CHAPTER FIVE: BENEATH HER SKIN

Location: Underground holding cell, Vairo estate safehouse.

The walls were sweat-slick concrete.

No windows. No mercy.

Dani sat chained to a chair, leg wound still bleeding through a soaked bandage. Her face was pale, bruised. But her eyes? Still defiant.

Ember stepped into the room.

Lucien followed. No guards. No mirrors. Just them and a traitor wrapped in secrets.

“I never pegged you for a coward,” Ember said calmly.

Dani spat blood. “You don’t know me.”

“I knew you well enough to share a home with you,” Lucien growled. “And you sold us out.”

Dani laughed, bitter. “I didn’t sell you. I sold her.”

Her eyes locked on Ember.

Lucien moved fast grabbed Dani by the collar, dragged her chair across the floor, metal shrieking.

“You’re alive because I’m not done bleeding you.”

Dani smirked. “Rafael’s watching. You know that, right? Every scream I make, he’ll hear.”

Ember stepped forward, pulled the flash drive from her pocket.

She dangled it in front of Dani’s face.

“He left this for me. You know what’s on it?”

Dani went silent.

“Project files,” Ember continued. “Medical records. Test logs. There’s a video too. Want to guess what it shows?”

Dani’s jaw twitched. “You don’t want to see it.”

“Oh, but I did,” Ember said softly. “It shows me five years old hooked up to monitors while Rafael reads me bedtime stories between blood draws.”

Lucien stiffened.

Ember leaned close.

“Tell me what ‘Subject Beta’ means.”

Dani looked away. “You’re Alpha. She’s Beta. That’s all you need to know.”

Ember grabbed her face, forced her to look. “She looks like me?”

Dani’s silence said yes.

Lucien’s voice dropped. “Is she alive?”

“She’s more than alive,” Dani whispered. “She’s perfect. You were his mistake. She’s the fix.”

Ember’s stomach turned. “He cloned me?”

“No,” Dani said. “He took everything you were, and made her without guilt.”

Lucien stepped back like he’d been slapped. “He created a version of Ember who doesn’t hesitate.”

Dani smiled, bloody and wild. “She’s coming for you.”

Later.

Lucien and Ember stood alone in the surveillance room. The flash drive played on the screen again.

Video footage: Subject Alpha at age 9, aiming a pistol with inhuman precision. Vital signs normal. A second clip Subject Beta, older, calmer, tearing through a mock-up safehouse, killing targets with surgical elegance.

“She has my face,” Ember said.

“No,” Lucien murmured. “She has your shape. But not your soul.”

Ember didn’t answer. Her eyes were locked on the screen.

Then it changed

A final file. Unlabeled.

Lucien opened it.

A voice recording played. Rafael’s voice again.

> “Alpha was always too human. Pain. Empathy. Weakness.

But Beta? She doesn’t feel love. Or remorse. She only knows loyalty.

And she will come for Alpha’s place, her face, her body, her role.

Because this isn’t about control.

It’s about replacement.”

The recording ended.

Ember touched the screen. “He never wanted me. Just the idea of me.”

Lucien turned to her. “Then we kill the idea.”

Cut to: Rafael’s facility.

Beta stood in the center of a white room, shirtless, scarred, breathing slow and steady.

She watched the fire footage of Ember burning the house down.

A doctor approached. “You’re being deployed.”

Beta nodded.

“Target?”

The doctor smiled.

“Your sister.”

Beta’s mouth curved into something like a smile.

“Then let’s go kill her.”

Time: 1:43 a.m.

Location: Vairo estate rooftop

Status: Wounded, restless, haunted

Ember sat at the edge of the rooftop, legs dangling over the drop. The wind tasted like metal. Her mind was drowning in data lab notes, surveillance logs, Beta’s training footage.

None of it felt real.

Lucien stepped out behind her, silent.

“You shouldn’t let me sit this close to the edge,” she said without turning.

He came closer. “Why?”

“I might jump. Or someone might push me.”

He crouched beside her. “I’d just follow.”

She scoffed. “Not very practical.”

“I’m not built for practical.”

They sat together in the chill silence, broken only by the distant rumble of the city.

“Do you believe in fate?” Ember asked.

Lucien frowned. “I believe in consequences. And vengeance. Not fate.”

“I used to think I was just… unlucky. Born into the wrong family, trained into the wrong life. But now? I’m not even sure I was born the way normal people are. Maybe I was designed.”

“You’re still you.”

“What if she’s better?” she whispered.

Lucien turned to her. “She’s not you. She’s what he made after you. That doesn’t make her better. It makes her his next experiment.”

Ember leaned into him, her voice breaking for the first time. “I’m scared she’s everything I was supposed to be.”

He touched her face gently. “If Rafael built her without a soul… then you already won. Because you have one. And that terrifies him.”

She nodded but there was something else hiding in her eyes. Something growing colder.

“He’ll use her against me.”

Lucien’s jaw clenched. “Then we kill her first.”

Meanwhile…

Beta sat in a stolen car.

Downtown. One block from a Vairo-owned hotel.

She wore Ember’s face. The same scar. Same smirk.

In her lap, a child’s drawing crude, red crayon. It showed two girls.

One with a gun. One without a head.

She pressed the paper to the hotel door after walking through the lobby unnoticed.

Five minutes later, the entire security team inside was dead.

She never fired a shot.

She used a blade instead. Closer. Quieter. More intimate.

Back at the estate.

Lucien and Ember were notified.

The bodies were laid out in a V formation. One word carved into the marble floor.

“MIRROR.”

Lucien stared at the crime scene photo.

“She’s not just coming. She’s taunting us.”

Ember’s eyes hardened.

“No,” she said. “She’s inviting me to meet her.”

Location: Vairo estate, Ember’s private quarters

Time: 3:02 a.m.

The air was cold, sterile, and thick with silence.

Ember stood beneath the shower, fully clothed. The water drenched her hair, traced down her neck like ghost hands. She didn’t feel it. Her eyes were locked on her reflection in the steamed glass across the room.

The same face as the girl who had killed six men tonight with nothing but a knife.

Same eyes. Same shape. Same ghost of a smirk.

But not the same soul.

At least… that’s what Lucien said.

She pressed her palm to the mirror. “You’re not me,” she whispered. “You’re just wearing me.”

But she didn’t know if she believed it.

Downstairs.

Lucien pulled up the satellite feed Dani had hacked before they locked her away. It showed movement military vans parked near Sector K-0, a long-abandoned facility buried beneath the southern district.

He leaned in.

There was only one visible figure in the video. Female. Long dark hair. No hesitation.

Beta.

She walked calmly toward the guards. They didn’t even raise their guns.

In thirty-one seconds, all four were dead.

No sound. No flash. Just bodies. Then she vanished into the structure.

Lucien slammed the screen off.

“She’s not trained like Ember,” he muttered. “She’s programmed.”

Back upstairs.

Ember stood in front of her closet. Guns, knives, tactical gear all lined up like old sins.

She touched each one. Familiar weight. Familiar comfort. She used to believe weapons made her feel powerful.

But now, it felt like they were choosing her.

She stripped down, redressed in black, and clipped twin holsters to her hips.

Then she opened the last drawer. Inside was something she’d sworn never to wear again.

Her old Vairo assassin’s badge. Red. Marked with her code name: E1–Ash.

Lucien entered without knocking. He saw it in her hand.

“You sure you want to go back to that?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “But she’s not coming for Ember Vairo. She’s coming for E1–Ash. So that’s who she’s going to get.”

Lucien crossed the room slowly, expression unreadable. He brushed her cheek with the back of his knuckles.

“She’s fast. Cold. Precise,” he said. “You won’t win by matching her. You’ll win by being what she’ll never understand.”

“What’s that?”

He leaned closer.

“Human.”

Ember steps into the underground weapons vault and stands in the center.

She lights the match and drops it into a bucket filled with her old Vairo uniforms.

They go up in flames crimson, crackling, smoking like hell’s breath.

Lucien watches from the shadows.

When she turns to him, her eyes aren’t soft. They’re sharp. Wet with grief. Carved by fire.

“You just burned your past,” Lucien says.

“No,” Ember replies. “I buried my ghost.”