Chapter 40
Forty
Cassian
The image is burned onto the back of my eyelids.
Her face, pale and terrified, framed by the closing steel doors. Her eyes are wide with a horror that is no longer passive, but sharp and defiant. And in her arms, clutched to her chest like a shield… my mother’s box.
For a full second, my mind refuses to process it. It is a glitch in reality, a waking nightmare. The two halves of my world—the ghost girl in the loft and the ghosts in the box are colliding in a way that should not be possible.
Then the doors close, sealing her away, and the spell breaks.
A roar tears itself from my throat, a sound of pure, animalistic fury that is ripped from the deepest part of my soul.
I grab the nearest object—a heavy, steel table lamp—and hurl it across the room.
It smashes into the concrete wall with a deafening crash of shattering metal and glass, a pathetic echo of the cataclysm unfolding inside me.
The loft is no longer a home or a prison. It is a crime scene. It has been violated. I have been violated.
My feet move on their own, carrying me past the wreckage, past the open bedroom door, straight to the bookshelf.
My eyes find the empty space. The space where the box has sat, untouched, for years.
A quiet, sacred tomb that I never entered but whose presence was a constant, low hum of pain in the background of my life.
She opened it.
The thought is a physical blow. She put her hands on it, she looked inside.
Aria saw them. She saw Leo’s smile. She saw my mother’s handwriting.
My blood runs cold, the rage momentarily freezing into a solid block of ice in my chest. The recorder.
She listened to it. She heard his voice. His last words.
The ice shatters and the rage comes back, a thousand times hotter, a thousand times more focused.
This is not the anger of a captor whose prize has escaped.
This is the desecrated fury of a man whose holiest place has been defiled.
She didn't just steal a box, she stole my ghosts.
She stole the last, private piece of my brother that existed on this earth.
I stalk back to the desk where I left my phone. The call with Dimitri is still connected, his infuriated voice still squawking on the other end. I slam the phone down, shattering the screen and cutting him off mid-sentence. He does not matter. The board does not matter. Nothing matters but her.
My entire strategy has been wrong. I have been hunting a frightened rabbit, sending an army of wolves to scour the open fields, but this was not the act of a rabbit. This was the act of a viper. Precise. Silent. Venomous.
She didn’t just run, she planned, she waited. She came back.
How? The service elevator. The design flaw. The one vulnerability in my fortress. It’s the only way.
And the timing. She knew I would be gone. She knew my schedule.
My mind flashes to Milo. His fear. His nervous energy. The way he couldn't meet my eyes. He was the only one who knew about the fights. The only one she had a chance to speak to. I make a mental note. I will deal with Milo later. He will pray with a quick death.
Right now, I have to think like her.
I close my eyes, forcing the red haze of my fury to recede. I picture her face in the elevator. The terror was real, but beneath it was a glimmer of something else. Resolve.
Aria has the certificate. She knows about my father and her mother. She has the recorder. Aria knows Leo was at the wheel. She thinks she has weapons. She thinks she can expose us, that she has leverage.
Where does a soldier go when they have new ammunition? They don't run home to their parents—she knows her mother is the enemy. They go to ground. They find a defensible position. A base of operations.
A place that belongs only to her.
I stride to my laptop, my fingers flying across the keyboard, ignoring the broken glass on the desk. The city-wide search is over. I call it off with a single, brutal text message to my foreman: STAND DOWN. NEW INTEL.
The hunt is no longer a blanket operation. It is now a surgical strike.
I pull up the files I had my investigators compile on her when I first found her. Everything. Her financials, her grades, her sparse employment history. It was all a dead end before. She was a ghost, living on the fumes of a trust fund that paid her rent.
But I wasn't looking for the right thing. I was looking for weaknesses, I should have been looking for a stronghold.
I find it in a dry legal document. A lease agreement. Not for her apartment but for a small, non-residential studio space in a pre-war warehouse building in the arts district. A place she pays for out of her own dwindling savings. A place no one else would know about. Her sanctuary.
I pull up the address on the map. It’s only a few miles away.
A cold, predatory calm settles over me. The rage is still there, a white-hot core beneath the ice but it is now a tool, not a storm.
Aria thinks she has escaped. She thinks she is safe, she thinks she is the hunter now, the one who holds the secrets.
She is a ghost, hiding in a room, clutching a box of memories. She has no idea that I am the one who built the tomb, and I am coming to collect my dead.