Aurora’s POVThe rain whispered against the windows, a soft, ceaseless rhythm that mirrored the storm churning inside me. I stood in the war room beside Damien, watching the digital map shift with red markers and lines of data streaming across the monitors. It felt surreal, how the world outside could remain untouched—silent and calm—while ours spiraled toward something that felt inevitable.We hadn’t spoken much since Romania. Since Daemon.Damien hadn’t slept. Not really. He paced at night, murmured Monroe’s name in his sleep, and carried shadows under his eyes that even sunlight couldn’t erase. There was a hollowness in him now. A silence that didn’t come from fear—but from knowing what had to come next.“What do you see when you look at that map?” I asked him quietly.Damien’s jaw clenched, but he didn’t look away from the screen. “I see the end. One way or another.”I moved closer, feeling the tension roll off him in waves. “You’re not alone in this.”His gaze shifted to me, the
Damien's POVThe shattering of glass was the catalyst. My bullet tore through the reinforced window, followed by the eruption of chaos. Monroe vanished behind a wall of smoke and shrapnel as alarms blared and red lights flooded the corridor. The sound of gunfire echoed like thunder in a metal tomb. Xavier and the others split into formation behind me, weapons drawn, eyes scanning every shadow."Move!"Aurora was already ahead, navigating through the thick smoke like a ghost. I followed her into the heart of Monroe's kingdom.The air was thick with heat and static. Something deeper stirred beneath the surface, a low thrumming like a living heartbeat within the asylum's bones. As we pushed forward, the walls pulsed with faint light—not fluorescent. Bioluminescent. Artificial veins wired through the structure like it was alive."He's turned the entire place into a machine," Xavier muttered."No," I replied, stepping into the main corridor. "A womb. He's birthing something here."We found
Aurora's POVThe early dawn crept over the horizon, casting a silver light across the war-torn estate. I stood at the window of the master bedroom, watching the sun struggle to rise through a veil of gray clouds. The air was still, eerily quiet, as if the earth itself was holding its breath.Damien was asleep, finally. The lines of exhaustion carved into his face had softened in the quiet. He looked younger when he slept—less burdened, less tormented. As if the weight of the world he carried had momentarily slipped from his shoulders.But peace, I knew, was fleeting. We were standing on the edge of something greater, something darker. Monroe wasn’t finished. Daemon’s death had only revealed the first layer of the nightmare. And in the hours since, our intel had painted a more harrowing picture.I turned from the window as Damien stirred. He blinked up at me, his expression clouded with sleep and something else—fear? Worry? He sat up slowly, rubbing a hand over his face."You didn’t sl
The hum of the helicopter blades faded into the distance, leaving behind an unsettling silence that settled over the hidden compound. Damien stood on the edge of the scorched grass, his eyes fixed on the treeline where the battle had erupted only hours earlier. The clone child’s face still haunted him—those eyes, wide with recognition, staring at him not with fear, but familiarity.He had barely spoken on the flight back. Aurora had watched him, her gaze quiet and filled with unspoken questions, but she hadn't pressed. She understood his silence, respected it. Now, as the team disbanded to tend to wounds and assess the stolen data, Damien remained frozen in place, a ghost rooted to the ground."You should get inside," Aurora said gently, approaching him. Her voice was a balm, but it didn’t reach the storm inside him.Damien didn’t move. "He looked at me like he knew me. Not as a stranger. As something… familiar."Aurora hesitated. "Maybe because he was designed to.""No," Damien murmu
Aurora's POVThe rain had finally stopped by morning, leaving behind a trail of fog that curled around the forest trees like a lingering breath. From the window of the safehouse, I watched the mist, the silence broken only by the occasional drip of water from the eaves.Inside, no one spoke much. The child—the clone—was asleep now, curled up on a makeshift cot in the adjacent room. Despite everything, he looked... peaceful. Fragile. Too human to be a weapon.Damien hadn't said a word since we returned. He stood by the window, rigid, his expression unreadable. But I could feel it—the storm behind his eyes. The questions. The guilt. The fear that maybe, just maybe, some part of this twisted nightmare was rooted in him.I walked over slowly, placing a gentle hand on his arm."Talk to me," I whispered.He shook his head. "I don't even know what to say.""Start with how you feel."He turned to me then, and I saw it all laid bare in his eyes. The child had called him 'father.' Not as a weap
Damien's POVThe world outside the safe house was quiet, unnaturally so. The wind rustled dry leaves along the courtyard, but inside, silence reigned like a heavy fog. I stood by the large window, watching the horizon shift in colors as dusk fell, my thoughts tangled in a chaos I couldn't quite escape.The child—Subject Echo, they had called him—was resting in one of the spare rooms, monitored by three of our best medics and two guards. But it was his eyes that haunted me. Not because they were different, but because they were exactly the same as mine. The first time he looked at me and whispered, "Father?" something in me fractured.He wasn’t just a clone. He wasn’t just another experiment.He was a child who saw me as something more than a genetic match. He saw me as someone who should have protected him.Aurora came to stand beside me, her presence soft but grounding. She didn't speak at first. She rarely did when she knew my mind was spiraling. Instead, she slipped her hand into m
Damien's POVThe laboratory lights flickered overhead, casting long shadows across the scarred concrete floor. The aftermath of our escape from Monroe's last facility was still fresh in my body—aching ribs, a split lip, a bullet graze along my shoulder. But none of that compared to the weight pressing on my chest.The boy. The clone. His eyes had been mine. His voice a fractured echo of my childhood.I sat at the edge of the conference table, staring at the flash drive we had retrieved from Monroe's vault. It pulsed faintly with a blue LED, as if it too was alive. Inside this drive were secrets that might explain the inexplicable. Or destroy us.Aurora entered quietly, her presence grounding. Her sweater sleeves were tugged down over her hands, and her hair was pulled back, still damp from the shower. Her eyes softened the moment she saw me."Is it time?" she asked.I nodded. "Yes. We need answers."She joined me at the table, slipping her fingers into mine, and I inserted the drive i
The underground corridor was damp, the walls echoing with the faint hum of electricity and something else—something alive. Damien led the team through the dimly lit passageway, his flashlight cutting a narrow path through the darkness. Each footstep was measured. Every breath was held too long.Behind him, Aurora kept pace, her hand brushing the back of his coat, a silent tether grounding him. Neither had spoken since Monroe’s last message played on the decrypted drive—a message that revealed more than just facts. It revealed a history neither of them were ready to accept. A history that tied Monroe not only to Damien’s past but to Eve’s betrayal.“It’s down here,” Julian whispered, pointing toward a metal door at the end of the hallway. “The lab where they kept the early prototypes.”Damien’s jaw tightened. “Let’s finish this.”He pressed his palm to the control panel beside the door. It buzzed. Denied.Aurora stepped beside him, producing the encrypted tablet they’d recovered two mi
The sound of the helicopter blades sliced through the heavy silence that had settled over them. The cold mountain air rushed in through the cracked windows as Damien stared out at the darkening sky. His thoughts were a jumble, every instinct screaming that something was off. There was too much at stake now—too much to lose.Aurora sat beside him, her body tense, eyes scanning the rapidly approaching mountainside below. She hadn’t spoken much since they left the apartment, and Damien could feel the weight of her silence pressing on him. It wasn’t the quiet of contemplation. It was the silence of someone holding something back. He could see it in the set of her jaw, the way her fingers gripped the seat.For a moment, the only sound in the helicopter was the hum of the engine, and then Julian’s voice broke the stillness. “We’re fifteen minutes out. Keep your eyes peeled. This place is off the grid—completely untraceable unless you have the right tools.”Damien nodded, his eyes never leav
The quiet hum of the city beyond the windows was a constant reminder of how much had changed. Once, the world outside had seemed like a distant, almost irrelevant force to Damien. His focus had been on survival, on the mission—whatever that had meant at any given moment. But now, the hum of normal life felt like a harsh contrast to the chaos still simmering in the corners of his life.Damien stood by the window in the quiet of the early morning, his fingers lightly tracing the cool glass. His mind was far from the world outside. No, his thoughts were consumed with the girl he loved, the twisted legacy of Monroe, and the road that still stretched ahead.Aurora slept in the other room, the soft rise and fall of her chest a reminder that, for the first time in a long while, there was something worth fighting for. His gaze flickered over the city below, but he could barely make out the distant streets. The world beyond felt blurry, like everything was veiled in a haze. Maybe it was just h
The soft murmur of rain against the windows filled the room, a rhythmic lull that did little to ease the storm brewing within. Aurora stood by the glass, her fingers tracing the faint condensation on the pane. The dim light of the early morning cast long shadows across the room, and despite the softness of the moment, a sense of foreboding lingered in the air. The storm outside mirrored the one inside her heart—a quiet tempest, powerful in its restraint.Damien stood just a few feet away, his gaze fixed on something unseen, his expression distant. The weight of what they had discovered weighed heavily on him, as it did on her. But it wasn’t just the revelation of the clones, or Monroe’s twisted experiments. It was the fear—the uncertainty of what this meant for them. For their future. How much had Damien been changed by everything he had learned? And how much of that change had already begun to stretch its dark tendrils into their relationship?She knew he was struggling. His silence
Dawn arrived on the heels of nightmares. Damien stood alone on the rooftop of the safehouse, the sky above painted in hues of lavender and crimson. Smoke still lingered on his clothes from the underground lab, and his mind—still thick with memories and the ghost of Eli’s small, trusting voice—refused to settle.Aurora found him there, her silhouette framed in the soft glow of morning. She didn’t speak immediately. She stood beside him, their shoulders nearly touching. Together they watched the horizon, waiting for courage to catch up with conviction."I used to think dawn meant a new beginning," Damien said quietly. "Now it just reminds me of everything we have to survive."Aurora glanced at him, eyes soft. "New beginnings aren’t always gentle. Some are born in fire."His lips curled slightly at the edge. "You’re the only reason I can still feel anything."She reached for his hand and took it without hesitation. "You feel because you're still human. No matter what Monroe did. You’re s
The underground corridor was damp, the walls echoing with the faint hum of electricity and something else—something alive. Damien led the team through the dimly lit passageway, his flashlight cutting a narrow path through the darkness. Each footstep was measured. Every breath was held too long.Behind him, Aurora kept pace, her hand brushing the back of his coat, a silent tether grounding him. Neither had spoken since Monroe’s last message played on the decrypted drive—a message that revealed more than just facts. It revealed a history neither of them were ready to accept. A history that tied Monroe not only to Damien’s past but to Eve’s betrayal.“It’s down here,” Julian whispered, pointing toward a metal door at the end of the hallway. “The lab where they kept the early prototypes.”Damien’s jaw tightened. “Let’s finish this.”He pressed his palm to the control panel beside the door. It buzzed. Denied.Aurora stepped beside him, producing the encrypted tablet they’d recovered two mi
Damien's POVThe laboratory lights flickered overhead, casting long shadows across the scarred concrete floor. The aftermath of our escape from Monroe's last facility was still fresh in my body—aching ribs, a split lip, a bullet graze along my shoulder. But none of that compared to the weight pressing on my chest.The boy. The clone. His eyes had been mine. His voice a fractured echo of my childhood.I sat at the edge of the conference table, staring at the flash drive we had retrieved from Monroe's vault. It pulsed faintly with a blue LED, as if it too was alive. Inside this drive were secrets that might explain the inexplicable. Or destroy us.Aurora entered quietly, her presence grounding. Her sweater sleeves were tugged down over her hands, and her hair was pulled back, still damp from the shower. Her eyes softened the moment she saw me."Is it time?" she asked.I nodded. "Yes. We need answers."She joined me at the table, slipping her fingers into mine, and I inserted the drive i
Damien's POVThe world outside the safe house was quiet, unnaturally so. The wind rustled dry leaves along the courtyard, but inside, silence reigned like a heavy fog. I stood by the large window, watching the horizon shift in colors as dusk fell, my thoughts tangled in a chaos I couldn't quite escape.The child—Subject Echo, they had called him—was resting in one of the spare rooms, monitored by three of our best medics and two guards. But it was his eyes that haunted me. Not because they were different, but because they were exactly the same as mine. The first time he looked at me and whispered, "Father?" something in me fractured.He wasn’t just a clone. He wasn’t just another experiment.He was a child who saw me as something more than a genetic match. He saw me as someone who should have protected him.Aurora came to stand beside me, her presence soft but grounding. She didn't speak at first. She rarely did when she knew my mind was spiraling. Instead, she slipped her hand into m
Aurora's POVThe rain had finally stopped by morning, leaving behind a trail of fog that curled around the forest trees like a lingering breath. From the window of the safehouse, I watched the mist, the silence broken only by the occasional drip of water from the eaves.Inside, no one spoke much. The child—the clone—was asleep now, curled up on a makeshift cot in the adjacent room. Despite everything, he looked... peaceful. Fragile. Too human to be a weapon.Damien hadn't said a word since we returned. He stood by the window, rigid, his expression unreadable. But I could feel it—the storm behind his eyes. The questions. The guilt. The fear that maybe, just maybe, some part of this twisted nightmare was rooted in him.I walked over slowly, placing a gentle hand on his arm."Talk to me," I whispered.He shook his head. "I don't even know what to say.""Start with how you feel."He turned to me then, and I saw it all laid bare in his eyes. The child had called him 'father.' Not as a weap
The hum of the helicopter blades faded into the distance, leaving behind an unsettling silence that settled over the hidden compound. Damien stood on the edge of the scorched grass, his eyes fixed on the treeline where the battle had erupted only hours earlier. The clone child’s face still haunted him—those eyes, wide with recognition, staring at him not with fear, but familiarity.He had barely spoken on the flight back. Aurora had watched him, her gaze quiet and filled with unspoken questions, but she hadn't pressed. She understood his silence, respected it. Now, as the team disbanded to tend to wounds and assess the stolen data, Damien remained frozen in place, a ghost rooted to the ground."You should get inside," Aurora said gently, approaching him. Her voice was a balm, but it didn’t reach the storm inside him.Damien didn’t move. "He looked at me like he knew me. Not as a stranger. As something… familiar."Aurora hesitated. "Maybe because he was designed to.""No," Damien murmu