Leif yanks it open. Inside: shredded papers. Burnt fragments. One intact document was burned at the edges but legible.
Project Cerelia, Maternal Division Phase One: Collection. Phase Two: Conditioning. Phase Three: Breeding.
My blood runs ice-cold. Bjorn swears under his breath. Ivar stumbles back a step, face ashen. I grab the paper so tightly it tears.
Someone did this to Claire. Someone planned it. Resourced it. Funded it. Someone believes they own her now. I want to kill them.
My vision blurs at the edges, not with tears, but with rage so sharp it feels like a blade pressing against the inside of my skull.
Bjorn puts a hand on my shoulder. "You are losing your sanity, brother." Calm. We need to maintain our composure to manage this situation.
“I’m losing her,” I whisper-growl. “Every fucking second she’s away from me."
“No,” he says firmly. “Not yet. Nothing is over until we get her home."
But I can feel time slipping, like sand through a clenched fist.
By the timewe get close to the last week of month two, I’m barely human.
Grace avoids looking at me when she comes out of her room, rounder now since she’s in her third trimester and more exhausted; of course, the midwife is on call per Bjorn’s orders.
“You need sleep,” she says softly. I don’t respond.
“You need to take care of your body so you can rescue her.” I still don’t respond.
“You need…”
“Don’t,” I rasp. “Don’t tell me what I need. I need Claire.”
Grace’s eyes fill with tears, and she rushes back down the hallway as Bjorn shoots me a look that is a warning and disappointment.
But I don’t apologize. I don’t have the capacity for guilt. Just grief and fury. And I feel a growing conviction that Claire might be breaking in ways I can’t imagine, and it’s killing me that I can’t reach her.
And that thought…that thought hollows out something inside me.
On a Sunday night,Axel stands abruptly from his laptop.
“Got something.”
My heart slams into my ribs.
“A shipment manifest,” he says. “A private lab purchased large quantities of… lactation-induction pharmaceuticals.”
My stomach flips. “Where?” I breathe.
He zooms in. An unmarked biomedical facility. In a restricted area. The facility is under the ownership of a subsidiary of SableCorp.
Everything inside me stills. Then I smile. A slow, cold, deadly smile.
Because whoever took Claire? They just breathed their last breaths.
They left a trail, and I will follow it into hell.
It’s Monday,the beginning of the third month, and I’ve stopped pretending there is a point where grief stops being grief and becomes something that feels less like heartbreak and more like starvation. That’s where I live now. I now reside in the void between anger and hopelessness.
I don’t rememberthe last time I slept through the night. I don’t remember the last time I showered long enough to feel human. I don’t remember the last time I didn’t feel her absence like a wound in my body.
People talk. People whisper. People try to comfort me. I don’t want comfort. I want her. And every day without her makes me more dangerous.
