Chapter 35: The first Touch

WREN

Tomorrow at midnight.

The glowing white text on the matte-black screen blurred into a smear of harsh light. My lungs seized, the air suddenly thin and icy in my throat.

I couldn’t breathe.

Julian’s betrayal was one thing. A greedy, narcissistic man stealing a fortune was a tragedy I could understand. But this?

This document bore the unmistakable, heavy-handed signature of Duchess Beatrix Ashford.

My grandmother.

The woman who had brushed my hair before my mother’s funeral. The woman who had once told me I was the only future this family had.

She wasn’t trying to protect the Ashford name from my supposed madness.

She had funded it.

And now that Lyra was closing in on Julian, Beatrix was tying up the loose ends.

A permanent offshore facility meant a black-site asylum. No records. No visitors. A ghost ship for inconvenient heiresses.

“Wren.”

Kael’s voice sounded like it was coming from underwater.

“Wren, look at me.”

I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the date.

Tomorrow.

Twenty-four hours from now, a private medical extraction team would walk into this bedroom, inject something straight into my carotid artery, and I would wake up in a concrete cell on an island that didn’t exist on any map.

Then a pair of warm, rough hands framed my face, physically forcing my gaze away from the screen.

Silver-gray eyes locked onto mine, fierce and unyielding.

Kael was kneeling on the floor in front of me now, completely invading my space. His broad chest rose and fell with a sharp, controlled rhythm.

“Breathe,” he commanded, his voice a low, gravelly rasp that seemed to vibrate through my bones. “Do not let them break you in this room, Emerence. Breathe.”

I gasped.

The sound came out ragged and ugly, but oxygen finally rushed into my lungs like shattered glass. A violent shudder ripped through my spine, and my knees threatened to give out.

Kael moved closer, his thighs bracing against my legs to keep me upright on the velvet stool.

“She ordered it,” I choked out, the words tasting like copper. “My own blood. She’s going to make me disappear.”

“I am not going to let a single one of those mercenaries touch you,” Kael said, the vow carrying a dark, lethal promise.

He lowered his hands from my face, though his knuckles brushed my jaw in a fleeting caress.

“But we need to know their entry point. If this is an Acheron black-ops extraction, they won’t use the front gates. We need the transport logistics.”

He stood, shrugged off his dark suit jacket, and tossed it onto the bed.

Then he reached into his leather bag and pulled out a heavily modified laptop. He snapped it open on the desk beside the tablet and connected the two devices with a thick cable.

His fingers moved rapidly across the keyboard, bypassing the manor’s external firewall.

“Julian’s network is isolated, but if Acheron is coordinating an extraction, they have to interface with the estate’s security grid to temporarily blind the cameras,” Kael muttered, his eyes tracking the cascading lines of code. “I need to find the backdoor they installed in the security mainframe.”

“I know the mainframe.”

My voice was still shaking, but the fog of panic had begun to recede. In its place was something colder.

The instinct to survive.

I slid off the stool and stood beside him.

“The Ashford security grid was overhauled three years ago. I approved the architecture. If Beatrix is using an Acheron proxy, she’ll use the legacy administrative override. I know the base directory.”

Kael stepped back slightly, making room for me in front of the keyboard.

I reached for the laptop.

But the moment my fingers hovered over the keys, a violent tremor seized my hands.

It wasn’t a slight shake.

My entire body was vibrating with the accumulated trauma of the last six months—the drugs, the gaslighting, the isolation, and now the crushing weight of my grandmother’s death sentence.

I tried to press the first key, but my finger slipped and hit the wrong letter.

A frustrated, desperate sound escaped me.

I pulled my hands back.

“I can’t. I can’t stop shaking.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, humiliation burning at the back of my throat.

I was supposed to be the brilliant corporate prodigy. The untouchable heiress.

And here I was, falling apart when I needed to be steel.

Then Kael stepped directly behind me.

The heat of his chest radiated against my back, a solid wall of warmth and strength.

He reached around me, his large, calloused hand covering both of mine where they rested on the edge of the desk.

I gasped softly at the contact.

“You don’t have to be steel every second of the day, Wren,” he murmured, his mouth hovering inches from my ear. His warm breath brushed my neck, sending goosebumps racing down my arms. “You’re allowed to feel the cold.”

His hand didn’t move to take over the keyboard.

He simply held my trembling hands beneath his.

Firm.

Grounding.

Gentle.

His thumb slowly stroked the frantic pulse at my wrist, a rhythmic, intimate motion that sent a jolt of warmth through the ice in my veins.

For the first time since my father died, I wasn’t fighting this war alone.

The tremors in my fingers slowly began to fade, absorbed by his steady strength.

We stood there in the darkness, the storm lashing against the windowpane while the blue light of the monitor cast long shadows across the walls.

I turned my head slightly.

He was already looking at me.

His face was inches from mine.

The icy composure of the professional psychiatrist was gone. In its place was a man stripped down to his core? a man carrying a dark vendetta who had somehow found his ruin in the very woman he was supposed to manipulate.

His silver eyes dropped to my lips.

The air between us grew heavy.

Thick.

Charged with the dangerous, unspoken tension that had been building since the day he walked into this house.

The slow burn beneath every shared glance and every secret meeting in the archives suddenly flared into something hotter.

He leaned closer, the movement agonizingly slow.

I could feel the heavy, erratic beat of his heart against my shoulder blades. My lips parted, my eyes fluttering shut as I found myself craving the ruin he seemed to offer.

Craving the temporary oblivion of his mouth.

His nose brushed my jaw.

His grip on my hands tightened, almost painfully, as if it reflected the war raging inside him.

But he stopped.

Instead, he rested his forehead against my temple, his breath ragged.

“If I cross this line right now,” Kael rasped, his voice strained with desperate restraint, “I won’t be able to stop. And I need my head clear to get you out of this house alive.”

The rejection wasn’t a denial of his feelings.

It was proof of them.

He was sacrificing what he wanted to make sure I survived.

I opened my eyes, swallowed hard, and nodded against him.

“We have to find the entry point.”

Kael released a long, tortured breath and slowly pulled his hands away from mine.

The absence of his warmth left a strange ache in my chest.

He took half a step back, giving me the space I needed.

My hands were perfectly steady now.

I turned back to the keyboard, my mind locking onto the task with razor-sharp clarity.

I typed in the legacy directory commands, bypassing Julian’s superficial locks and diving straight into the master security mainframe.

“There.”

I pointed to a hidden subroutine running in the background.

“That’s the Acheron backdoor. They’re routing a command to disable the western perimeter cameras.”

Kael leaned over me, his eyes narrowing at the code.

“Can you pull up the execution log? We need to know what time they plan to trigger the blackout.”

My fingers flew across the keys, pulling up the master scheduling terminal.

A black command box appeared in the center of the screen.

Task: Perimeter Blackout (West Wing)

Status: Scheduled

Execution Time: 00:00 (Tomorrow)

“Okay,” I breathed. “It’s still set for midnight tom—”

The screen suddenly glitched.

The white text flickered violently, turning an aggressive red.

The data in the command box shifted before our eyes.

Task: Perimeter Blackout (West Wing)

Status: OVERRIDE INITIATED

Execution Time: CURRENT

I froze.

Down the hall, a heavy mechanical clunk echoed through the manor.

The master magnetic locks on the west wing doors had disengaged.

Kael’s head snapped toward my bedroom door.

His hand immediately dropped to the concealed holster at his waist.

The screen flashed one final time.

STATUS: EXTRACTION TEAM EN ROUTE.

ETA TO TARGET ROOM: 60 SECONDS.

The extraction wasn’t happening tomorrow.

They were already inside the house.