The thought loops through my skull while I stand under water hot enough to scald, scrubbing at my hands like I can wash off the memory of his skin. The cum cleaned off easily. The feeling of him shaking apart under my grip didn't.
My reflection in the fogged mirror looks like a stranger. Dark hair plastered to my forehead, water dripping down a face I've never particularly liked. Too sharp. Too angular. The kind of face that makes people nervous in elevators. Gray eyes that Jace once described as "the color of impending doom" staring back at me with an expression that feels weird on my face.
I'm thirty-two years old. I've killed forty-seven people. I've broken more minds than I can count. I've done things that would make ordinary humans vomit, and I've done them without flinching.
But I've never lost control like that.
I turn off the water and stand in the steam, assessing the damage. My lip is swollen where he bit me back. There are scratches on my chest from his nails, red lines that will fade by tomorrow.My cock, traitorous bastard that it is, is already half-hard again just from thinking about the sounds he made.
Pathetic.
I dress in clean clothes. Black pants, black shirt, because simplicity is efficient and I don't have the bandwidth for choices right now. My office is on the other side of the apartment, separated from the living spaces by a hallway and two locked doors. I seal myself inside and pull up Moore's archive.
Work. Focus on work. That's what I do. That's all I know how to do.
The financial records blur together for the first hour. Shell companies layered on shell companies, money moving through accounts in Switzerland, Singapore, the Caymans. Whoever designed this system was good. Better than good. The kind of meticulous that speaks to decades of experience.
I cross-reference transaction dates with the Westpoint Academy operational timeline. Most of the money flowed through during the Academy's peak years, twenty to fifteen years ago. Equipment purchases. "Personnel expenses" that almost certainly meant handlers and medical staff. Regular payments to a network of fertility clinics across three continents.
Then, five years ago, the pattern changes.
The accounts don't close. They just... redirect. The money starts flowing somewhere else. Same shell company structure, same careful layering, but different destinations. I trace one thread through seventeen intermediaries before it dead-ends in a numbered account in Geneva.
Geneva.
I make a note and keep digging.
Three hours in, I find a name.
It's buried in a footnote on a wire transfer from 2019, so small I almost miss it. A compliance signature, required by Swiss banking law. The kind of detail most people would overlook.
Werner Kreiss.
I've heard the name before. Years ago, in whispered conversations between Custodians who thought I wasn't listening. Kreiss handles money. Not just any money. The kind of money that makes nations nervous, that funds wars without leaving fingerprints, that builds empires in the shadows.
If he signed off on these transfers, he's connected to Project Omega.
I open a new search, pulling every file in Moore's archive that mentions his name. Seven documents appear. All heavily redacted. All referencing financial arrangements between "interested parties" and "operational facilities."
One document is different. A letter, dated four years ago, addressed to the Custodian Council. The subject line reads: "Proposed restructuring of Eastern Seaboard operations."
The letter is mostly blacked out, but one paragraph survived:
"Mr. Kreiss represents an organization with significant interest in our mutual objectives. His proposal to consolidate financing through Geneva-based intermediaries would provide enhanced security for Phase Two initiatives while maintaining plausible deniability for participating Houses."
Phase Two: Westpoint Replication Initiative
That's the new program. The one that rose from Westpoint's ashes in an accelerated fashion, but was always planned. The one manufacturing a new generation of weapons in facilities scattered across the globe.
And Kreiss is financing it. Or at the very least, taking money from the Custodians as a back burner project that they want to see come to fruition.
I lean back in my chair and stare at the ceiling. My body aches. My eyes burn. I've been in this office for six hours, and the only reason I know that is because my computer tells me it's past two p.m..
Which means I've been avoiding Jonah for almost eight hours.
I pull up the security feed before I can stop myself. He's in the library again, curled into the armchair like a cat, one of my books open in his lap. From this angle, I can see the sharp line of his jaw, the way his dark hair falls across his forehead, the furrow between his brows as he concentrates.
He's not classically handsome. His nose is slightly crooked, broken at some point and never set properly. His eyebrows are too heavy, his mouth too wide. But there's something about the way his face moves when he thinks. The way his expressions cycle through amusement, frustration, curiosity, all in the space of a single page.
