75. Sienna
Sienna
T he timer slows.
Not by much.
But enough to matter.
00:01:52
Then—
00:01:51
Not dropping in chunks anymore.
Not accelerating.
Just moving normally.
Kade notices immediately.
His expression darkens.
Interesting.
For the first time tonight—
Something isn’t under his control.
I keep my hands wrapped around Elizabeth’s tightly.
“Stay with me,” I whisper.
Her breathing still shakes.
But now she’s listening.
Actually listening.
“You used to read to me,” she says weakly.
Emotion punches straight through my chest.
“Oh, sweetheart…”
“You made up stories when the power went out.”
The timer steadies again.
00:01:47
Vale stares at the monitor in disbelief.
“The tether’s compensating…”
Kade steps toward us sharply.
“No.”
Jonah immediately intercepts him.
Massive body between us.
Immovable.
Kade’s jaw tightens for the first time.
“You built emotional adaptation into the system,” I whisper, realizing it out loud. “Not just fear response.”
Vale slowly looks toward me.
And suddenly—
He understands too.
“You did that,” he says quietly.
Memory slams into me hard.
Late nights inside Oracle.
Arguing with Kade.
Fighting him over predictive human conditioning models.
I had secretly embedded emotional stabilization pathways into the biometric architecture.
A safeguard.
A humanity layer.
I never thought it survived.
But it did.
Oh my God.
Kade sees the realization hit me.
And suddenly—
He looks furious.
“You weakened the system.”
“I humanized it.”
“You corrupted it.”
“No,” I snap, rising slowly to my feet. “I stopped it from becoming you.”
The room goes dead quiet.
Kade stares at me.
And now the obsession isn’t hidden anymore.
It’s right there.
Raw.
Terrifying.
“You still don’t understand what we could’ve become together.”
My skin crawls.
“There was never a we.”
That lands like a knife.
Good.
The countdown ticks lower.
00:01:26
Cal checks the corridor again.
“Uh… not to interrupt the emotional breakup scene from hell, but we’ve got movement!”
Heavy footsteps thunder outside.
Multiple hostiles.
A lot of them.
Lance reloads fast.
“We’re not holding this room much longer.”
Vale suddenly moves beside the terminal again.
“There may be enough stabilization now to separate Elizabeth from the biometric chain.”
Hope explodes through me.
“You can do that?”
“I don’t know.”
Not comforting.
But it’s something.
His fingers fly across the keyboard.
Code tears across the screens.
The system fights him instantly.
ACCESS DENIED
Kade smiles coldly.
“You really think I’d make it that easy?”
Then—
The facility lights suddenly die.
Everything plunges into darkness.
Elizabeth gasps.
The countdown drops sharply.
00:01:11
“No no no—” I grab her hands tighter immediately. “Elizabeth, listen to me.”
Emergency red lights slam on a second later.
Shadows flood the room.
The atmosphere changes instantly.
More dangerous.
More unstable.
And then—
The corridor outside erupts.
Gunfire detonates everywhere at once.
Cal fires back immediately.
Lance unloads beside him.
Concrete explodes inward.
“They’re breaching!”
One operative crashes through the doorway—
Jonah drops him instantly with a brutal strike to the throat before firing past him into the corridor.
Chaos explodes.
Kade moves.
Fast.
Way too fast.
He lunges straight toward the terminal.
“No!”
I dive for him.
So does Jonah.
We hit Kade at the exact same moment.
The terminal sparks violently.
The screen glitches.
And suddenly—
Every monitor in the room changes.
The children’s camera feeds disappear.
Replaced by one message flashing across every screen.
FINAL EXECUTION AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED
Kade smiles through the chaos.
Blood on his face.
Eyes wild now.
And finally—
Finally—
The mask comes completely off.
“You should’ve stayed with me, Sienna.”