Ava is killed

AVA's POV 

The first thing I felt was the cold. It wasn't the sterile, air-conditioned chill of the Park Hyatt; it was the damp, biting breath of a concrete cellar.

My head throbbed with the rhythmic pulse of a drum, a lingering gift from the cloth they’d pressed over my face in the hotel suite.

I tried to move my hands, but the bite of zip-ties around my wrists stopped me. I was slumped in a metal chair, my boots scraping against a floor that smelled of stagnant water and oil.

"Finally," a voice said.

I squinted against the harsh glare of a single industrial bulb hanging from the ceiling. A figure stood in the shadows.

She was lean, dressed in dark tactical gear, her face obscured by a black ballistic mask. Only her eyes were visible—sharp, dark, and shimmering with an unsettling intensity.

"Who are you?" I rasped, my throat feeling like it had been scraped with glass. "If you want money, Nathan will pay you. Just let me go."

The woman stepped into the light.

She didn't look like a kidnapper; she moved with the practiced precision of the security team Nathan trusted with his life.

She began to pace around me, the heels of her boots clicking like a countdown.

"Nathan," she mimicked, her voice distorted by the mask but dripping with venom.

"Always 'Nathan.' You’ve been in that house for five minutes, and suddenly you’re the only person he listens to.

You’re the one he looks for. You’re the one he whispers to."

I felt a jolt of terror. She had been there. She had been listening.

"I’m his nurse," I said, my voice trembling as I tried to appeal to whatever logic she had left. "That’s all I am.

I’m a medical professional hired to do a job. I don't want his money, and I don't want his throne."

"Liar," she hissed, lunging forward. She grabbed my chin, forcing my head back. Through the mask, I could see the frantic, jagged pupils of a woman who had let obsession rot her mind. "I’ve spent years protecting him.

I’ve bled for King Corp. I waited for him to notice me, to see the loyalty I offered. And then you walk in with your scrubs and your sad stories, and he looks at you like you’re the sun."

"You’re one of his guards," I whispered, the realization sickening me. "You were supposed to protect us."

"I am protecting him," she snapped, stepping back and drawing a suppressed handgun from her holster. The movement was fluid, terrifyingly casual.

"I’m removing the distraction. Once you’re gone, he’ll be forced to rely on the people who were actually there from the beginning. He’ll come back to the shadows.

He’ll come back to me."

"He'll find you," I said, tears finally blurring my vision. "If you do this, he will burn everything to find out who hurt me. You know him—you know he doesn't stop."

"He won't find a trace," she said.

She raised the weapon. It was a cold, mechanical gesture.

"I'm just a nurse," I pleaded, the words a broken sob. "Please. I have parents who need me. I have—"

Thwip.

The sound was small, almost insignificant, like a heavy book hitting a carpet.

Pain wasn't the first thing I felt. It was the shock.

A sudden, white-hot bloom of heat exploded in my chest, right below my collarbone. The air left my lungs in a silent gasp.

I looked down, watching a dark, crimson stain blossom across the forest-green fabric of the dress Nathan had picked out for me.

The world began to tilt. The light from the bulb stretched into a long, thin line. I felt the zip-ties being cut, my body slumping forward, heavy and uncooperative.

"Too close, Ava," the woman whispered, her voice echoing as if from the end of a long tunnel. "You just got too close."

NATHANIEL'S POV 

I was in the back of the SUV, the H.I.S. prototype interface draped over my lap, my fingers blurred acr loloss the keyboard as I bypassed the hotel’s local security encryption.

I was a god of data, a king of the digital realm, but I felt like a failure in every way that mattered.

"Sir, I have a signal," Miller shouted from the front seat. "Stevens’ burner phone. It pinged a tower near the Okutama Reservoir. It’s a restricted area, old industrial sites."

"Get us there," I said, my voice a low, vibrating growl. "I don't care about the speed limits. If the police get in the way, buy them. If they don't move, ram them."

I looked at the screen. I was tracking the biometric signature of the King Corp tactical suits. One of them was moving away from the reservoir.

"Wait," I muttered, zooming in. "Heart rate elevated. Adrenaline spike. Whoever this is… they just finished what they went there to do."

A sickening dread settled in my gut. No. Not her. Not Ava.

AVA'S POV 

Everything was gray.

I felt the sensation of being lifted, then the rush of cold, damp air. There was a sound of rustling reeds and the distant, lonely call of a night bird.

"Into the deep," the woman said.

I felt a shove. For a second, I was weightless, suspended in the dark air of the Tokyo night. Then, the world vanished into an icy, crushing embrace.

The water of the lake was black and suffocating. It rushed into my nose and mouth, the cold stinging the wound in my chest like a thousand needles.

I tried to kick, tried to claw my way back to the surface, but my limbs felt like lead. The weight of my soaked clothes and the loss of blood were pulling me down into the silent, silt-covered bottom.

As I sank, the lights of the surface grew smaller and smaller, like dying stars.

Nathan, I thought, a final, flickering spark in the darkening void of my mind. You talked in your sleep... and I never got to tell you I heard you.

The bubbles escaped my lips in a silver trail, rising toward a world I could no longer reach. The cold was no longer painful. It was heavy. It was quiet. It was final.