Chapter Ninety-Eight: What the Lock Was Hiding

The asylum doors closed behind them with a soft, anticlimactic click — no iron, no ceremony, just an old building letting go of a secret it had guarded for years.

Eve walked to the car under her own power. Spine straight. Jaw set. She didn't look back at the third-floor window, though she felt her father's eyes on her the whole way down the drive.

Alex matched her stride, close enough to catch her if she stumbled, careful enough not to touch her without asking. "How are you feeling."

"Fine."

"Eve."

"I said fine, Alex." She didn't slow down. "You don't get to fuss over me right now. You don't get to be careful and gentle and *concerned*. Not yet. I'm still deciding how angry I am at you, and hovering isn't going to speed that decision up."

"Noted." A muscle worked in his jaw, but he kept pace anyway, kept his hand a careful inch from her elbow the entire walk to the car, like a man who'd learned exactly how much space she needed and hated every centimeter of it. "For what it's worth — I'd rather you yell at me than go quiet like this."

"I'm not fragile." The words came out sharper than she meant them to. "I survived worse than a truth, Alex. I'll survive being furious with you too."

He didn't argue. That, more than anything, told her how carefully he was walking around her tonight.

They were three miles outside Palermo, the sea sliding by gray and restless past the window, when the cylinder in Alex's jacket pocket began to hum.

"That's early," he said, frowning down at it. "He said it would take hours to synthesize the counter-agent, not—"

"He lied," Eve said, and something in her voice had gone strange, distant, like she was listening to herself from underwater. "Or he didn't. Maybe it doesn't need synthesizing. Maybe it just needed me to finally *want* it."

The pressure started behind her eyes first. A low, building ache that had nothing to do with exhaustion and everything to do with a wall somewhere deep in her skull finally, catastrophically giving way.

"Eve—"

"Something's happening." She pressed her palms to her temples, breath going ragged. "Alex, something's—"

The world went white, then black, then neither, and Eve Harlow fell sideways into a decade she had never been allowed to remember.

---

"It's a normal job," the recruiter said, sliding two folders across the table — one for her, one for Sophia. Neither sister had touched theirs yet. "Corporate surveillance. Long-term placement. You'd be surprised how much a pretty face and a photographic memory are worth to the right people."

Sophia had grabbed her folder first, always first, always hungrier for whatever came next. "How long-term."

"However long it takes."

It took years.

Eve remembered the training compound before she remembered anything else — remembered it in fragments at first, sensation before sense, the smell of gun oil and antiseptic, the particular ache of a body being rebuilt from the ground up into something harder than it was ever meant to be. She remembered Ryan at nineteen, all elbows and arrogance, losing three straight sparring matches to her before he stopped sulking about it and started actually teaching her the things that mattered. She remembered Mia stitching her up for the first time, hands steady even when her voice wasn't, murmuring* this doesn't have to be who you become, you know, *like she half believed it herself. She remembered Aria before Aria learned to smile like nothing touched her — sharper then, more breakable, the two of them staying up past curfew trading theories about who they'd been before the program erased the answer.

She remembered Sophia changing.

It happened slowly enough that Eve almost missed it — a hardness creeping into her sister's laugh, a coldness behind eyes that used to hold nothing but mischief. The program had a way of finding the softest part of a person and pressing on it until something gave. Sophia's had given first. Eve had watched her sister get carved down into something sleeker and crueler and infinitely more useful to the people running the compound, and she hadn't known how to stop it, and some nights, lying awake in the dark, she still wasn't sure she'd tried hard enough.

The mission, when it finally came, had a name and a face. Voss Enterprises. Alex Voss. Get inside. Get close. Become whatever the target needed you to be, and dismantle his empire from the marrow out.

She was supposed to destroy him.

She fell in love with him instead — slowly, then all at once, then so completely that by the time she understood what had happened to her, there was no version of the mission left that didn't feel like a betrayal of something realer than any order the Board had ever given her.

And then, one impossible, unsurvivable night, the Board found out.

She remembered the explosion before she remembered anything else about that night too — the east wing of some estate she'd half-convinced herself was starting to feel like home, fire tearing through it exactly the way fire had once taken her sister's old life, Alex's name torn out of her throat as she ran toward a building already collapsing in on itself. She remembered Ryan's hand locking around her arm, dragging her back. She remembered the moment someone told her he hadn't made it out.

She remembered, with a clarity that made her skin go cold even now, exactly what she'd done next.

---

Eve came back to herself gasping, Alex's hands braced hard on either side of her face, his voice cracked open with a fear she'd never once heard from him in any version of the man she'd known.

"Eve. Eve, look at me, stay with me—"

"You died," she rasped, jade eyes wild, unfocused, still half-lost in a fire that had happened years before the one that actually scarred him. "I watched the wing come down. They told me you didn't make it out. I remember — Alex, I *remember* what I did after."

His face went the color of old ash. "What did you do."

The car had stopped. She was on the ground somehow, on her knees on wet Sicilian gravel, Alex kneeling in front of her like the empire he ran meant nothing at all compared to keeping her upright.

"I burned it down," Eve whispered. "Not the estate. The Board. I went through their people the way fire goes through dry wood — Ryan couldn't stop me, Aria couldn't stop me, Mia begged and I didn't even slow down. I dismantled their entire northern command in eleven days. I put more fear into that organization than they'd felt in thirty years of running it." Her hands were shaking now, memory and present tense tangling together until she couldn't fully separate which fire she was standing in. "I couldn't reach the top of it. They had numbers I couldn't out-fight, not even broken open the way I was. They started trying to put me down instead of just stopping me." Her breath caught. "And that's when he found me."

"Who," Alex said, though something in his face said he already suspected.

"My father." The word came out raw, disbelieving, a decade late. "He was still inside the Board then. He hadn't gone underground yet. He pulled me out of a collapsing compound with half their security team already dead behind me, and instead of turning me in, he put something in my arm and told me to sleep." Her eyes found Alex's, hollow and haunted and finally, fully awake. "He didn't build the Obsidian Lock to protect me from what they'd done to me, Alex."

She swallowed hard, the last piece of the memory finally surfacing whole.

"He built it to protect the world from what I'd already become."