63. ACCEPTANCE
ariella
The smell of a hospital room is always the same, no matter what part of the world you’re in. It’s a heavy chemical blanket designed to mask the lingering scent of mortality.
I’m seated in the hard plastic chair of the private clinic’s waiting room, staring blankly at the polished linoleum floor.
Through the small glass viewing square of the adjacent door, I can see Alistair.
He’s terrifyingly still, a map of clean white bandages wrapping around his ribs, his upper thigh and shoulders leave the fragments of the Triarch Dominion’s collapsing infrastructure had nearly torn him apart.
The medical staff had finally stabilized him, but the constant, rhythmic beep of his heart monitor still echoes.
I haven’t slept in over twenty-four hours. Every logical instinct I possess—the cold, calculating Keinston blood running through my veins—told me I should leave him bleeding in that bed.
He lied to me from the very beginning. He monitored me, drugged me, fabricated my entire existence to keep me contained within his perimeter.
But logic has a funny way of fracturing when you look at the person who threw himself into the line of fire to keep you breathing.
Alistair surrendered his equations to keep me alive.
So yes, I’m not forgiving him because it’s the safer choice. I’m forgiving him because I don’t want a safe life.
I want the demon who looks at my darkness and calls it a puzzle.
The heavy door to the waiting room swings open, cutting through my thoughts.
Asher steps inside, his sleeves rolled up, a faint smear of grease and carbon on his forearm from breaching the Dominion’s local server array. There are a few bandages covering his arms and forehead, but thankfully those are all minor cuts, nothing as serious as Alistair’s.
His face is set in a tight, grim expression as he holds out his phone. “Dad is on a secure satellite link,” Asher says, his voice dropping into a rough, exhausted register. “He’s been calling your personal device for hours, Ari. He’s completely losing his mind. You need to talk to him right now.”
I take a slow, stabilizing breath, smoothing down my jacket before taking the device. The dynamic encryption banners of CynoTech are spinning rapidly across the display before the screen splits, connecting me directly into a high-level corporate conference.
My father’s face materialized first—his expression an absolute storm of protective fury and cold corporate authority.
Beside him, my mother looks entirely pale, her hands trembling from clutching a glass of water from our estate in Sydney.
“Ariella!” my father barks, his voice vibrating with a terrifying, heavy weight that made the speaker rattle.
“The tracking tethers on your primary device spiked a localized combat advisory in England hours ago. What the hell happened? Your mother and I are at the private hangar right now. The corporate jet is warming up. We are flying to England.”
“No, Dad, stay in Sydney,” I interrupt smoothly, forcing my voice to maintain a level of calm precision that mirror their own corporate operations. “No need to fly to England. It’s all handled.”
“Handled?” my mother echoes, her voice thick with panic. “Asher sent an encrypted diagnostic report stating a rogue shadow organization breached your grid! You were nearly killed, Ariella!”
“I’m fine, Mom. I swear,” I exhale, showing my middle finger to Asher, and lean back against the chair. “Asher and Adrian are right here with me. They’ve the local network entirely locked down, and the threat has been permanently neutralized.”
To prove it, I casually turn the phone’s camera toward the side of the room, framing both Asher and Adrian in the shot—who thankfully is here too, even though I didn’t notice him coming after Asher.
I gave them a sharp, demanding look—a silent order to back up my lie.
Sensing the absolute leverage I have over them in this moment, Adrian and Asher exchange a brief, suffering look before facing the screen, trying their best to cover the bandages. Asher nearly jumps away from the screen, considering he’s got a white cloth wrapped around his forehead.
“Yeah, Dad. We got it completely handled,” Asher chirps, raising his hand to give the screen a mock, completely sarcastic thumbs up.
“Perimeter is secure, Uncle,” Adrian chimes in with a perfectly practiced, professional nod.
I turn the camera back to face me, blocking them from my parents’ view, and silently mouthed a ‘thank you’ to both of them.
Then with a triumphant, sweet smile plastered across my face for my parents to see, I continue smoothly to the camera.
“See? If you fly out here right now, it creates an international data trail that the local authorities might flag. Give me until the end of the week. I’ll fly back to Sydney and explain everyyything in the boardroom. ”
My father’s sharp eyes searches my face through the screen for any sign of deception while my mom tries to make small talk with me.
Eventually, against the united front of the three of us, even his corporate authority yields.
“Two days, Ariella,” my father delivers coldly. “One second delay and I’m deploying our security assets to drag you back home.”
“You got this! Love you both, mwah,” with a flying kiss I end the connection.
I hand the phone back to Asher, who’s glaring at me like he wants to toss me out the window.
“Don’t tell me you’re planning to fly back to Aussie with that smiling freak currently tied to a life-support monitor,” his voice dropping into a dangerous, gravelly register.
With a bright, uncurated, mischievous expression, I reach into the inner pocket of my jacket.
I pull out a folded piece of heavy parchment and smooth it out on my lap, letting the bold, crisp letters of the marriage certificate face them.
My own signature is already dry at the bottom.
Adrian stares in utter disbelief. Asher’s jaw actually slackened for a fraction of a second.
“How the fuck...” Asher mutters, his eyebrows rising. “How did you even get that shit? We’re barely leaving since we brought you in.”
“You said ‘barely’,” I wink at him.
I asked one of the legal assistants from CynoTech’s England branch to prepare the paperwork this morning.
Not my brothers. I couldn’t ask them after everything they’ve been through for me. Especially after spending an entire day sitting beside this hospital bed, wondering whether I’d ever get the chance.
Asher rubs the bridge of his nose, exhaling a harsh breath. “Okay, let’s say you actually pulled off this administrative miracle. How exactly do you plan on getting an international fugitive out of the country without alerting every border agency in Europe?”
I look up at him, my smile widening mischievously. “We have a private jet.”
Asher and Adrian lock eyes, identical expressions of utter disbelief washing over their faces.
“No fucking way,” Asher snaps first, throwing his hands up. “Abso-fucking-lutely not, Ariella. You’re not hijacking our family’s private transport to smuggle a wanted cyber-terrorist across international lines.”
“You once told me that I was allowed to make terrible decisions,” I remind Adrian before either of my brothers can stop me.
His expression changes immediately, shifting from shock to pure, unadulterated dread. “I didn’t mention that those decisions include marrying a psychologically damaged genius currently hiding from several governments.”
“He’s not hiding,” I defend. “I’m recovering.”
“That somehow makes it worse,” Adrian mutters before returning his attention to me. “Ariella, at least talk to Mom and Dad first.”
I fold my arms stubbornly. “If the two of you stand beside me, I can convince them of anything.”
“Our sweet little dumbfuck sister, you’re severely overestimating our influence here,” Asher says.
“And,” I continue as though neither of them spoke, “if I’m already married, they can’t exactly force me into a divorce,” and mock-pout,
Did I just see Adrian rolling his eyes? With the exhausted expression of a man realizing his own words have returned to haunt him.
“That conversation,” he starts soberly, “was supposed to encourage confidence. It wasn’t intended to inspire premeditated legal warfare against our parents.”
“You still said I was allowed to make bad decisions,” I puff out my lower lip at him.
“I said you were allowed to make your own decisions.”
“I am making my own decision.”
A heavy sigh escapes him. “Wasn’t that conversation supposed to remain confidential?”
Asher’s head snaps from me to Adrian.
“When the fuck did the two of you have this conversation?”
“When your little sister was having an existential crisis.”
“And your solution was to encourage independent thinking?”
“I was trying to be supportive.”
Asher stares at him for a long moment before smacking him on his shoulder.
Before Adrian can backfire and the two join Alistair in the emergency room, I cut in.
“Look,” my tone drops the sarcasm as I look between my brother and my cousin.
“Triarch Dominion is gone. The Crown’s legacy is turned to ashes.
But the data is still sitting on encrypted drives.
If the state gets its hands on Alistair, they get everything.
But if we pull him into the corporate shield of CynoTech, if we give him a position as Chief Research Officer under our family’s legal machinery, then we get the smartest engineer on the planet. ”
Adrian’s clinical gaze drifts from me to the viewing glass where Alistair is lying unconscious. The logic is undeniable. It’s indeed a high-risk, multi-billion-dollar exploit, but it’s exactly how the Keinston empire built its fortress.
“Since when do you start thinking like a strategist?”
“Since the day I was unofficially handed over the England branch of CynoTech.”
“Oh, c’mon, you never worked a single day, you lazy ass,” he says, flicking on my forehead.
I mouth a silent ‘ouch’, rubbing the spot when Asher mutters, “He’s a security nightmare, Ariella,” though the dangerous edge in his voice has softened into something resembling begrudging acceptance.
“The second he wakes up, I’m setting the parameters. If he even breathes in your direction wrong, I’m personally throwing him out a high-rise window.”
“He won’t,” I say, looking back through the glass at Alistair’s sleeping form.
A faint, possessive spark flares deep in my chest. “He knows exactly what happens when he tries to run an equation against me.”
Adrian lets out one final, defeated laugh, rubbing his temples.
“Fine. We’ll deploy the legal machinery to scrub the Interpol alerts and mask his routing entries before your father looks too closely at the backend data on this Friday.
But you’re handling the boardroom explanation by yourself.
Marry the freak at your own risk,” he says, earning another smack from Asher.
“Seriously, dude. What the fuck?” Asher exclaims with newfound horror.
“Deal,” I smile.
As my brothers turn and slip back into the hallway to initiate the corporate cover-up, all the while bickering at each other, I push open the heavy door to Alistair’s room.
Quietly, I walk up to the side of his bed and lean down. My lips brush against his forehead, feeling the steady pulse.
“Wake up soon, Professor,” I whisper against his skin with a knowing smirk. “Time to see if you can handle the reality of your favorite variable.”