my father that I might not survive the crossfire.
The silence on the recording stretches. My heart stops beating. I wait for the man who raised me to tell the mercenary to call it off. I wait for him to demand my safe return. I wait for him to be a father.
Instead, he casually writes me off as a necessary casualty. He tells Kirill that a Supreme Court nominee who loses his only daughter to gang violence becomes an untouchable martyr.
“...it will be a devastating loss for this family,” my father states coldly.
The recording clicks off.
The silence in the office is suffocating.
I stare at the blank, black screen of the tablet. My stomach heaves.
He weaponized my murder. He planned to stand over my closed casket, wearing a black suit, weeping for the cameras,using my slaughtered, bullet-riddled body as a stepping stone to the highest court in the country.
I wasn’t a daughter. I was a prop, and when I became inconvenient, he threw me away.
A raw, ugly sound rips out of me.
I collapse forward, my hands hitting the carpet, my forehead pressing into the floor.
I scream.
I scream until my lungs burn and black spots dance in my vision. The pain in my chest is so vast that it feels like it has been cracked open with a pry bar. I can’t breathe. I can’t pull air into my lungs. The room spins. My hands claw at the rug, my fingers curling into tight, agonizing fists.
The world I knew is gone.
Strong hands grip my shoulders.
Cassian drags me from the floor. I fight him blindly, thrashing, sobbing, striking out at the only thing I can reach. My fists bounce off his chest, hitting his collarbone.
He absorbs it, taking every uncoordinated hit without flinching.
He pulls me flush against him, wrapping his arms around me in a vice grip, crushing me to his chest. He buries his face in my damp hair, pinning my arms down, physically holding me together while I shatter into a thousand pieces.
“Let it out,” he rumbles against my ear, his voice a low, steady anchor in the middle of the hurricane. “Burn it down, Iris. Let it burn.”
I sob into his shirt, my fingers digging desperately into the fabric of his back.
I cry until there are no tears left, until my body is nothing but a hollow, shaking shell.
Minutes pass.
Maybe hours.
Time loses its meaning entirely. The hyperventilation slows into a weak, shuddering rhythm.
