Alexei doesn’t move.
“Because someone should have,” he says.
Simone steps into the room.
The room is silent. Julian’s monitoring equipment hums on the other side of the wall.
Celeste’s hand finds my knee under the table.
No one fakes what just happened to Alexei’s face.
I let Simone stay. She sits against the far wall. Silent.
Her presence changes the temperature of Alexei’s responses. The precision remains, but the rehearsed quality fades. He speaks to me and Celeste, but his attention keeps pulling toward the wall where she sits. The shifts are fractional and involuntary.
He gives us a third location. Coordinates. Guard counts. Shift patterns. Enough to cross-reference against Julian’s existing intelligence.
The operational details for all three, he says, will come as trust is established.
I accept the terms. They’re reasonable.
“You said children,” Celeste says. “That’s why you left. But you recorded everything before the children directive. The adults. The cages. The feeding schedules. Why was that different?”
Alexei’s eyes go to Simone.
“The modification is designed to suppress emotional interference,” he says. Still looking at Simone. “I recorded. I filed. I maintained operational detachment because that’s what I was built to do.”
A pause.
“Then I brought blood to a woman the guards forgot. One act that served no function. No strategic value. I did it because I looked at her and could not just record.”
Simone’s hands tighten in her lap.
“He built me to remember everything.” Alexei’s voice changes. Quieter. The detachment stripped away. “I can’t forget what I choose. I can’t delete. Her face when I touched her hand through the bars is stored with the same permanence as every blood type and feeding schedule I’ve ever recorded. That memory proved my detachment was already broken.”
He looks back at me. At Celeste.
“Then the children directive arrived. And I could see clearly what the rest of my existence would look like. Infants born into the system. Growing up in those rooms. And I would record every day of it, from birth to adulthood, with a memory that can’t let go and a detachment that was already gone. The children were the directive. She was the reason the directive broke me.”
No one speaks.
“He accounted for everything,” Alexei says. “Except what happens when the man he built to record it all starts to care about what he’s recording.”
The strategic picture assembles.
Control the only reliable source of clean blood and every vampire lord on this continent answers to you. Konstantin engineered the crisis and built the solution. The farms are the foundation.
“One more thing,” he says as we stand to leave. His eyes find mine. “Konstantin knows what you’re becoming. Both of you. The immunity. The evolution. He’s been tracking it from a distance, but the distance is closing.”
“How do you know?” Celeste asks.
“Because my last assignment was you. He sent me to document what you were becoming. I documented my way here instead.”
The corridor is quiet.Julian has the recordings. Marcellus will debrief at midnight. Simone left without speaking.
Celeste leans against the wall outside the secure wing. Arms crossed. Her jaw set in a line.
“He built me to fight. He built Alexei to remember.” She looks at me.
