Chapter 9 #2
“Morrow has intervened, of course. The Arcane Compliance Division has formally taken jurisdiction. But the transfer was messy. The police saw the body. They witnessed the aftermath.”
“Morrow is a blunt instrument,” I said, stepping closer to the desk. “He relies on paperwork and intimidation. He doesn’t know how to handle detectives who ask the wrong questions.”
Korenth paused, looking at me. “You think they know something?”
“I think the MCIU is persistent,” I said smoothly. “They found the Calysteri woman before your teams did. Now they’ve found this man. They are tracking the pattern, Korenth. If Morrow pushes them too hard, they won’t back down. They’ll dig.”
I let the threat hang there. I knew Korenth hated exposure more than anything.
“If they start connecting dots between these ‘anomalies’ and our operations in the district,” I added, “it becomes an issue you can’t bribe your way out of.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Don’t leave it to Morrow,” I said. It was a gamble, but I kept my face impassive. “Put me in the room. Let me embed with the investigation as a ‘Consultant’. I can monitor what they know in real-time.”
Korenth considered this, tapping his finger against the glass desk. He thought I was offering to be his spy. He thought I was desperate to prove I was still his perfect, obedient creation. He didn’t know I was positioning myself to intercept the truth before he found it.
“You want to babysit the police?” he asked, a faint sneer on his lips.
“I want to ensure containment,” I lied. “If the MCIU has data that compromises us, I can corrupt the files. If they have theories, I can dismantle their logic before it ever creates a paper trail. Morrow tries to shout them down; I can make them chase ghosts.”
Korenth nodded slowly. “True. Morrow lacks… finesse.”
He looked at me, decision made.
“Very well. Go to the station. Embed yourself. I will send the authorisation to Morrow immediately.”
He leaned back against his desk, crossing his arms.
“Make sure the ACD keeps the police blind, Riven. Keep the peace. Or silence it.”
“Understood.”
I turned to leave. I needed to get out. The pressure in the room was crushing me, that watching presence boring into my back. My scar burned as if bleeding, though I knew the skin was unbroken.
I reached the door.
“Oh, and Riven?”
I stopped. I didn’t turn around.
“Varessia is looking for you,” Korenth said. “She’s in the building. She says she wants to catch up.”
A fresh wash of cold claimed me.
“Understood.”
I walked out. The door slid shut, cutting off the suffocating atmosphere of the office.
I leaned against the corridor wall for a second, exhaling a breath I didn’t know I was holding. My hand was shaking.
I looked down at my chest. A faint wisp of smoke was curling from the fabric of my shirt, directly over the scar.
I brushed it away.
I survived Korenth. Now I had to survive her.
Instead of taking the lift down, I took the corridor that connected the East Tower to the West. Varessia’s executive suite was on the top floor, but when I reached the heavy double doors, her assistant—a pale young man with dark circles carved under his eyes—intercepted me.
“Miss Quinn isn’t in the office, sir,” he stammered, keeping his gaze fixed on my tie knot. “She… she’s waiting for you in her private residence. The Penthouse.”
My step faltered. Just for a second.
The Penthouse. I hadn’t been there in a decade. Not since I was twenty-three, naive enough to mistake consumption for affection.
“She’s expecting me?”
“Yes, sir. She said… she said you know the way.”
I clenched my jaw. I did.
I took the private lift up. The biometric scanner recognised me instantly, flashing green without hesitation. She never removed my access. It was a leash, a reminder that the door was always welcome to crawl back.
The doors slid open.
The apartment was a sprawling expanse of white marble and floor-to-ceiling glass that overlooked the entire city. It was beautiful and soulless.
The temperature plummeted the moment I stepped inside. The air here smelled like a freezer—sterile and biting.
“You took your time,” she said.
Varessia stood by the fireplace, though there was no wood burning. Instead, thick, inky shadows pooled in the hearth, drifting like liquid smoke. They were the source of the radiating a chill that seeped into the bones.
She wasn’t wearing much. She looked as though she had just emerged from a bath, draped in a silk robe the colour of falling snow, tied loosely at the waist. It was casual, intimate, and calculated to disarm.
She turned slightly, the light catching the sharp, aristocratic line of her jaw and the spill of silvery-black hair that gleamed like polished obsidian.
Back then, a creature like this—flawless, luminous, radiating that terrifying grace—would have brought me to my knees.
I would have looked into those ice-pale eyes and mistaken their shine for warmth.
Now, I just saw the predator beneath the porcelain. Her beauty was camouflage.
The air around Korenth exerted a crushing static force that demanded you kneel. Varessia operated on a different spectrum. As I watched, the shadows at her feet uncoiled like oil in water, defying gravity to lick at the hem of her robe. Her power moved as a tide—fluid and drowning.
“Korenth had instructions,” I said, staying near the door. I didn’t want to walk deeper into this trap.
“Korenth always has instructions.” She turned, a glass of clear liquid in her hand. “He thinks he is the architect of this city. He forgets he is simply the landlord.”
She looked at me. Her eyes were luminous violet, filled with a terrifying, archaic intelligence.
“Come in, Riven. Stop hovering. You used to like this view.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Was it?” She smiled. “It feels like yesterday.”
I forced myself to walk into the room. Every step was a push against a strong wind. The memories here were visceral—lessons on control that always ended with me drained and her revitalised.
“I have work to do, Varessia. The police—“
“The police can wait.” She set her glass down on a crystal table. “I want to talk about the surge.”
She moved towards me. The air around her darkened, shadows bleeding from her skin to stain the light.
“A couple of days ago,” she whispered. “In the Old Quarter. A flare of pure light.”
“It was a disruption,” I said, keeping my voice bored. “Korenth thinks it was a leak in the Lows. He’s worried about exposure.”
“Korenth is a fool,” she snapped, the mask slipping for a fraction of a second. “He thinks about containment. I think about potential.”
She stepped into my personal space. The cold intensified, biting through my coat. The shadows on the floor lengthened, stretching towards my boots.
“That was a call, Riven. Someone out there woke up. Someone powerful enough to crack the foundation of this city.”
She reached out. She didn’t touch me physically. She struck with her mind.
A needle of ice pierced my mental defences. Invasive. Heavy. She was drilling for a reaction. She wanted to know if I had felt the surge, if it resonated with the dark power I kept buried.
She wanted to know if I was hiding something.
My instinct was to lash out. To shatter her hold with a blade of my own power. But I couldn’t. If I used the old strength, she would recognise the frequency. She would know I was no longer the broken thing she discarded.
So I did the harder thing. I endured it.
I grunted, gritting my teeth as the strain built behind my eyes.
I pulled my shields tight, wrapping my core in layers of grey static—the guise of a standard, useful soldier.
I hid the vault and showed her the empty room.
If she broke through, she would see the power I hid.
Worse, she would seep into the cracks of my will like she used to, dulling the edges of my resistance until I forgot the reason I left.
I would become hers again—a willing devotee, enslaved by my own compromised mind.
That stood as a fate worse than the lab table.
“Still so guarded,” she murmured, her hand hovering inches from my chest. Shadows tightened around her wrist, seeking entry. “What are you hiding? A decade ago, you used to let me see everything.”
“A decade ago,” I grated out, fighting the urge to drop to my knees, “I didn’t know any better.”
She smiled. It was a small, cruel thing. “You were sweeter then. Less… scar tissue.”
She pushed harder. The chill turned to a blistering freeze. She was testing my limits, seeing how much force it took to crack the shell.
I had to stop this.
I let a sliver of shadow slip free—not the core, but the irritation. Controlled. Precise. It lashed out, wrapping around her wrist, solid and unyielding. I shoved her magic back, breaking the connection with a physical jolt.
The constriction vanished.
Varessia blinked, stepping back. She looked at her wrist, where my shadow had left a faint bruise, and then up at me. She didn’t look angry. She looked delighted.
“There he is,” she purred. “I was beginning to worry you’d gone soft working for Korenth.”
I exhaled slowly, my heart hammering a warning rhythm against my ribs. “I am not soft, Varessia. And I am not yours. Not anymore.”
“No,” she agreed, walking back to the fireplace where the shadows churned in the grate. “You’re a weapon in a glass case. But sooner or later, Riven, someone is going to shatter it.”
“I have orders,” I said, seizing the opening to retreat. “Korenth has assigned me to the police investigation. I am to embed at the station.”
She laughed—a short, dismissive sound. “He has you playing detective? How dreary.”
The amusement vanished, her expression hardening.
“Fine. Go to the station. Play his game. But keep your eyes open.”
“For what?”
“For the source,” she said. “Find whoever made that surge. Find them before Korenth does. And bring them to me.”
“Why?” I asked. “What do you want with them?”
“I want to see what they are made of,” she said softly. “I want to see if they can survive me.”
“I’ll find the source.” It was the only true thing I’d said all day—I just had no intention of bringing them to her.
“Do.” She waved a hand, a dismissal. “You know the way out.”
I turned and walked to the lift. My back prickled, sensing her gaze on me until the doors slid shut. I leaned against the metal wall as the lift descended, my hands shaking.
She was holding something back. It was in the weight of the room, in the way she looked at me—like a tool she had outgrown. Korenth spoke of containment, but Varessia spoke of potential.
I’d caught fragments of their arguments for weeks. Coordinates in the blind spots of the city grid. Massive energy diversions routed to nowhere. They were building something. A project. A facility. Something they didn’t trust me to see.
And it was hungry.
For months, the Calysteri simply evaporated—clean, quiet acquisitions. Fuel for whatever engine they were building. But now, the discipline was slipping. The missing weren’t just vanishing anymore; they were turning up dead. Seven bodies in a week.
Korenth was getting desperate. He was burning through resources faster than he could hide the ash. Even the asset I’d silenced was just another symptom of the rot spreading from the top down.
She wanted the source.
My orders were to find it, but the parameters had shifted. I was done acting as their bloodhound. I didn’t need to scour the city blindly; embedding with the police placed me perfectly within striking distance.
I needed to reach the anomaly first—not to play saviour, but to secure the leverage. I didn't know what had caused the surge, or why it had echoed so violently in my own chest. But if Varessia saw it as potential, and Korenth saw it as a threat, I had to ensure I reached it before they did.