Chapter 46
The Cost of Your Brilliance
Elara
I can’t stop shaking.
Not the delicate kind of trembling people imagine when they think of shock, not a cinematic quiver with a tear falling at the right moment; this is uglier than that.
This is my body trying to burn through adrenaline that has nowhere to go.
My hands clench and unclench at my sides, fingers aching, nails biting into my palms hard enough that pain becomes something to focus on, something real, something I can measure.
Everything else in this lab is too clean, too bright, too sterile for the filth that’s crawling through my thoughts.
My father is alive.
My father is a criminal.
My father made something people kill for.
My father let me mourn him for fourteen years like grief was a price worth paying for his ambition.
And now he stands in front of me, in a room that smells like antiseptic and power, trying to explain it like this is a complicated equation and not a human betrayal.
Halldórsson shifts near the door, watching, his expression tight. He’s seen crime scenes. He’s seen people unravel. But this is different. This is the kind of violence that doesn’t leave blood on the floor; just hollowed-out bones. I want an answer to my question.
Henrik lifts his hands slightly, palms open, a gesture that might be calming if it didn’t make me want to spit. “I understand you’re angry.”
“Stop talking,” I say, and the words are a plea and a threat at once. “Just—stop. And tell me where he is.”
Henrik’s jaw tightens instantly.
“You’ll tell me where Vapor is or I’ll find him myself.” I say, louder, because the name is a needle I keep pressing into the conversation until it bleeds.
Henrik’s expression shifts—protective, controlling, possessive in a way that makes my stomach twist. “You are not going near him.”
“You can’t decide that,” I snap.
“I can,” he says, voice turning iron. “Because you don’t understand what he is.”
“I understand what he did to me,” I shoot back. “And I understand he didn’t hurt me.”
Halldórsson’s gaze flickers to Henrik, warning him with his eyes. The inspector is careful—he knows I’m a bomb right now, and he knows Henrik is the kind of man who thinks he can disarm bombs by explaining chemistry.
Henrik exhales. “Elara. He abducted you.”
“He saved me,” I say immediately.
Henrik flinches at the certainty in my voice, like it offends him that I can say that about someone else while looking at my father with nothing but disgust.
“He killed two men in my house,” I admit, and my stomach lurches at the memory of it.
The gunshots. The bodies collapsing. The smell of smoke and cold.
“Yes. He did. And then he took me. But he could’ve killed me.
He didn’t. He could’ve hurt me. He didn’t.
He fed me. He—” My throat tightens, he didn’t only just feed me.
“He was good to me in the only way he knows how to be good.”
Henrik’s eyes harden. “That is not goodness.”
“It’s the truth,” I say, voice shaking.
Halldórsson shifts again, subtle, but his face betrays something like doubt. Not about Henrik. About the story Henrik keeps insisting on.
I press harder.
“He had no idea about you,” I say to Henrik, stepping closer. “He had no idea who you were, or that you were alive, or my father. He didn’t know anything about your formulas. He didn’t know about this lab. He didn’t—”
“You don’t know what he knows,” Henrik cuts in sharply.
“I know what he told me,” I snap. “And I trust him more than I trust you.”
Silence slams down.
Henrik looks like I’ve physically struck him. “Enough Elara, he’s a goddamn serial killer!”
Halldórsson’s jaw tightens, but he doesn’t intervene. Maybe because he knows it’s true. Or maybe because he knows I need to say it.
“I want to speak to him,” I say, my voice cracking now with something rawer than anger. “I want to hear his version. I want to hear it from his mouth, in his own words. Not from you. Not from files. Not from your paranoia.”
Henrik’s expression shifts again; conflict, frustration, something like fear.
“He isn’t talking,” he says finally.
I blink. “What? How the hell would you know he’s guilty then?!”
“He hasn’t said a word,” Henrik repeats, and there’s something unsettled in his tone now, like he doesn’t like admitting that the myth is refusing to perform. “Not one. Not to me, not to Halldórsson, not to anyone. We’ve tried everything short of…” He stops himself, jaw clenched.
“Short of what?” I demand.
Henrik doesn’t answer.
Halldórsson does, quietly. “Short of torturing him.”
The words turn my stomach to ice.
Henrik’s gaze snaps to the inspector, anger flaring, but it’s too late. The implication is in the air now, sharp and poisonous.
“You’re not fucking serious, right?” I whisper harshly.
Henrik’s voice turns controlled again, forced calm. “We restrained him. We secured him. We did what had to be done. He is not a man you reason with, Elara. He is a weapon.”
“He’s a person,” I snap.
Henrik’s mouth twists. “Is he? You don’t find him different? Odd? Monstrous?”
I stare at him, heart pounding. The thought settles, sharp and definitive. “And you find that because you made him that way?”
Henrik stills.
The silence that follows is an answer.
I take a step back, suddenly dizzy.
“No,” I whisper. “No. Stop.”
Henrik’s eyes drop, guilt flickering again like a fault line. “It’s not that simple.”
“Did you…,” I murmur, voice breaking. “Did you sell your serum to him?”
Henrik looks up at that, fast, almost offended. “No,” he says immediately. Too quickly. “Not to him.”
The distinction lands like a blade.
“To who the fuck then!?” I yell now.
He hesitates. Just a second. Just long enough.
“ásgeir Grímsson,” he says finally.
The name hits me in the chest, hard.
Halldórsson exhales quietly behind me, like he already knows where this is going and doesn’t like it.
Henrik straightens, as if bracing himself for judgment. “Vapor’s father. He came to me a long time ago. Before you were born. Before Vapor became… what he is now. He was desperate.”
“Everyone who destroys lives is desperate,” I hiss back.
Henrik ignores that. Or maybe he can’t afford to hear it. “His wife was dying. A degenerative nervous system disorder. Progressive. Painful. There was no treatment. No cure. Just deterioration; loss of motor control, nerve signals misfiring, cells dying faster than the body could replace them.”
My stomach twists. I don’t want to feel sympathy. I hate that my body tries to supply it anyway.
“He’d heard rumors about my work,” Henrik continues.
“About the serum. About balance. Restoration. Neural recalibration. The goal was simple in theory: improve nerve conduction, stop cellular death before it became irreversible. Give the body time to heal itself.” His mouth tightens. “He begged me.”
“Begged you to buy something you knew wasn’t ready to be used,” I snap.
“He begged me to save his wife,” Henrik snaps back, irritation flaring before he reins it in, visibly. “I refused at first.”
Of course you did, I think. Long enough to still feel moral asshole.
“But?” I prompt.
“But I was young,” he says. “And greedy. And arrogant enough to believe I could control something that hadn’t yet been controlled.
I told him the serum wasn’t ready. That it was unstable.
That instead of restoring balance, it could distort it.
That it could be fatal. That it could change her personality.
That it might accelerate damage instead of stopping it. ”
“And he didn’t care,” I say.
“He cared,” Henrik insists. “He just cared more about her than about the risk.”
My hands curl into fists again. “So you gave it to him anyway.”
Henrik shakes his head. “Yes, but not the final compound as what it is now. It was a prototype. A first demonstration. Unbalanced. Incomplete.”
“You gave him the unbalanced version,” I say slowly, the pieces sliding together in my mind with nauseating clarity. “You gave a desperate man a chemical weapon!?”
Henrik closes his eyes.
“What I hadn’t thought of,” he says quietly ignoring me, “in the process of trying to save her… ásgeir ran tests with the serum to test its balance, the dosage. He believed the balance was achievable if he could just adjust the variables. The dosage. The exposure. The subject.”
My chest tightens painfully. “So he practiced.”
Henrik opens his eyes again, and there it is. The truth he’s been circling like a coward.
“He needed a living nervous system,” Henrik says. “One young enough to adapt. To survive repeated recalibration.”
I take a step back, because my legs suddenly feel like they’re made of water.
“On his son,” I finish for him.
The silence after that is deafening.
Henrik doesn’t deny it. He doesn’t rush to soften it with language or justification. He just stands there, shoulders rigid, jaw clenched, like a man who knows he’s already been sentenced.
“ásgeir never told me who the subject was,” he says, like that matters. “Not at first. When I realized—when I suspected—it was already too late. The damage was done.”
“The damage,” I repeat, my voice lethal. “You mean Vapor.”
Henrik flinches at the name now.
“That’s why you see him as a monster,” I say, understanding blooming in my chest like something poisonous. “Because every time you look at him, you see your mistake. Your own fucking failure. Your unbalanced serum walking around with a gun.”
“That is not—”
“You made him,” I cut in. “Not with intent. Not directly. But he is the way he is because of you, because of what you created.”
Halldórsson shifts again, uneasy now. He doesn’t interrupt. He can’t. This isn’t an interrogation anymore. This is a reckoning.