บททั้งหมดของ The Wife He Burned, The Queen Who Return : บทที่ 171 - บทที่ 180

The facility didn’t feel the same anymore. It wasn’t just under attack. It was alive. Walls shifted with quiet precision. Corridors rerouted. Barriers dropped and rose in controlled intervals, cutting Helix movement into fragments that no longer flowed cleanly. Victor had done that. Somewhere deep in the core, he was holding it all together. And it was working. But not where it mattered most. Damian felt it first. Not in the room. In his body. A slow drain that hadn’t been there before—subtle at the start, easy to ignore. Now it pressed heavier, sharper, pulling at him from the inside out. Silas’s hand was still in his. That hadn’t changed. Couldn’t. The connection held but it demanded something now. More than before. “His stability is fluctuating,” one of the technicians said, voice tight despite the controlled tone. “Not dropping just… unstable.” Damian didn’t look at the screen. He didn’t need to. He could feel it. Each breath Silas took seemed to pull somethin

The room didn’t feel like a battlefield anymore. It felt like a countdown. Not loud. Not chaotic. Just something narrowing, tightening, closing in on a point that couldn’t be avoided. Silas’s breathing fractured again. Short pulls. Uneven. Each one thinner than the last. The monitors didn’t hide it anymore. The numbers climbed and dropped in sharp, conflicting waves two patterns trying to exist in the same space and failing to hold. Damian didn’t move. His hand stayed locked with Silas’s, but the strain had stopped being subtle. It showed now in the tension in his shoulders, the way his breathing had started to match the uneven rhythm he was trying to stabilize. Evelyn stood close enough to see all of it. Too close to ignore it. “Do something,” she said. Not to anyone specific. To the room. To the system. To the impossible thing happening in front of her. The woman at the console didn’t turn. “There isn’t a manual override for this.” “Then make one.” “That’s not how

It didn’t break all at once.Helix didn’t collapse in a single moment of failure or panic. They unraveled piece by piece, the precision that had defined them turning against itself as the system stopped behaving the way they expected. Corridors that should have stayed open sealed at the wrong time. Routes that should have led forward looped them back into controlled dead zones. Their formations tight, disciplined fractured under pressure they couldn’t predict. Damian felt all of it. Not as separate events.As one shifting pattern. Every movement inside the facility passed through him now filtered, processed, answered. It wasn’t overwhelming. Not anymore. It was clear. “They’re splitting again,” Evelyn said, eyes on the screens. “They don’t have a choice,” Damian replied. His voice carried that same layered calm, deeper than before, like the system had settled around him instead of fighting him. Victor’s defenses held. But now they were evolving. “Sector three is collaps

Victor did not wake all at once, because it came in fragments, beginning with a shallow breath that did not quite hold, followed by a faint shift beneath Evelyn’s hand and the smallest tension in his fingers, as though his body was still deciding whether it had enough strength left to answer the world around him. “Victor.” Her voice remained low and controlled, though something sharper lived beneath it, something carrying urgency and restraint at the same time. His eyes stayed closed, refusing to open yet, but his brow tightened slightly, and that small movement was enough to tell her awareness still existed somewhere beneath the damage. Behind her, hurried footsteps echoed through the room as the technician returned carrying a med kit and dropped beside them immediately. “He needs immediate stabilization,” he said while scanning Victor quickly, his expression growing tighter with every reading. “His vitals are barely holding, and if we lose more time this could become irreversibl

That was the first thing Evelyn noticed, not the silence and not the stillness that had settled across the room, but the monitors as they continued falling in slow and steady lines, not crashing and not flattening, only descending with an almost unbearable calmness, as though something essential had been drawn out gently and completely without resistance, leaving behind an emptiness that felt more terrifying than chaos ever had. “Damian…” Her voice broke when she said his name, because there was no control left inside it anymore, no distance and no restraint, only fear that had finally escaped after being held back through every fight, every loss, and every moment she had forced herself to survive. His hand was still wrapped around Silas’s hand, still holding and still there, yet the strength beneath that grip had faded into something frighteningly light, while his breathing remained shallow and uneven as though every breath had become something his body now had to remember. “