Chapter Two
The quiet stretched too long after Klarissa’s words left her mouth. Death is coming, and I am its creator. Even through the haze of pain and the fog of whatever medication the healer had pushed into her veins, the weight of those words settled like iron in the room.
Questions came at her in a wave. Liam’s sharp Irish lilt, Violet’s fiery energy, Jacob’s steady rumble.
They wanted to know what she meant, how she knew, what exactly was coming.
Fragments overlapped—“weapon?” “human threat?” “what the hell does she mean creator?”—but she couldn’t answer them all at once.
Her throat burned, her ribs protested with each shallow breath.
Still, she forced her gaze to steady, her voice low but clear.
“It’s not a metaphor,” Klarissa said. “I don’t deal in those.”
They blinked, glanced at each other, but the questions didn’t stop.
Except from him.
Keiran Murphy, Alpha of the Black Ridge Pride, stood at the foot of the infirmary bed and said nothing. He didn’t join in the barrage, didn’t push forward with demands. He simply stared. And when Klarissa lifted her head, she found herself staring right back.
The silence between them deepened, stretched taut, until it tugged at her very bones.
The others must have noticed, because the questions stuttered, then faded, until the only sound was the faint hum of machines and the healer shifting his tray.
It was a staring contest she hadn’t meant to start but somehow couldn’t back away from.
At last Keiran’s lips curved in something that was not quite a smile. “Why is it,” he said softly, voice carrying the rumble of his lion beneath it, “that I don’t think this is you being overly dramatic?”
Klarissa swallowed against the dryness in her throat. “Because it isn’t.”
He tilted his head, gaze sharp. “Then tell us.”
She closed her eyes briefly, gathering the scraps of courage she had left.
When she opened them, every pair of eyes was on her.
Kamon’s hand tightened around hers, Rune’s warmth steady at her other side, anchoring her.
“What I am ... what I do,” she began, “isn’t simple.
My field is virology. I create viruses.”
A growl rippled through the room, but she held up a hand. “Not to release. Not to harm, but to cure. You can’t fight a plague unless you know its shape. You can’t engineer an antidote without first building the weapon. That is what I do—I craft the sickness so that I can craft the remedy.”
The silence was heavy, but not empty. They were weighing every word.
“In the right hands, what I create saves lives,” she pressed on. “But in the wrong ones...” Her throat constricted. “In the wrong hands, it could wipe out thousands. Tens of thousands. And those wrong hands have it now.”
Violet swore under her breath. Jacob’s growl joined Rune’s low rumble, a chorus of protective fury. Liam’s jaw clenched tight enough she could hear the grind of his teeth. But it was Keiran’s eyes she couldn’t look away from.
“You’re telling me,” he said slowly, deliberately, “that you built the very thing that could bring my people to their knees.”
“I’m telling you,” Klarissa countered, “that I built the only thing that might stop it.”
The room stirred again, voices rising. Liam leaned forward, elbows braced on his knees. “How big a problem are we talking here? How fast does it move?”
“Fast,” Klarissa answered. “Faster than most systems can catch. I designed it that way to test countermeasures. If it ever got out, it could spread in days.”
Jacob’s eyes narrowed. “To humans too?”
“Yes,” Klarissa admitted. “But shifters are the true targets. Your genetic markers make you burn hotter, faster. If it escapes into the city, it won’t matter who you are. Death will not discriminate.”
Rune’s hand tightened around hers until it almost hurt. She didn’t pull away. His tiger’s growl vibrated through her bones, matched by Kamon’s silent, steady fury.
Violet’s voice cut through, sharp as a blade. “So, what you’re saying, Red, is that someone out there has the blueprint for the extinction of shifters.”
Klarissa nodded once, sharp. “Yes. And I know exactly where it began.”
The others waited, but she wasn’t finished.
She forced herself to continue, even as her ribs ached and her pulse pounded.
“You want to understand me? Then you need to understand the science behind what I do. I map viruses like architects map cities. Every wall, every gate, every hidden tunnel. To build a cure, I need to know every possible mutation. That means I’ve made monsters on paper, in glass tubes.
They were supposed to stay locked there. Supposed to die in containment.”
Her breath shuddered. “But someone took them.”
Liam cursed softly. Violet muttered something about data theft, eyes already calculating. Jacob’s jaw worked, but he said nothing, watching her with a soldier’s intensity.
Kieran finally spoke again, slow and certain. “And you’re certain your work is what they have now?”
Klarissa met his gaze. “About seventy-five percent of it, yes, I’d bet my life. And yours.”
No one moved. Even the healer seemed to freeze, his hand stilling over his instruments.
Jacob broke the silence. “If you can build it, you can unbuild it. Can you stop it?”
“Yes,” Klarissa said. “But only if I know what version they’re using, how far they’ve twisted it from the models I built. Otherwise, I’d be guessing. And guesses will get us all killed.”
Rune shifted closer, his voice low, dangerous. “Then we find them. We make them give you what you need.”
Kamon nodded, his expression grim. “And then we carve them open for what they’ve done.”
Her chest tightened, but not from pain. From the fierce certainty in their voices. From the way they stood at her side as though they had always been meant to.
Violet broke the moment with a sharp laugh. “Hell, I thought I was dramatic. You two kittens have me beat.” Her smile faded quickly, replaced with fire. “But she’s right. If this gets out, we’re looking at a body count that makes Santiago’s reign look like a tea party.”
The mention of Santiago made the room flinch.
Klarissa felt it like a weight, but she pressed forward.
“This didn’t start in a lab funded by strangers.
It didn’t start with shadow corporations or faceless enemies.
It started in my home.” Her chest tightened, ribs protesting, but she forced the words out. “It started with my father.”
Kieran’s eyes narrowed. “And just who is your father, Klarissa.”
Klarissa let the silence stretch one heartbeat longer, then gave them the name she had carried like a brand all her life. “Vincent Caruso.”
The name hung in the air like a curse, and in the space that followed, Klarissa felt the final tether snap. There was no taking it back. The war had begun the day she put a weapon in her father’s hands. And now, it had come home to roost.
****
Rune could still feel the echo of Klarissa’s words reverberating through the room.
Vincent Caruso. The name was a curse, a brand, a warning.
His tiger prowled with restless fury inside him, but he forced himself to stay steady.
Klarissa was shaking, her eyes shadowed, but still she held herself upright, her voice steady even as her body betrayed exhaustion.
She was more strength than fragility, more determination than despair, and Rune had never seen anything more compelling in his life.
Jacob was the first to break the silence. “Why start at all? Why create something like this? What were you trying to cure?”
Klarissa’s gaze flickered to him, then to Kieran, who still hadn’t spoken again.
It was as though the Alpha was weighing every flicker of her expression.
Rune tightened his hold on her hand, ready to step in if she faltered, but she didn’t.
Her eyes grew wet, her jaw trembling, but her voice carried.
“My mother,” she whispered. “She was dying, not from an infection, but because she was a latent shifter. There was something in her animal DNA that was killing her from the inside. They tried everything. I ... I tried everything. I thought if I could strip that part away—disarm the mutation that was consuming her—she might live. But I was too late.”
The healer jerked at her words, his hands stilling. Rune caught the movement, his tiger bristling, and almost spoke. But then he saw Kieran’s small shake of his head, a silent command to let Klarissa finish. Rune held his tongue, though every instinct demanded he react, as she continued.
Rune felt her fingers twitch in his, and his tiger snarled at the sight of tears brightening her eyes. He wanted to pull her close, to shield her, to silence the questions. “You don’t have to do this now,” he said quietly, leaning in so that only she could hear. “We can wait.”
Her head moved side to side, sharp and certain. “No. We can’t wait. If they break the encryption and replicate my work, they don’t need it finished. Even at seventy-five percent complete, they could manufacture a version that would kill indiscriminately.”
Violet’s eyes lit with grim fascination. “Now you’re speaking my language.” She leaned forward, a grin that was equal parts wicked and deadly flashing across her face. “Encryption. Firewalls. How did you lock it down?”
Despite her tears, Klarissa managed a faint smile.
“Triple-coded encryption lattices, rotating keys. I buried my notes in false data structures and ghost servers. For years it held. But it was only ever a matter of time. He cracked a few walls already. Five years ago, he broke through one. That breach killed fifty-four people—a mix of humans and shifters.”
Klarissa’s eyes met his, haunted. “Eighteen months ago, it happened again. This time thirty-six shifters and two humans died before it burned out. He would have considered that ratio acceptable.”