When he said my name that night, it wasn’t anger or control that laced his voice it was grief. The kind that splits a soul clean in half. And for the first time, I didn’t know whether I wanted to comfort him… or run.---The night was heavy with silence when I found myself standing before the glass wall of Kael’s office. The city stretched out beneath us, a thousand fractured lights glimmering like broken stars. Each one reflected a piece of the chaos still burning inside me.Everything had changed.And yet, nothing had.The war between us between what we were and what we’d become felt like a wound that refused to close.Kael stood by his desk, sleeves rolled up, the lines around his eyes deepened by exhaustion. The man looked more human than I’d ever seen him less the calculating strategist who’d once played with people’s fates, more… broken.“Amara,” he said, my name quiet but weighted.I swallowed, my pulse catching. “You shouldn’t still be here. The board meeting starts in an hour
I woke to the sound of my own heart breaking and the faint echo of her scream still hanging in the air.---Pain came first.It rolled through me like fire through metal, searing and cold all at once. My systems struggled to reboot one flicker, then another. Static swarmed my vision. My lungs burned with smoke. Every breath tasted like blood and ash.But then came the silence.And in that silence, I heard it again her voice.Saphira.Faint. Distant. Terrified.The world snapped back into focus.I pushed up from the debris, my arm trembling under the weight of fallen steel. Circuits screamed across my spine as I forced myself to stand. The tunnel was half-collapsed, walls dripping with condensation, the air thick with the metallic tang of ozone. Blue light flickered weakly from my chest core barely stable.I scanned the wreckage.No sign of her.No sign of Lucien.Only Nyra’s body, sprawled near the door, still breathing barely.I stumbled toward her, my movements jagged, every servo p
They say death comes in silence. But when I woke, it was to the sound of falling steel and my own heartbeat screaming that he was still out there.---The first thing I felt was weight.Not just physical the crushing press of debris on my legs but emotional, heavy, suffocating. Smoke clawed down my throat, and the taste of dust coated my tongue. I coughed, every sound raw and broken.“Caelum,” I rasped.The world above me was chaos a collapsed rooftop turned into a graveyard of steel and flame. Sparks rained from broken circuits, flickering like dying stars. Somewhere close, something groaned metal bending, ready to give way again.I tried to move, but agony shot through my ribs. My hands were trembling, slick with blood and grit. One side of my vision blurred red.I was alive.Barely.And Caelum…“Caelum!” I screamed, ignoring the pain, trying to push aside a concrete slab. It shifted, just an inch. My shoulders burned, my chest heaved. The only answer was the crackle of fire and the
They said I was lucky to survive the blast. But luck doesn’t explain the nightmares that whisper Caelum’s name.---When I opened my eyes, the world was quiet.Too quiet.The ceiling above me wasn’t steel or glass or fireproof alloy it was cracked plaster, yellowed by age and water stains. A fan creaked lazily overhead, stirring the scent of antiseptic and smoke.For a long moment, I just lay there, staring, waiting for the walls to melt back into flames. Waiting to wake up in the lab again. Waiting for Caelum’s voice.But it didn’t come.Pain came first instead. A sharp stab in my ribs when I tried to move, the dull ache of half-healed burns along my arm. My body felt foreign, patched together. My head throbbed like someone had hammered the memory of the explosion directly into my skull.Then came the voice.“You shouldn’t be awake yet.”I turned my head, slow, deliberate, because even blinking hurt. A woman stood in the doorway, wearing combat boots and a sleeveless vest lined with
It wasn’t the monster’s strength that terrified me it was the way it said my name.---Smoke coiled in the air, thick and metallic, stinging my lungs as I pushed myself to my feet. The lab’s alarm blared overhead, shrill and endless. The creature stood in the center of the chaos, its silver skin glistening like liquid light, veins pulsing with faint blue luminescence. The metallic tang of blood mixed with ozone.For a heartbeat, the world narrowed just me, the creature, and the echo of my pounding pulse.Then it spoke.“Saphira.”The voice wasn’t synthetic. It wasn’t alien. It was familiar.Too familiar.I froze, my throat locking up. My name rolled off its tongue with the exact cadence, the exact gravity, that had once made my heart stutter in dark hallways.No.It couldn’t be.“Caelum?” I whispered.The creature tilted its head. And for a moment, beneath the fractured lights, I saw him his jawline, the arch of his brow, the small scar at the corner of his lip. But the eyes… those we
The first thing I felt wasn’t pain. It was silence. And somehow, that was worse.---When consciousness returned, it didn’t come gently.It tore through the fog in jagged flashes metal, light, the sterile bite of antiseptic in the air. My eyelids felt glued shut. My throat was dry as dust. The faint hum of machines pressed against my skull like a migraine.I tried to move.I couldn’t.My wrists were bound cold metal biting into my skin. My ankles too. Panic flared in my chest as I tugged harder, the restraints clinking in cruel rhythm. Every movement only confirmed what I already feared. I wasn’t just trapped.I was back inside his world.“Welcome back, Miss Kade.”His voice slid through the room like a knife through silk.I opened my eyes and wished I hadn’t.Drayke stood a few feet away, hands clasped behind his back, a faint smile ghosting across his face. He looked impossibly calm for a man who had just survived an explosion. No soot. No burn marks. Just a crisp white coat and tha