LOGINThe plastic receiver felt heavier than lead in my hand, the analog static scratching against my ear like a persistent hum. I couldn't move. I couldn't breathe. The name the caller had just spoken hung in the narrow space between my thoughts, vibrating with a terrifying, absolute clarity.Julian.For several seconds, my brain flatly refused to process it. My eyes drifted slowly away from the ancient rotary phone on the desk and locked onto the man standing just a few feet away from me. Julian was right there. He was inside the clinic. He was drenched in the same rain, breathing the same stagnant air, and tracking the same ghosts. I looked at the sharp, aristocratic lines of his profile and realized the caller could not possibly be talking about someone else. The trust I had placed in him—the belief that he was the only clean element in a world corrupted by my father and Kain—evaporated in a single heartbeat.Julian immediately noticed the shift in my expression. His eyes narrowed, his p
No one moved.The woman stood in the lamplight with rain still beading on her coat, and the sentence she had spoken hung in the doorway between them, and no one in the hall, living or dead, seemed willing to be the first to touch it."Grandmother," Tatiana said finally. Her voice held. She was proud of that later. "I don't have a grandmother. I was told both my grandparents were gone before I was born.""You were told many things." The old man's eyes went past her, into the dark of the hall, to the place where Kain stood. "That was always the arrangement. We decide what the child is told. The child grows up inside the decision. Tonight the arrangement ends.""Why tonight?""Because you found the room." He said it simply, without bitterness, as a man states weather. "You found the floorboards. The photograph, I expect. The wolf." His gaze came back to her, and it was neither warm nor cold. It was attentive, and she understood suddenly that she had never in he
For three seconds, no one spoke.The monitor sat black and blank in front of them, and Mikhail was already working—keys clicking, feeds cycling, his jaw set in a way she had never seen before. He had guarded embassies. He had guarded ministers. He had, she realized, never once looked afraid in front of her until this exact moment."Backup feeds," Kain said."Dead. All of them, at the same second." Mikhail didn't look up. "This wasn't a cut. This was someone walking in through the front door with the house's own keys. There's only one set of core codes, Kain. One."No one said yours. No one needed to."How long until the car reaches the house," Tatiana said."Two minutes." Mikhail's hands had stopped. He turned in his chair. "Tatiana. Listen to me. We don't know what this is. But an old man who is supposed to be broken and a woman who is supposed to be dead do not drive through a security shutdown at midnight to pay a social call. I want you out of this corridor. There's a passage behi
The words didn't land like the others. They didn't shatter anything. They simply went through her—clean, quiet, and straight to the floor beneath her, where they lay looking up at her with her mother's handwriting on their backs."Why."Kain didn't answer."Why would my mother and Madam want me gone? They were standing together, laughing in the snow. They split the wolf between them. Why—" Her voice cracked once, and she hated it. "Why would two women who built something together decide to erase the thing that connected them?"Kain looked at her. And she watched him choose silence the way she had watched him choose it a dozen times that night—the same weighing, the same closing. But this time the door didn't quite shut."You said they were planning to disappear me. That's not a word people use by accident. Disappear is what happens to people in this family's files. Names crossed out, dates, no bodies." She stepped closer. "Why, Kain.""Tatiana—""I have spent this entire night learnin
The words hit the room like a dropped glass.Because he was the one who took me.No one moved. Mikhail's hand had gone still on the back of his chair, knuckles pale. Julian leaned against the doorframe with the stillness of a man who had been waiting years for exactly this sentence. And Kain—Kain didn't move at all.That was the worst part. He didn't flinch. He didn't deny it. He just stood there, jaw tight, eyes fixed on some point behind her mother's shoulder as though he were watching the years rearrange themselves and found nothing in the new shape surprising."No." Tatiana heard herself say it before she'd decided to. "No, that's not— he wouldn't—""Tatiana." Her mother's voice was quiet. Too quiet. The voice of a woman who had rehearsed this moment in a dark room for years. "I'm telling you what happened.""You told me he took you. Took is not the same as rescued. Say what you mean.""Tatiana—""Say what you mean, or don't say anything at all." Her hands were shaking. She put t
My fingers tightened around the edges of the faded plastic sleeve, snatching the photograph from Julian’s hand before he could pull it back into the safety of his coat. The sharp crimson light of the archive room caught the gloss of the image—my mother, older, standing in that sunlit stone courtyard next to the aggressively scratched-out silhouette of a nameless man."Tell me where this was taken," I demanded, holding the paper flat against my chest. "No more riddles, Julian. No more keeping secrets for my own good."Julian let out a slow, steadying breath, his gaze locked onto the stolen photograph in my hands. "The photo was funneled to me with strict conditions, Tatiana. I was told never to reveal the destination unless you successfully retraced your steps to this sub-level wing and uncovered the truth about the clinic on your own.""I am standing in the room where it happened," I snapped, gesturing violently around the ruined, red-lit archive. "The truth is out. Give me the locatio
-Tatiana-The car finally rolled to a stop. Gravel popped under the tires, and my stomach twisted because it sounded too much like something breaking. I pressed back into the seat anyway, like that would change anything. Julian’s name hit me like a lifeline. My secret boyfriend who's also my fami
-Tatiana-I slapped my hands against the cool window and watched the house shrink behind us. Every light in the dining room still blazed. No one left to turn them off. No one left to do anything.“Why them and not me?” I asked again. “I promise you I am of no use to you alive.” Why do I have to be
-TATIANA- Tatiana was destroying the bedroom. Drawers hung open, clothes scattered across the floor like she was searching for something that might magically appear if she just kept tearing through everything. The broken lamp base she tried to cave my skull in with earlier skidded across the hardw
-TATIANA-I watched my family die between bites of rosemary lamb, and the worst part was how ordinary it felt.Dad had just raised his glass, to give a toast to loyalty, bloodlines, keeping the family strong when the first shot rang through the dining room.Next, a wet slap of blood hit the tableclo







