Chapter 17 #2
Caden’s composure visibly changed, any trace of his everlasting fake charm finally vanishing. He didn’t even bother to deny it. Instead, he slowly nodded back, clearly reflecting on that moment. “Yes.”
“I still don’t understand one thing,” Emma pressed on, now facing Stephen again. “How did you know to find me? How did you know someone like me even existed? Where to look for me? You couldn’t have tracked me through the LiaPrism.”
She forced the silver haired liar to meet her eye, but, in a telling move, he abruptly looked away, avoiding her altogether. The shift made my stomach churn with unease.
Caden sighed, the sound heavy with resignation, before his gaze caught Emma’s. “You saw what will happen in the future.”
Emma’s frown deepened as she nodded.
Caden’s voice dropped lower. “You saw Alek.”
Emma shifted in her chair, confusion and a creeping sense of dread clouding her features.
“If we all fail at preventing the clusterfuck we’re heading to, he’s our only hope,” Caden furthered. “He’s the only one with a real shot at resisting the Trackers you saw in action. The only one who can fight back. And succeed.”
“What the fuck does the Krait have to do with Emma?” I didn’t get it; none of it made sense. And why the hell had our o-so-trustworthy Specialist kept all of this from me?
Emma’s question broke through my thoughts, barely a whisper. “Who is he?”
“You know who he is, Emma. I can see in your eyes that you do,” Stephen murmured softly.
Emma kept her focus on the other two men, until it dawned on her. Stephen gave a barely perceptible nod, his expression neutral, but it was enough.
“He’s my son,” Emma said, certainty in every word.
What?
Shock. My breath caught in my throat as her words sank in. Her son? I tried to process the impossibility of it, while my heart was pounding so hard it felt like it might burst.
Her face had gone pale, and I saw the strain as she fought to keep her emotions under control. I reached out, trying to grab her hand for support, but she pulled away.
Meanwhile, my head was struggling to keep up with yet another fucking twist.
“Her son?” The words felt foreign in my mouth, like I was choking on them. “How?”
Stephen finally looked right at me. “After you started your Leadership training, I traveled back to the future a few times. I couldn’t interfere, but I gathered as much intel as I could.”
He paused. “Which wasn’t much. The Krait—Alek—doesn’t know anything about his past. Whatever I found out was only from watching him piece it together on his own.”
What the hell? Why wouldn’t he remember anything about his past?
“I noticed him fighting the Trackers on multiple occasions, always using magic. Never setting off any sensors.” Stephen turned to Emma. “No one else will fight them like him. No one else will be able to do so and live. But he will—and they will never know where to find him after he does.”
A sinking feeling settled in my gut.
“Which could only mean one thing,” he went on, like this was all so fucking obvious. “His translation is untraceable.”
Like Emma’s. What. The. Fuck.
“The girl you saw with him—Mila—she’s his girlfriend. I overheard them talking once, when Alek mentioned he got his untraceable translation from his mother. A Humanborn from Boston, alive during the Great Exposure.”
“That’s when I started searching for her,” Stephen continued. “I checked every LiaPrism I could near Boston—Cyclos, Kanata C—but there was no record of her. Nothing. Which meant she was still in Boston. Still unfound.”
He paused, inhaling deeply. “I thought if we could get ahead of this—before it was too late—maybe we could stop it from happening at all.”
Silence.
Then—
“And my son…” Emma’s breath hitched, like she was holding herself together by sheer force of will. “Why am I not with him?”
Stephen and Caden exchanged a quick, troubled glance.
“I’m dead, aren’t I?” Emma asked softly, her voice trembling. “That’s why I’m not with him?”
My stomach churned, and it felt as though the oxygen had been sucked out of the room. No.
Stephen took a moment before answering. “We’re not entirely sure. Your son believes you’re dead, but he also mentioned searching for his father and hoping you were with him. So the situation remains unclear.”
“Father?” I sounded almost hoarse. “Who’s the father?”
Emma searched my face, her whole demeanor pleading for answers I was not able to provide.
“James?” she whispered, and I was relieved to hear a glimmer of hope mixed in with her uncertainty.
“I wasn’t able to find out the exact identity of the father. However, I learned the father was, or had been, a First Offensive who had been trained by me at some point.”
“So I’m the father.” I nodded slowly, the puzzle finally coming together. It made a twisted kind of sense now.
But Stephen coughed, interrupting my thoughts. “Actually, as it stands, there are three possibilities.”
“Three?” Emma shrieked. “What do you mean, three? Who?”
The master-manipulator replied dryly, almost clinically, as if he were reciting historical facts rather than unveiling catastrophic truths. “Well, James seems the most obvious choice at this point.”
Emma opened her mouth, clearly to reply, but he wasn’t finished.
“However, considering the criteria, it could also be Caden.”
“What?” We all yelled at once.
Caden’s face went ghost-white. For the first time that evening, his cold composure cracked.
My pulse spiked—violent, erratic—as I whirled on Stephen. “Him?” I roared, jabbing a finger at the man responsible for every scar on Emma’s body. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Caden’s shock flickered, then twisted into something darker, more vicious. His jaw locked. His fists clenched. And then his eyes blazed with that calculated fury, I’d only ever seen on the battlefield.
“You’re telling me I might be the father?” His voice came out low, and lethal. “That I fucking tortured the woman who could become the mother of my child?”
Each word dripped with venom, steeped in a rawness, bordering on the unforgivable.
Stephen didn’t even try to soften the blow. He simply murmured, “Yes.”
A muscle ticked in Caden’s jaw, his breaths sharp and uneven, like he was barely holding back.
“I can’t believe you’d think—” I started.
But Emma’s words cut through it all.
“You said there were three…”
I turned to her, my confusion tangling with the rising dread clawing its way up my spine.
“What?” My pulse was pounding in my ears. “Who the hell is the third?”
A beat of silence. Then—
“Me.”
The voice was smooth. Unsettling. And impossibly familiar.
A chill slithered down my spine.
No.
The air shifted and warped, when a low hum vibrated through the room, crackling at the edges of reality.
We turned—slowly. Hesitantly.
A portal closed behind him, colorful and seamless.
That smirk. That fucking smirk.
It twisted my stomach into knots.
Mocking. Knowing. Infuriating.
Of course.
Fucking Julian.