Chapter 28
Learning the
Language of Death
Elara
I wake with the taste of heat still caught behind my teeth.
The fire has died down, its glow a weak orange pulse that barely reaches the corners of the room.
Shadows stretch long and thin across the concrete, distorting the edges of everything.
For a moment, I forget where I am. Then the faint mechanical hum crawls over my skin, and the memory returns like a falling blade: the bunker, the failure, the cold, him.
Lucan.
Vapor.
Both names wrap around my ribs differently. One cuts. One constricts.
I push myself upright slowly. My limbs ache; too warm now, the blood moving again, reminding me how close I came to falling into a stillness only he could pull me back from. The jacket’s still engulfing my body in warmth, I zip it close. My skin prickles at the scent, it’s his.
I look down.
The tracker still grips my ankle like a shackle pretending not to be one. I touch it with the tips of my fingers. Cold metal. No give. No change. My body reacts with a small surge of frustration I swallow quickly. He left it on because he probably never intended to trust me.
He shouldn’t.
He mustn’t.
He’s the only thing between me and whatever world ordered me dead.
But knowing that doesn’t stop the anger.
Or the curiosity.
I rise shakily, steadying myself, and step out of the room.
The hallway yawns open like a throat swallowing me upward. I climb because staying where he placed me feels like suffocating. Each step feels forbidden, treasonous, and yet I take another. And another. The cold presses against my bare ankles where the jacket doesn’t reach.
At the top, the bunker’s main floor lies quiet, lit by soft lamps that make everything look deceptively human. The couch. The table. The cabinets. The stillness.
But there is nothing human about this place.
Not really. This is a den. A laboratory.
A tomb waiting for its next occupant. And I am not alone down here, not truly.
My gaze drags toward the door at the back, the door with the keypad beside it.
His workspace. The place he walks into like a god and emerges from like a weapon.
I approach slowly.
My heart crawls up my throat as if trying to flee before I can betray myself. I should go back. I should stay where I’m meant to be. I should remember that I’ve seen his face, every scar, every twisted line, every inhuman flicker of restraint, and that this knowledge alone could kill me.
But something darker in me whispers, Go on.
So I do.
I press my fingers to the keypad. A cautious sequence, a hopeful one, a stupid one.
Wrong.
Another.
Wrong.
I grit my teeth and try again.
Wrong—wrong—wrong—
“Stubborn,” I mutter, heat burning across my cheeks.
I don’t know what I expect. That the door will suddenly pity me? That the man it belongs to will allow entry by accident? That my defiance will impress the steel enough to yield?
I slam my palm against the door.
“Open, damn you—!”
“You’ll bruise before the door does.”
The voice behind me isn’t loud.
But it might as well be the end of the world.
I spin with a scream tangled in my throat.
He stands halfway down the stairs, still in his biker gear, visor black, helmet featureless. A figure cut out of shadow. A creature shaped by the cold. My pulse riots, every instinct begging me to bolt, to retreat, to become small—
He doesn’t move.
He simply watches.
Then he reaches up and unclips the helmet with both hands.
The sound of it unhooking snaps something in me.
When he lifts it off, the bunker feels smaller. His face, scarred, carved, too real, feels like a truth I’m not prepared to carry and yet can’t look away from. My breath stalls. My knees weaken.
I shouldn’t see him like this.
He shouldn’t let me.
He places the helmet on the table and steps toward me, slow, deliberate, as though measuring my reactions in real time.
“Exploring?” he asks, voice a low rumble that coils through my spine.
My cheeks flame. “I—yes.”
“Hm.”
He clicks the strap of his bag open and pulls something out; careful, precise, the way someone handles explosives or infants.
A plant.
Even wrapped in protective layers, its silhouette is unmistakable. Those dark petals. That ghostly violet. Monkshood.
Aconitum napellus.
Queen of poisons.
It hits me like recognition hits a wound; sharp, invasive.
He shoves it toward me. “For you.”
My fingers curl automatically around it. The pot is warm from his hands, not mine.
“For me?” I whisper.
“Yes.”
“You know I like poisonous plants.”
“I do.”
“How?”
He does not blink.
“I stalked you.”
My heart knocks against my ribs.
He continues, tone level, casual, like the statement isn’t a shard of glass pressed against the thin line of my sanity.
“I watched you draw them,” he says. “You always started with the poisonous ones. As if you weren’t choosing to draw them, but they were choosing you.”
A shiver snakes between my ribs.
I shouldn’t feel seen by him.
Not like this.
Not in a way that hits something beneath the terror, something far, far more dangerous.
I swallow, my throat tight. “Did you… find out anything? About the origin? The contract?”
He steps closer, just enough that the air around us shifts, darkens.
“I’m busy,” he says. “That’s all you need to know.”
The dismissal should make me angry. It does, partly. But another part of me, a hollow, hungry thing I never knew I had, tightens at the certainty in his voice. A promise buried inside a threat.
He brushes past me, toward the keypad.
And then everything happens too fast.
His arm sweeps near my waist, not touching, just close enough for heat to bloom along my skin. He corners me without using his hands. His body blocks the stairs, the hall, the entire world except the steel door.
“Move,” he murmurs.
I can’t.
My back hits the steel.
My breath stutters.
He leans past me, his torso brushing the blanket still wrapped around me. The keypad beeps under his fingers, each press a brutal reminder of how easily he enters spaces I’m dying to understand.
The lock clicks.
The door jolts open behind me—
And I fall.
I catch nothing. My feet slip. My ass hits the floor of the workspace with a thud that rattles up my spine and knocks the breath out of me.
Humiliation sears my cheeks.
He steps over the threshold, pauses, and looks down at me with a predator’s stillness.
“Fascinating,” he says. “You break into a restricted room and manage to only injure yourself.”
“Shut up,” I hiss, mortified.
His lips twitch, almost amusement, almost cruelty. He extends a gloved hand. Not a gentleman’s gesture. More like a command word made flesh.
I stare at it.
“Take it,” he says.
I do.
He pulls me up easily, as if I weigh nothing at all.
Once I am standing, the room behind him—or beneath him, really—reveals itself.
And the world shifts.
It’s darker than I imagined.
Not dim—dark.
A curated darkness, purposeful, scientific.
Metal tables gleam in the low light. Jars filled with preserved organs line shelves like trophies.
Trays of syringes glint faintly. Vials of varying colors are arranged with obsessive precision.
Notes scrawled in a hand that looks more like a code than a language clutter a corkboard.
There is a freezer in the corner with latches that could hold back a monster.
And in the center:
A long, steel table.
Not an operating table.
Not exactly.
Something in between a dissection slab and a confession altar.
My breath catches, ragged.
He watches me absorb it. Watches the flinch, the fascination. Watches both fight inside me like animals in a pit.
“You’re afraid,” he says.
“I’d be an idiot not to be.”
“And yet…” He closes the door behind him without breaking eye contact. “You followed.”
I don’t answer.
I don’t trust my voice.
He moves to one of the shelves, pulls down a vial filled with a translucent liquid the color of diluted twilight. He holds it up between two fingers like a jewel.
“Do you know what this does?”
“No.”
He steps closer.
Too close.
“This,” he says softly, “stops the body’s motor function in under four seconds. Leaves every nerve awake. Every thought working. Every fear intact.”
A shiver runs through me, but not entirely from dread.
He watches it travel through my body.
I hate that he sees it.
I hate that something inside me wants him to.
“Why are you showing me this?” I breathe.
“Because you asked to understand,” he murmurs. “And understanding has a cost.”
He sets the vial down and picks up another; darker, thicker, almost oily.
“And this one,” he goes on, “induces a chemical hallucination so vivid the brain cannot distinguish it from reality. Useful. Persuasive.”
He offers it to me.
I take it.
The glass is cold.
My fingers tremble.
“You like things that kill,” he says. “Not flowers. Not pretty things. Things with teeth.”
“It doesn’t mean—”
“It does.”
His voice is final.
Sharp.
He walks past me, brushing my shoulder with deliberate closeness.
“What are you doing?” I whisper.
“Teaching.”
The word lands deep, dangerously deep.
I follow him to another table, drawn like gravity is a force he controls. He points to a clear container with metal clamps.
“This,” he says, “is a liquid neuroblocker. One dose collapses a human’s ability to resist. Not torture. Not pain. Just silence.”
“You’ve used it,” I say before I can stop myself.
He turns.
A slow, dark smile cuts across his face—small, but devastating.
“Of course.”
Something in my chest tightens painfully.
Fear.
Curiosity.
Something else.
Something I shouldn’t let grow.
I look at the shelves again; at the poisons, the tools, the preserved horrors. At the meticulous violence displayed like artwork.
Everything in this room exists for one purpose: to end something.
And here I am. Breathing inside it.