Chapter 24
What Should Be Impossible
Elara
Cold is a creature.
It crawls into places I didn’t know I had; behind my ribs, between my fingers, under my tongue. It moves slow at first, curious, then confident as it threads itself through bone and blood, dimming sensation like someone lowering the volume on my body.
I’ve lost track of time in the dark. Minutes, hours, whatever came after we stormed out of his workspace and he shoved me into the cell, shutting the lights and heat down like extinguishing a match, exists only as a bruise in my memory.
My breath fogs in front of me, pale ghosts drifting in the pitch-black.
“Coward!” I shout at the door. My voice ricochets off concrete, too small, too human to dent anything in this bunker. “Is this all it takes to break you? A defiance act and a truth you didn’t want to say out loud?”
My teeth chatter. I hate that he can probably hear that.
I stand because if I sit, I’ll freeze faster. Or collapse. Or both. My legs feel dipped in syrup, heavy and sluggish, the cold eating its way upward. I press my palms to the wall, try to force heat into my limbs, but the concrete steals it instantly.
“Vapor!” My voice cracks. “Come finish what you started—”
My knees buckle. I catch myself on the cot frame, breath shuddering.
Darkness blurs at the edges of my vision. Not the absence of light, but my own failing perception. Hypothermia is a slow thief. It strips away dignity first. I curse him again. Loudly. Weakly. Stupidly.
“You’re a monster. But at least monsters show up. You’re nothing but—”
A hum sounds overhead.
Low. Electric.
Then—
The lights snap on.
A violent yellow floods the cell, so bright it stabs straight through my skull. I lurch backward with a gasp, arm thrown up instinctively though my fingers barely respond.
Heat spills into the room next, a wave so sudden my skin burns with the contrast. My vision swims.
The door clicks.
Unlocking.
He fills the doorway like he owns the air I’m trying to breathe. Mask on. Shoulders taut. Gloves still on his hands, because he always keeps barriers between his skin and the world, and especially with me. But behind the black lenses, I can feel it: something fractured. Something off-balance.
I bend down, grab the notebook from the floor with stiff fingers, and fling it at him again. It skids across the concrete, pages fluttering like a dying bird at his feet.
“There,” I choke out. “I finished your article, even before you dragged me in there to watch you kill someone. Every monstrous, villainous thing about you. Now you can drag me to your lab and bury me in acid alongside your experiments.”
His entire body goes still.
“Elara.” His voice is low. “Enough.”
“No,” I hiss, stepping forward even as my knees wobble. “Not enough. Did leaving me here make you feel in control again? Did it make the world quiet enough for you?”
A pulse of fury goes through him like a seismic shift.
Something snaps.
He strides toward me in three long, lethal steps. I hit him; small, frozen fists thumping against his chest. Pointless. He absorbs every strike like he’s letting me burn myself out against him.
“Don’t touch me!” I shout.
He grabs my wrists, not harsh, but unyielding, and forces my trembling hands down. I struggle, breath ragged, but strength is leaving me in ribbons. My hands barely move.
“I’m not here to fight you,” he growls. “I’m here to stop you from dying.”
“Funny,” I laugh, broken. “Since you’re the one who left me here to do exactly that.”
He flinches, barely. But I see it.
His gloves tighten around my arms. Not enough to hurt.
Enough to restrain. I try to wrench free, but my body is clumsy with cold, too slow to resist. My vision pulses.
He curses under his breath, anger tinted with something like panic, and reaches behind him with one hand.
Zip ties. I recognize the sharp plastic hiss as he loops them around my wrists.
“Stop—”
My voice cracks.
“Let go of me—”
“You are hypothermic,” he snaps. “You’re delirious.”
“I’m angry,” I fire back.
“Your body is shutting down,” he corrects.
The zip tie bites tight. The sound echoes.
He drags his jacket off, leather, black, heavy, and throws it around my shoulders with more force than tenderness. The weight of it nearly knocks me off balance. Heat envelops me, suffocating and welcome all at once.
“Don’t—” I gasp, shivering harder. “I don’t want anything from you.”
“That,” he says, voice low and sharp, “is the first honest lie you’ve told tonight.”
My lip trembles.
I hate it.
I blink hard, willing the tears back—
But they spill anyway, hot against frozen skin.
His breath stutters behind the mask, a fractured inhale.
“Elara…” He reaches for me, and stops, fingers curling into a fist inches from my cheek. “Stop fighting me.”
“Why?” My voice breaks. “So you can feel better about what you did?”
The switch flips in him.
He loses control.
“Feel better!?” He roars.
The sound slams into the cell, vibrating through my bones. I jolt backward, hitting the wall. My whole body recoils instinctively, eyes wide. My heart spikes, and fear crawls its way back in.
He steps forward, towering, voice a serrated edge, caging me.
“You think this is about control? About ego? Do you have any idea what I’m doing for you?”
I shake my head, not a denial, a tremor.
He keeps going, words shaken loose now that he’s unraveling.
“I stood in a room full of killers and lied to every single one of them,” he snarls. “I told them the contract on your head was fulfilled. I told them you were dead. Do you understand what that means?”
My breath hitches.
“It means,” he continues, voice dropping into something lethal and fevered, “there are men in the black market who believe they bought your corpse, and I let them believe it. I’m going against rules, all protocols.”
I blink, tears thickening my vision.
His hands slams into the concrete wall right beside my head.
“I am protecting you,” he says, louder now, the words cracking. “I am trying to find out who ordered the hit. I am trying to keep you alive long enough to understand what you are caught in.”
My throat tightens painfully. I swallow. My pulse thunders.
“Elara,” he says, softer but more dangerous, “I left that light off for ten minutes before I nearly tore my own bunker apart trying not to come back down here. And yes, I should have come down, but I didn’t. And I apologize.”
“And don’t,” he snarls, voice low but trembling with the force he’s burying, “accuse me of not caring.”
A shiver tears through me. Not from the cold.
From the way he says care, like the word itself is a weapon he’s never been trained to wield.
I look away, because I suddenly cannot bear the weight in his voice, the ruin he’s confessing without meaning to.
My gaze darts to the floor, the wall, anywhere but him.
He doesn’t allow that escape.
His gloved hand snaps up, fingers clamping around my chin with controlled brutality, forcing my face back toward his. I gasp, breath hitching, because he holds me like he’s restraining violence—not aiming it at me, but containing it for my sake. Somehow that’s worse.
“Elara,” he growls, leaning in, the void-black mask filling my vision until the world behind him disappears. “Look. At. Me.”
I do.
Because I can’t not.
His thumb shifts along my jaw, steadying me as if he senses how close I am to collapsing, whether from the cold or from his words, I don’t know.
“I apologize again,” he says, and the phrase sounds foreign on his tongue, like a language he was never meant to speak. “If I have confused you before.”
His grip tightens just slightly, enough to anchor me.
“Maybe,” he continues, “I should have been more clear.”
A beat.
The hum of the heater fills the silence. My breath trembles in the space between us.
“The experiments done on me,” he says, voice low, dangerous in its truth, “should make it impossible for me to feel what I feel toward you.”
My pulse stutters.
“I shouldn’t be capable of this,” he whispers. “Not want. Not attachment. Not fear. Not…”
He stops. His jaw flexes behind the mask. Something raw slips between the words. “…not whatever this is.”
My eyes burn. His mask inches closer, the lenses black and bottomless, reflecting nothing, yet I feel watched more intimately than I ever have in my life.
“And yet,” he says, breath brushing my cheek, “every time I see you, I go to war with myself.”
I swallow, throat tight, a hot wet tear falling down my cheek. My eyes drift shut for a heartbeat, because it’s too much, too close, too consuming.
He notices.
“Elara.” His voice softens into something that feels like a warning and a plea at once. “Don’t look away from me.”
I force my eyes open.
I feel him, letting the warmth of his body shield me from the cold he left me to suffer. His other hand lifts, hesitates, and then settles lightly on the side of my neck, two fingers finding my pulse, feeling the frantic rhythm beneath my skin.
“This,” he whispers, as if confirming something vital, “should not matter to me.”
His thumb pauses.
“But it does.”