Chapter 23
TWENTY-THREE
Riven
I returned to the cage.
Highspire felt brittle and cold today, the glass towers reflecting a pale, judgemental sky. I walked through the front doors of Quinn Enterprises, adopting the arrogant gait of a man who belonged there.
My coat was buttoned to the chin, concealing the spare shirt I’d pulled from the boot.
It smelled of stale storage, a poor substitute for the one lying on the floorboards in the Old Quarter.
Stripped of its buttons, it was useless.
I left it where it had fallen, abandoning the ruined fabric just as I had abandoned the sleeping woman.
I pushed the thought away and focused on the threat ahead.
I found Varessia in the atrium. She was staring at a kinetic sculpture of spinning silver rings, her reflection fractured in the moving metal.
“Riven,” she said without turning. “I wondered when you’d stop playing detective and come home.”
I stopped three paces behind her. I forced my shoulders to drop, unclenched my hands. I became the thing she remembered.
“I’m close,” I said. My voice was flat. “The surge you felt at the station. I can bring the source to you.”
She turned then.
“Oh, Riven,” she murmured, her smile sharp and pitying. “You’re chasing a prize we have already claimed.”
She stepped closer, the click of her heels echoing on the marble.
“You don’t need to hunt anymore. We already found what we were looking for.”
I kept my face still, swallowing a spike of dread. “Who?”
She tilted her head. “The old wolf from the station. We picked him up thirty minutes ago. The resonance… it was blinding. I think he’s the one who caused that power surge in the Old Quarter all those days ago. Korenth is very pleased.”
Eamon.
I remained motionless, unblinking. I just filed the information away behind the wall I had built for twenty years.
“Where is he?” I asked. “If his magic is that volatile, I need to assess the containment risk before Korenth arrives.”
“Ever the dutiful servant.” Varessia checked her watch. “We’re heading to the facility now to oversee the final stage. You can drive.”
She tossed me a set of keys. I caught them out of the air.
“The facility?”
“The Industrial Crescent,” she said, walking towards the private lift. “The old pneumatic exchange.”
I went cold. The Blackwood Mill. The exact spot where I recently had snapped her guard’s neck to save Selene.
If she knew I was the one who had destroyed that investment, I was driving to my own execution.
I forced the sudden spike of adrenaline back down, locking it behind a mask of bored obedience, and followed her.
We got into her car. I drove, the city blurring past in silence while Varessia scrolled through data streams on her tablet with surgical focus.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. Once.
I ignored it.
We reached the Crescent. I steered the car away from the river, towards the main loading bay of the old factory.
Two guards stood at the steel door in full tactical gear. Augmented. Even from across the space, I could smell the metallic rasp of power being forced through veins never meant to hold it.
I parked the car. Varessia stepped out, smoothing her white suit.
“Coming?” she called.
I exited the car. I slid my hand into my pocket and glanced at the screen of my phone, shielding it from her view.
The screen glitched. A broken text from Selene pushed through the interference: …dustrial Crescent…Eamon…
My lungs seized. She was here. She had tracked him.
I clamped down on the panic, ignoring the urge to scout for her car.
A fear for her safety fought with the iron-willed discipline I had maintained for years.
The betrayal hardened into an unavoidable necessity—a calculated cruelty designed to keep her breathing.
My phone vanished back into my pocket as I severed my emotions, leaving only the mission.
There was no room for them now.
I walked around the car and joined Varessia. The guards nodded to her and hauled the heavy door open.
I fixed my mask in place and I followed her inside.
We met the exodus in the service tunnel. A stream of white coats and tactical vests flowed towards the exit, eyes wide with panic. The fire alarm hammered a rhythmic, deafening clang against the concrete.
Varessia stepped into the path of a fleeing scientist, grabbing his arm to halt his flight. “Report.”
“The suppression system,” the man gasped, looking back towards the double doors. “Sensors picked up a heat spike in the main bay. We were moments from completion when the water triggered.”
Varessia released him. She smoothed her jacket and walked straight into the downpour. I followed.
Inside the lab, rusty brown water battered the room, turning the sterile floor into a swamp. Steam hissed violently where the spray hit overheating consoles.
“Shut it down!” a technician yelled from the far bank of monitors, his hands flying over a keyboard. “The core is destabilising!”
“Leave it!” Varessia’s voice cut through the noise.
She wiped water from her eyes, a hungry smile taking hold.
Her suit was ruined, the white fabric soaked through and clinging to her shoulders.
Rusty streaks from the old pipes marked the lapels, destroying the sharp, clinical lines of her silhouette.
The chaos of the lab was finally marking her.
“Override the safety!” she shouted over the blaring alarms. “Let it finish.”
I focused on the glass containment room in the centre of the bay. Eamon lay strapped to the metal table. He looked small, his skin grey and waxy. Three tubes ran from his arm, carrying a thick, glowing silver fluid out of his body and into a collection canister on the exterior wall. He was fading.
Then movement on the far side of the glass caught my eye.
Selene.
She stood there hammering a metal chair against the partition.
The deafening alarm swallowed her screams. Hair plastered to her face and jacket torn, she threw herself against the glass cage holding her father.
My gaze shifted back to the table. The flow inside the tubes had accelerated, the torrent of light leaving Eamon’s body turning him into a trembling, grey shell.
He tore his eyes away from Selene, his head rolling heavily against the metal table to face the entrance. Through the glass and the rain, he found me. He saw Varessia standing next to me. He saw me standing tall, hands in my pockets, playing the loyal dog.
He met my stare with an unyielding, stark stillness.
He closed his eyes.
Selene turned. She felt the shift in the room’s attention. She looked at Varessia, her face twisting in fury. Then she looked at me.
The room narrowed down to a single, brittle point of focus. The rushing water and shouting technicians receded into a distant background hum.
I watched recognition set in—a slow, devastating collapse.
Her gaze tracked my stance, then moved to Varessia at my shoulder, before the memory of the failed message finally took hold.
The message telling me exactly where she was.
She had told me, and I had brought the monsters to the door.
Hope rotted in her eyes, festering into a confusion so profound it looked like physical agony.
I felt as though I had reached into her chest and crushed the heart she’d offered me last night.
“Riven?” she mouthed.
It was a silent, desperate plea for me to prove her eyes wrong. To be the partner I claimed to be, rather than the executioner standing by Varessia.
I kept my face like stone. I held her gaze. I let her see me standing at the right hand of the woman killing her father. I let her hate me, because hate would keep her warm when the grief tried to freeze her to death.
Static prickled my arms. Arcing silver light leapt from the containment unit, blurring the air between the gantries like a heat haze.
“Whatever she is,” Varessia shouted over the alarm, leaning close to me, “she’s annoying. Kill her, Riven. Before she breaks the glass.”
I stepped to the side and lifted my hand.
Selene flinched.
That small movement—that instinctive recoil—knocked the breath from my lungs..
I aimed past her, targeting the structural support of the walkway above the cube and pushed my magic forward. A bolt of shadow sheared the metal. The walkway groaned and collapsed, crashing down between Selene and us—a jagged wall of debris that severed the path.
“The discharge makes a clear strike impossible,” I said, my voice a cold, clinical mask. The lie was intended to buy her the seconds she needed.
Eamon looked at me one last time. His gaze held a quiet, devastating acceptance. He knew the part I had to play. His lips moved, shaping words lost to the screaming alarm and the roar of falling water. I couldn’t hear what he said. From the look on Selene’s face, she couldn’t either.
Inside the cube, the machine gave a final, high-pitched whine.
Beep.
Beep.
Beeeeeeep.
The monitor flatlined.
The flow of silver in the tubes stopped. Eamon arched his back—a final, silent spasm—and then slumped. The light in him went out.
With a pneumatic hiss, the door to the containment room slid open.
Selene lowered the chair she was using and charged inside instantly, her boots skidding on the wet tiles as she reached the table.
She seized the tubes connected to his arm—the clear lines still pulsing with the last of his essence—and ripped them free with a cry of pure desperation.
A spray of silver fluid hit the floor, glowing and useless. It changed nothing. The canister was full; he was empty.
She clutched his hand to her chest, trying to anchor him to the world by force of will alone.
She was screaming his name—I could see the shape of it ripping her throat apart even if the sound was lost. She pressed her other hand to his chest, trying to force magic back into him, trying to jump-start the heart that had already surrendered.
There was nothing left to give.
I held my ground, letting the guilt carve me hollow. I wore the mask. I played the part. If I broke now, everything he had died for would be lost.
He was gone.
And then, the world broke.
Selene stopped moving. She stopped screaming.
She slowly lifted her head.
Her eyes were not brown anymore. They were golden. Molten, blinding gold, burning with a fire that had been suppressed for her entire life.
But there was something else.
The shadows in the corners of the room—my shadows—began to tremble.
She stood up. She turned her eyes towards us and screamed.
A shockwave of pure, raw magic displaced the sound. A blast of golden light erupted from her body, shattering the glass cube, vaporising the falling water into steam.
Inky veins of darkness lashed through the gold, joining the light.
She reached through me, her touch bypassing skin and bone to seize something deeper.
She pulled on a thread I didn’t know existed—a reservoir of dark magic buried deep within her own soul, a perfect mirror to my own.
The bond was ancient—an old root suddenly yanking tight.
With that single, violent tug, she dragged the power from my very marrow to fuel her rage.
The blast hit the walls. The iron buckled. The ceiling groaned, cracks forming in the concrete.
“What is that?” Varessia shrieked, throwing up a wall of ice that shattered instantly against the force of Selene’s power. “Look at those shadows! They are woven into the light!”
Varessia looked at Selene with a terrifying, hungry awe. She forgot the canister. She forgot the danger. She wanted her.
“Her magic,” Varessia yelled, starting forward. “It’s something else. Take her, Riven!”
I looked at the ceiling. The supports were snapping. The building was coming down.
Time fractured. I looked at Selene, burning with a light that could level the city, and then at Varessia, whose hunger had just found a new, infinite source.
A piercing, icy panic clawed at my chest, instantly suppressed by a brutal necessity. If Varessia took her now, Selene entered a cage she would never leave. She would become a specimen.
Eamon was already gone. I couldn’t save the dead. But I could save the living—by becoming the monster she needed to hate. If she despised me, she would fight me. If she fought me, she stayed free.
It was the only play left.
I made the choice.
“The roof is collapsing!” I roared, grabbing Varessia’s arm.
“No! Get her!”
“We have the sample!” I shouted, pointing at the canister of Eamon’s magic that a technician had dragged to the door. “If we stay, we lose it all! Look at her! She’s bringing the whole district down!”
Another wave of power rolled off Selene—gold and black, beautiful and terrifying. It smashed the walkway I had dropped, turning metal to shrapnel. If we stay any minute longer Selene will kill us all. Leaving now will save her life.
Varessia hesitated. She looked at Selene—the true prize in the wreckage. Then she looked at the canister.
“Move!” I snarled.
I looked back one last time.
Selene stood at the epicentre of the ruin. The gold and black storm spiralled around her, tearing the very air apart.
Her eyes found mine across the chaos. The warmth I had seen this morning had vanished, replaced by an absolute hatred.
I had saved her life. The loathing in her eyes was a price I paid with a broken determination. And in doing so, I had shattered the fragile connection that had finally begun to make the silence loud.