The Illusion of Control

~CASSIAN~

I tasted blood.

It pooled thick on my tongue, bitter and metallic - like copper and ash. I didn’t know if it came from my mouth or my broken lip, or if I’d bitten down during the blast. It didn’t matter.

Everything inside me roared.

My ears rang with a high, piercing screech - not just a sound, but a living thing. It drilled deep, vibrating through my skull like shards of glass. I could hear nothing else-not the fire, not the crumbling steel, not even my own breathing.

Only that awful, relentless ringing, like the world itself had been muted… or maybe destroyed.

I blinked through the smoke. My vision blurred.

And that’s when I saw her.

Aria.

Crushed beneath me, limp, dust in her hair, blood at the corner of her mouth. My body had shielded hers from the worst of it, but not all. Not enough. Her skin was too pale, her chest barely moving.

Panic cracked through my ribs harder than the blast had.

“Aria.” My voice cracked, raw and desperate. “Look at me.”

No response.

Her chest rose -barely- in a shallow, trembling breath. Her lashes were caked with soot, her skin cold under my fingers. My heart thundered. Not from the pain in my ribs. Not from the fire behind us, but from the sickening stillness of the woman in my arms.

“Aria. Wake up. Now.” I shook her gently, careful of her neck and her back. “Come on. Don’t do this.”

Still nothing.

A steel beam crashed down not ten feet away, throwing up sparks.

No more time.

“Vaughn!” I barked into my comm. “We’re alive… northwest quadrant, back corner. Breach now or we die in here!”

“On it,” he snapped.

There was shouting. Gunfire. Then light.

Shadow Team Prime broke through the side wall like black wraiths. Two agents reached us fast, dragging us through the rubble. My boots scraped over cracked cement, the heat clawing at our backs as the warehouse screamed its death behind us.

Outside, the cold night slapped me in the face, but I didn’t let go of her.

Even as the medics rushed forward and lifted her onto a stretcher, I kept hold of her hand-her fragile, soot-streaked hand.

“Take her home,” I ordered. “Straight to the estate. No hospitals. No public records. Let all doctors be on standby.”

“Yes, sir.”

As the vehicle sped off into the dark, I stood alone in the flicker of red and white lights, wind pressing against the raw cut on my cheek and just then the Wolfe van arrived and without wasting another second, I hopped in.

Vaughn drove. Fast and silent.

We didn’t need words.

He knew where we were going—not the estate, not any public facility. This was off-grid, a Wolfe-owned stronghold buried deep in the outskirts, with no names or records, just reinforced walls and a history of brutal efficiency.

I sat in the passenger seat, my fists clenched, and blood drying on my skin.

The van veered off the highway, tires crunching gravel as it turned onto a narrow, unmarked path. The gates opened without question - facial recognition scanned us before we even stopped.

Facility K.

Where loose ends were handled.

Vaughn cut the engine and passed me my phone with a picture of Aria in bed.

“She’s in good hands,” he said quietly. “The doctors are already working.”

I nodded once, stepping out into the cold night air.

“I’m not worried about her care,” I muttered. “I’m worried about the bastards who made me need it.”

___

Inside the guardroom was cold and silent, lit by a single interrogation lamp that cast harsh shadows across the tile floor.

The man in the chair; masked, bruised, still covered in ash, sat with his wrists cuffed to the metal table. He hadn’t said a word since he was pulled from the rubble.

But now… he looked up and smiled.

It wasn’t fear. It was mockery.

“Well, well,” he rasped, his voice raw. “The Wolfe prince shows his face.”

I didn’t speak. Just watched him as I fought the urge to unalive him.

He leaned forward, chains clinking. “You should’ve let her die in there. That would’ve saved you a lot of grief because they are never backing down until she’s dead.”

Then he did something I hadn’t expected.

He laughed.

A deep, bitter laugh that echoed through the room.

“You played your part perfectly, Cassian, just like they knew you would. Thought you were ten steps ahead, but you walked right into the trap like a well-trained dog.”

My blood turned cold.

Before I could move, before I could even demand answers, his mouth twisted into a grin, and then he bit down.

A sickening crunch. His body jerked once, twice, then went rigid. Foam bubbled at the corners of his mouth.

“Shit!” a guard yelled. “He’s swallowing something!”

I lunged, grabbed his jaw, and tried to force it open, but it was too late. His teeth crushed a black capsule hidden in his molars.

Within seconds… he stilled.

Dead.

Silence slammed into the room.

I stood there, my chest heaving with fury coursing through my veins. He was the only thread that could’ve led me to the mastermind behind Sienna - to the one pulling her strings from the shadows. And now, with one bite, he’d severed it. The answers died with him.

With a roar, I turned and slammed my fist into the wall. The concrete cracked under the force.

Then Vaughn’s voice cut through my comm.

“Sir… there’s something you need to see. It’s… It’s an encrypted file. Just dropped to one of our darknet monitors through an unknown origin.”

I turned toward the screen on the wall as the techs brought it up.

A heavily encrypted audio file.

Filename: REQUIEM_001

“Decrypt it,” I said.

“We’re trying, but it’s bouncing through multiple shadow layers. It’s military-grade masking, sir, even uses waveform noise distortion.”

“Try harder.”

After nearly a minute of silence and code decryption, the audio began to play.

It was a female voice but not Sienna’s.

“To the mighty Cassian Wolfe…”

The tone was mocking, almost sweet.

“You took the bait just like you always do.”

My jaw clenched.

“She looked so peaceful tied to that chair. So… helpless. But you still came. You barely know her but you always come running when she cries, don’t you?”

There was a soft laugh. Then static.

And another voice; distorted, deeper, layered with a synthetic filter:

“This is only the beginning.”

The file ended.

Silence.

I stared at the screen, my fists clenched. My reflection looked back at me - blood on my face, soot in my hair, rage in my eyes.

They had planned this. Every second, every step and they had Aria’s trauma on record. Proof that they watched her suffer.

I turned to Vaughn. “I want everything. Every trace on that file. I want to know where it came from, how it got through our defenses, and who the hell else has seen it.”

“Yes, sir.”

I stepped out into the night, the wind colder now.

This wasn’t just about Aria anymore.

They declared war.

And I intended to end it.

But just as I reached for the car door, Vaughn’s voice crackled again in my comm - sharp and rattled.

“Sir…”

I froze.

He never sounded like that. Not even during active combat.

“What is it?”

“There’s more.”

“More what?”

He hesitated.

“It wasn’t just audio this time. A second file was embedded behind the waveform distortion. Encrypted so deep we almost missed it.”

A pause.

Then Vaughn said the words that twisted ice into my spine.

“It’s a photo, Sir. Taken today. Less than twenty minutes ago.”

My heart slammed once.

“Of what?” I demanded.

His voice dropped.

“Of your wife.”

I turned, already moving back toward the command room.

“She’s in her bed,” I snapped. “And the estate is under full lockdown.”

“I know,” Vaughn said. “That’s why this doesn’t make sense.”

The file loaded as I stormed through the glass doors. The screen blinked once. Then again.

Then the image appeared.

And I stopped cold.

It was Aria lying in her bed.

Wearing the same nightgown she wore in the picture I’d seen earlier.

The photo had been taken from inside the room.

From the shadows.

A perfect, high-resolution shot of her asleep, vulnerable, and unaware.

It came with a single line of text scrawled across the bottom in red glitch-font:

“You can’t protect what you don’t control.”