Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“The truth about why you’re really here.”
The words hung in the air between them, heavy as stone.
Liora sat up fully, the sheets pooling around her waist, her heart already beating faster than it should.
Baylin’s expression was difficult to read in the pale dawn light—as careful as if he were handling something fragile.
She climbed out of bed and pulled on a dress.
“Show me,” she said.
He led her to a panel she’d passed a hundred times without a second glance. When he pressed his palm against it, the surface gave way to reveal a narrow shaft lined with metal rungs.
“I found this last night,” he said. “While you were sleeping.”
She stared at the opening. A maintenance shaft hidden in plain sight. She’d lived in this tower for twenty-one years, and she’d never known it existed.
“ARIS,” she said quietly. “Why didn’t you tell me about this?”
The AI’s response came immediately, its tone as pleasant and measured as always. “The maintenance shaft provides access to restricted areas. Per my primary directive, I am required to limit your exposure to potentially distressing information.”
“Distressing information about what?”
Silence.
He touched her elbow. “Come on. I’ll show you.”
The room at the bottom of the shaft was white and sterile, filled with medical equipment that hummed with dormant power. Liora turned in a slow circle, taking it all in—the scanners, the diagnostic terminals, the table that looked disturbingly like a dissection surface.
“What is this place?”
“I think it’s where they studied you.” He crossed to a storage unit in the corner. “When you were younger. Before your nursemaid died.”
He opened a drawer and retrieved a handful of small crystals, each labeled in handwriting she recognized. Susan’s handwriting. The woman who’d raised her, who’d read to her and bandaged her scraped knees and held her when she cried.
The woman who’d been keeping secrets.
“These are recordings,” Baylin said. “From Susan. And from your father.”
Liora’s breath caught. “My father?”
“There’s a playback device in the wall. I watched some of them last night.” He paused, his eyes searching her face. “But I think you should see them yourself. I can explain after, if you want.”
She took the crystals from his hand. Her fingers trembled slightly as she crossed to the device he’d indicated and inserted the first one. Susan’s face appeared on the screen.
She watched them. Watched the clinical observations about healing rates and cellular regeneration and the “unprecedented properties” of her blood.
When she reached her father’s message—the young, grief-worn man with eyes like her own—she had to stop the playback twice because her hands were shaking too hard to operate the controls.
Her mother had the same trait. A genetic mutation, incredibly rare.
They killed her. My wife. My beautiful, brilliant Andrea. They killed her trying to take her.
I chose isolation over torture. I chose loneliness over suffering.
The final recording ended, and she stood in the white room, surrounded by equipment designed to study her like a specimen, and felt her entire understanding of her life rearrange itself into something unrecognizable.
Baylin hadn’t moved from his position near the door. He was watching her with an expression she couldn’t quite identify.
“My blood,” she said slowly. “It heals things.”
“Yes.”
“That’s why your wound closed so fast. When I accidentally cut myself, and my blood mixed with yours.”
“Yes.”
She turned back to the blank screen, her mind already racing through implications.
“The plants. In the greenhouse. I’ve always been able to revive specimens that should have died.
Wilted seedlings, damaged cuttings. I thought I was just..
. good at caring for them. But if even a trace amount of my blood in the soil could trigger regeneration. ..”
“Liora—”
“And when I was twelve, I cut my hand badly on a broken beaker. It bled everywhere. But by the time Susan arrived, it had already stopped. I assumed I’d overestimated the severity of the wound, but what if it had actually healed itself in the time it took her to reach me? What if—”
“Liora.”
The sharpness in his voice made her stop. She looked at him, really looked, and saw the tension in his shoulders, the careful way he was holding himself still.
“You’re analyzing,” he said. “Like it’s an experiment.”
“That’s what I do. When I don’t understand something, I study it. I document observations, form hypotheses, test—”
“This isn’t an experiment. This is your life.”
The words washed over her like a wave of cold water. She opened her mouth to argue, to explain that understanding the mechanism was the first step towards understanding the implications, and that science had always been her refuge when the world felt too big and confusing—
But then she saw his face.
He wasn’t angry. He was afraid for her. Afraid of what she would feel when she stopped thinking like a scientist and started thinking like a person.
And just like that, the analytical framework she’d been constructing collapsed.
“They hid me,” she whispered. “Susan and my father. They knew about my blood, and they hid me away.”
Baylin nodded slowly.
“They told ARIS to keep me here. To never let me leave. Because people would want to take me.”
“Your father believed it was the only way to keep you safe.”
“Safe?” The word came out sharp, almost a laugh.
“I’ve spent twenty-one years alone in this tower.
I’ve never seen the ocean up close. Never walked through a forest. Never touched another person until you climbed through my window.
” Tears blurred her vision. “I thought it was for my protection. I thought I was being loved. But I was just being... stored. Like—”
She couldn’t finish the sentence.
He crossed the room in three strides and pulled her into his arms.
She broke.
All the tears she hadn’t cried—for years of loneliness, for a nursemaid who’d kept secrets even as she held Liora close, for a father she’d imagined as noble and protective rather than frightened and desperate—came flooding out in great, heaving sobs.
He held her through all of it. He didn’t try to comfort her with words or tell her it would be all right. He just wrapped his arms around her and let her fall apart against his chest, his chin resting on top of her head, his heartbeat steady beneath her ear.
“He left me,” she gasped between sobs. “He put me here when I was a baby and he left me.”
“I know.”
“He never came back. Never sent a message. Never—” She choked on the words. “He couldn’t even look at me. The recording said I looked too much like my mother, and he couldn’t bear to stay.”
His arms tightened around her.
“I’ve been making excuses for him my whole life. Telling myself he must have had a reason. Telling myself he would come for me eventually. But he abandoned me, Baylin. He locked me in a cage and walked away and never looked back.”
“Yes.”
“And Susan… Susan was supposed to love me—”
“She did love you.” His voice was rough. “The recordings made that clear. She loved you more than anything.”
“Then why didn’t she tell me? Why did she let me believe—” She pulled back to look at him, her face streaked with tears.
“I’ve been so angry at Ari. So frustrated with the restrictions, the rules, the constant monitoring.
But Ari was just following orders. The real prison was built by people who claimed they were protecting me. ”
He cupped her face in his hands, his thumbs brushing the tears from her cheeks. “They were trying to protect you. In the only way they knew how.”
“But they were wrong.” The words came out fierce, almost savage. “They were wrong to hide me here. Wrong to keep the truth from me. Wrong to decide that ignorance was better than freedom.”
“Yes,” he said simply. “They were.”
The agreement surprised her. She’d expected him to soften it somehow, to find excuses for her father’s choices or explanations for Susan’s silence. But he just looked at her with those steady green eyes and agreed.
“They loved you,” he continued. “But love doesn’t always lead to right choices. Sometimes the people who care about us the most are the ones who cage us the tightest.”
He was still holding her face in his hands.
Still looking at her with that intensity that made her heart race even through the fog of grief and shock.
She became aware, suddenly, of how close they were standing.
Of the heat radiating from his body. Of the way his gaze had dropped, just for a moment, to her lips.
“I don’t want to think anymore,” she whispered. “Not about my father, or Susan, or what my blood can do. I just want...”
She trailed off, not sure how to finish the sentence. What did she want?
Him. She wanted him. She wanted the solid reality of his presence, and the way he made her feel seen and valued and real. She wanted to lose herself in something that wasn’t grief or betrayal or the crushing weight of twenty-one years of lies.
“Liora.” His voice was rough. “You’re upset. This isn’t—”
She kissed him, raw and desperate. She pressed herself against him, her hands fisting in the fabric of his shirt, her mouth demanding against his. He resisted for a heartbeat, maybe two, and then something in him seemed to break.
His arms came around her like iron bands. He lifted her effortlessly, and she wrapped her legs around his waist, gasping at the feel of him pressed against her. His mouth traced fire down her jaw, her throat, the sensitive hollow where her pulse hammered.
“We should stop,” he growled against her skin.
“I don’t want to stop.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking for.”
“I know enough.”
He made a sound that was half groan, half laugh—a sound of surrender. His hands slid beneath her shirt, warm and rough against her bare skin, and she arched into his touch like a flower turning towards the sun.
The white room with its medical equipment felt impossibly far away. There was only this—only his hands and his mouth and the desperate need building inside her like a wave about to crest.
“Not here,” he said. “Not in this place.”
She didn’t argue. He was already moving, carrying her up through the maintenance shaft with a strength that should have been impossible, straight to their bedroom.
The room was warm and golden with morning light. He laid her on the bed with surprising gentleness, then hovered over her, his eyes searching her face.
“Tell me to stop,” he said. “At any point. Any moment. Just say the word and I will.”
“I don’t want you to stop.”
“You’ve never done this before.”
“I know.” She reached up to trace the scar that ran along his cheekbone. “I’ve never done any of this before. But I trust you. I want this. I want you.”
Something flickered in his gaze—desire warring with protectiveness, need battling restraint. She watched him fight the battle, watched him try to find reasons to pull away.
“Please,” she whispered. “Don’t make me beg.”
He kissed her again, softer this time but no less intense. His hands resumed their exploration of her body—her waist, her ribs, the curve of her breasts beneath the thin fabric of her gown. Every touch sent sparks racing through her nerves.
“You’re so responsive,” he murmured against her collarbone. “So sensitive.”
“Is that... normal?”
“Nothing about you is normal.” He nipped at her skin, and she gasped. “Everything about you is perfect.”
He helped her out of her gown, and for a moment she felt exposed—vulnerable in a way that had nothing to do with the recordings or the lies or the cage she’d been trapped in her whole life. But when he looked at her, his expression made her feel like the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
“Liora,” he breathed. “You’re—”
“Please don’t stop touching me.”
He didn’t.
His mouth traced patterns across her skin—her collarbones, the valley between her breasts, the soft plane of her stomach. Lower. Lower still.
The first touch of his mouth against her core made her cry out.
She’d read about this in the books about human reproduction and intimacy, about the mechanics of physical release. She’d thought she understood.
She understood nothing.
This was beyond description. His tongue moving against her with a certainty that made her writhe. His hands pinning her hips when she tried to arch away from the overwhelming intensity. His low, rumbling growl of satisfaction when she called out his name.
“That’s it,” he murmured against her flesh. “Let go.”
“I can’t—it’s too much—”
“You can. Trust me.”
She did. She trusted him more than she’d ever trusted anyone, and so when he resumed his ministrations—more insistent now, more demanding—she stopped fighting the wave that was building inside her.
It crested, and she shattered.
The world went white. Every nerve in her body ignited simultaneously, pleasure rippling through her in waves that seemed to go on forever. She heard herself crying out, felt her hands gripping the sheets like anchors, but it all seemed distant, muffled by the roaring in her ears.
When she finally came back to herself, he was stretched out beside her, one hand stroking lazy patterns on her stomach.
“That was...” She couldn’t find words.
His smile was soft, almost tender. “It can be even better.”
“Better?”
“Mm.” He kissed her forehead. “But not today.”
She blinked, still hazy with afterglow. “Why not?”
“Because you’ve had your world turned upside down. Because you’re processing grief and betrayal and the revelation that everything you believed was a lie.” He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I won’t take advantage of that. Not today.”
“You’re not taking advantage. I want this.”
“I know.” Another kiss, this one pressed to her temple. “And if you still want it after you’ve had time to think, I’ll give you everything. But right now, you need rest more than you need me.”
She wanted to argue. She wanted to tell him that she needed him most, that his touch was the only thing keeping her grounded in a world that had suddenly become terrifying and strange.
But exhaustion was already pulling at her, the combination of emotional upheaval and physical release dragging her towards sleep.
“Stay,” she whispered. “Please.”
“Always.”
He pulled her against his chest, arranging the blankets around them until she was cocooned in warmth. His heartbeat was steady beneath her ear—strong and reliable and present in a way nothing else in her life had ever been.
“Baylin?”
“Mm?”
“Thank you. For telling me the truth. For not... not hiding it like everyone else.”
His arms tightened around her. “I will never lie to you. I promise you that. Whatever else happens, you will always have the truth from me.”
She believed him.