홈 / Romance / In Love With The Dangerous Professor / 챕터 81 - 챕터 90

In Love With The Dangerous Professor의 모든 챕터: 챕터 81 - 챕터 90

94 챕터

Eighty One

Celine's POVThe forests were not merciful.I began to run then, because I smelled Elena who was up there in front of me somewhere and the cars were behind us now, humming down low and mechanical, inscribing that stretch of darkness like something patient and inevitable. Hope was strapped to my chest, her weight so familiar at this point, the heat of her tiny body warm against me. My lungs burned. It was as if someone had taken out the muscles in my legs and replaced them with wet concrete.Elena halted at the brink of a break in the level, where a dry ravine yawned further into shadow, and seized my arm.“We need to get something together on this situation,” she said.No." Mine was out before I realised that hers wasn't finished yet."Dogs." She cocked her head toward the sound and then I heard it. A soft, far-off baying that chilled me to the bone. "And drones. They're covering too much ground. Two targets is better than one.”"Elena—""Your daughter needs you alive." Her hand gripp

Eighty Two

Caelum's POVI looked at the card for a moment and did not speak.The words stared back at me in crisp black type, and my mind shuffled through the images lodged there over the past seventy two hours, setting pieces against one another like a game of Scrabble or Chess, trying to find the image that was already present whether I wanted to see it –or not.Victoria. Who had insisted on going to Switzerland. Who had made the biometric cast, who’d been first into the vault and onto the terminal. Who had informed us that the self-destruct was linked to the files not the scan, information she’d only known after the alarm had been raised. Who had found the air vent. And who was waiting in a penthouse suite sipping wine when we landed hours later in Seattle.Who had known how to find my wife.I called Kent.He answered on the first ring. "Boss.""Find Victoria," I said. "Where is she?"A silence that spoke before he did. "We lost her when we left the fortress. She said she had something to dea

Eighty Three

Celine's POVThe footage played on a loop.The first time I watched it, my hand pressed flat against the table with fingers spread wide as though the wood under my palm was the only thing keeping me from collapsing. Then I watched it again. And again. Every time the timestamp in the corner ticked forward, every time Victoria’s figure moved down that corridor we hadn’t gone down before, every time she crouched at the base of that wall with something in her hands — something cold and specific and deliberate — I could feel the rage inside me climbing another rung.Three devices. Not one. Three.Hope stirred against my chest and made a soft sound in her sleep, and I shifted her weight instinctively without looking away from the screen. My jaw was clenched enough to hurt.Victoria was standing across the room, and I could sense her watching me as I watched the footage. She hadn’t moved since the phones had started blaring. At the time, she had just sat there with her hands folded on the ta

Eighty Four

Caelum's POVI listened to the call four times.With each voice that came through the speaker, I felt this happen to my body. A kind of stillness that began in my chest and radiated out to my hands, my jaw, the back of my neck. Not fear exactly. Something that dwelled beside fear but was older and quieter and much, much more deadly.Celine leaned opposite me with her arms around Hope and listened to all four playbacks in silence. After the fourth one she turned to me and her face matched the colour of the wall behind it.“That does sound like her,” she said."I know.""But we saw—""I know."The warehouse. The collapse. The crushing weight of all that concrete and steel on top of a woman who once had told me, grinning ear to ear, that she had contingencies for her contingencies. I had stood in the rubble and I had felt something embarrassing to name, something like relief, and I had buried that feeling and gone on because going on was the only language I’d been fluent in my whole life

Eighty Five

Celine's POVCaelum was standing in the middle of the warehouse floor. He was still, the way he got still when he was working something out, all his energy pulled inward and the outside of him just waiting. His arms were hanging loosely at his sides. His shoulders were back. Surrounding him in a broad half circle were twenty armed men, and on the opposite end of the area, twenty feet of open concrete between them, stood Vivienne.She was exactly as I’d seen her in the warehouse footage, precisely as Caelum had described her during those few rare instances he spoke of her at all. Unhurried. Composed. Flowing through the space as if she’d designed it for this moment and was pleased with how it took shape.Without thinking, I pressed Hope closer to my chest. She made a tiny noise of protest and I opened my arms and took her against me so that the top of her head pressed under my chin as I kept my eyes on the screen.Maddie had both hands on the wheel while sitting in the front seat, alt

Eighty Six

Caelum's POVI woke up on concrete.The sound came back first. The ding, dinging inside my skull, both ears ringing, high and constant, with that particular frequency you get from being in close physical proximity to a detonation in an enclosed space. I remembered it well enough to know what that meant before I learned anything else. Something had gone off near me. I was alive. Those were the two things right away and I just held that until the rest came back.I ran the inventory. Feet, fine. Legs, fine. Left side of my torso, not great. Ribs, at least two, the difference between cracked and bruised matter only in degree because the functional outcome was the same. Right shoulder, sore but mobile. Head still mostly intact, the bell starting to lose its harshest jangle.I pushed myself upright.It was not the same building I’d walked into last night, instead a warehouse. The bones were the same. Everything else had been put out of order by violence. Bodies sprawled on the floor, in the

Eighty Seven

Celine's POVThe container smelled of rust and salt water and something much older than either or both of those things that I could not name and did not want to.A bulb hung from a wire in the middle of the ceiling. It swung a little when someone passed outside, casting the shadows around the walls at slow angles that made the space seem smaller than it was. I had measured it by pacing. Eight steps one way. Six the other. Steel walls in all directions, no seams low enough to operate at, no rivets loose enough to make any difference.That’s because Hope had been crying for a long time.I had never sat on the floor so long and I had my back against that wall which I decided was the warmest of the four and I held her up against my chest and sang to her. I never had a good singing voice and I had never pretended otherwise, but she always responded to it, to the vibration of it through my chest more than the sound, and so I sang every song I could remember from start to finish and then sta

Eighty Eight

Caelum's POVI had not slept.The assault took eleven minutes from the time we breached the fence until I had eyes on the centre of the compound. Most of it I don’t remember in the way that memories typically worked for me, with sequence and detail and the texture of particular moments. I recall it, instead, as a series of decisions, each made and discarded at once in favour of an immediate one before and the one after, which is how it always went when I was operating at that level of focus. I navigated the compound and I cleared my way to my wife and my daughter and I did not stop and I did not slow down and I did not think about the left side of my torso which had not healed overnight.First, the south side of the compound cleared. I heard Kent get off through the earpiece, and I kept going.The east corridor took longer. Ryker’s voice came in clipped and functional, feeding me positions, and I adjusted my line and boiled through a gap between two container rows that spat me out ont

Eighty Nine

Celine's POVThe doctor’s hands were gentle and thorough and I sat on the edge of the examination table and let her work and looked at the wall and tried to be present in the room.Physically we were fine. That was the term the doctor used. Fine. Bruising, a split lip that had started to close, some soft tissue tenderness along my left side from the wall I’d been tossed against. Nothing broken. Nothing that time and rest couldn’t remedy.She said rest and I nodded and didn’t tell her that rest was not something I imagined myself finding anytime soon.Maddie was in the next room. Sometimes I could hear her voice through the wall, low and irregular, the voice of a person speaking through something they were still contained by instead of something they had moved away from. Her therapist was a small quiet woman who had come in an hour after us and who had the particular stillness of someone who has sat with a great many people at the moment after awful things happened.When they released

Ninety

Caelum's POVWhen I spotted the vest, I froze.Everyone stopped. The kind of stop that required no command, that arrived from the simultaneous realization of an object that shifted the parameters of the room. I heard Kent's breath go out once, controlled, then nothing behind me. I still, also Ryker to my right. At the south entry, also still, Vivienne’s people.Dmitri was standing in the middle of the floor and looking around at all of us with the patience of someone who had been waiting, and he was glad the waiting had come to an end.I ran the arithmetic. Increasing blast radius from that size vest in a confined space, everyone in the building. His thumb already rested on the detonator and his hand was steady in a way that told me the steadiness was not performance. A shot to the head wouldn’t stop the detonation if his hand closed by reflex. A shot to the hand could, given the right circumstances, but those necessary conditions would entail distance and angle and time, all of which

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