Chapter Thirty-One — Asset Morana
Chapter Twenty-Four — Asset Morana
The room felt suddenly too small.
Children hidden beneath the city.
Luciano Moretti smiling through medical monitors.
And Blaine standing rigidly in front of everyone like he’d already accepted becoming the
villain in the story again.
Avery hated how naturally he placed himself between danger and the children.
Even now.
Even after hearing what they called him.
There’s my angel.
Luciano’s voice echoed smoothly through the underground ward.
Blaine’s hands curled slowly into fists at his sides.
Not fear.
Control.
Like violence sat barely restrained beneath his skin now.
Silas stepped subtly closer toward Avery and the children.
Protective too.
Interesting.
Luciano watched the movement through the screens.
“Oh, Silas.” His smile sharpened faintly. “Still collecting strays, I see.”
Silas smiled back lazily.
“And you’re still experimenting on children.” Amber eyes cooled dangerously. “We all have
hobbies.”
The patriarch ignored the insult completely.
His attention remained fixed on Blaine.
“You disappeared before final conditioning completed.”
The silence that followed felt wrong.
Not because of the words.
Because Blaine didn’t deny them.
Avery’s stomach twisted.
Final conditioning.
Human beings weren’t supposed to have phrases like that attached to them.
Luciano folded his hands calmly atop the desk.
“Do you know how expensive your training was?”
Blaine finally spoke.
His voice sounded colder than Avery had ever heard it.
“You murdered Vincent.”
Luciano’s expression didn’t change.
“He endangered the city.”
“He exposed you.”
“He became emotional.”
The sentence landed like a slap.
Avery physically recoiled.
Because Luciano sounded genuinely disappointed in his son for loving people.
Silas’ smile vanished completely.
Blaine looked lethal now.
Not angry.
Worse.
Focused.
Luciano continued smoothly:
“Emotional instability compromises Black Vein functionality.” His gaze shifted briefly
toward Avery. “As you’re currently demonstrating.”
Avery’s pulse sharpened instantly.
The poison stirred beneath her skin again.
Blaine noticed immediately.
“Avery.”
Grounding.
Always grounding her.
Luciano smiled faintly watching it happen.
“There.” He leaned back slightly in his chair. “Fascinating.”
Cold slid down Avery’s spine.
“You knew,” she whispered.
Luciano’s eyes moved toward her calmly.
“We suspected.”
Suspected what?
Then it hit her.
The immunity.
Blaine touching her without dying.
No.
No no—
“The poison responds to attachment,” Luciano said softly. “We theorized a compatible
Black Vein subject might eventually stabilize exposure.”
Silence.
Avery stared at Blaine.
Blaine stared at Luciano.
And suddenly everything felt horrifyingly planned.
“You engineered him for me?” Avery whispered.
Luciano smiled.
“No.”
His gaze lingered on Blaine almost fondly.
“We engineered him for survival.”
The words hollowed something inside Avery instantly.
Because Blaine’s entire life suddenly rearranged itself into one terrible shape —
conditioned, weaponized, discarded — and still somehow choosing kindness anyway.
Luciano tapped something unseen beneath his desk.
Instantly every monitor in the ward shifted.
Files flooded the screens.
Photographs.
Medical records.
Black Vein subject profiles.
Children.
Thousands of them.
Avery physically stopped breathing.
The registry.
Luciano already had copies.
“Did Vincent truly believe he discovered something unique?” Luciano sounded almost
amused. “House archives are redundant by necessity.”
Blaine already looked tense.
“Why keep them alive?”
Luciano looked genuinely confused by the question.
“Because Black Vein is profitable.”
The simplicity of the answer felt monstrous.
Not revenge.
Not science.
Money.
Survival sold back to desperate people.
The children around the ward watched silently now.
Listening.
Learning.
Avery realized with horror they’d probably heard conversations like this their entire lives.
Luciano’s gaze drifted back toward Blaine.
“You were one of my greatest successes.”
Silas muttered softly:
“Oh, that’s going to end violently.”
Blaine ignored him.
“You trained children into killers.”
“No.” Luciano tilted his head slightly. “I trained children into assets.”
Avery looked toward Lena instinctively.
The little girl clutched her blanket tighter while staring fearfully at the screens.
Asset.
Not child.
Never child.
Something inside Avery snapped hard enough the poison reacted instantly.
Lights exploded overhead.
Several monitors cracked violently with static bursts.
The children screamed.
Blaine turned immediately toward Avery.
“Breathe.”
Luciano watched her through the broken screens with open fascination now.
“There it is.”
Avery shook violently with rage.
“You did this to us.”
“No.” Luciano’s smile thinned slightly. “The city did.”
Coward.
Monster.
Avery took a step toward the monitors before Blaine caught her wrist.
Warm skin.
Steady grip.
Grounding again.
Luciano noticed too.
And for the first time the patriarch looked concerned.
Interesting.
“You care for her,” Luciano observed quietly.
Silas actually laughed under his breath.
“Oh, now you noticed.”
Blaine’s expression turned murderous.
Luciano stared at the two joined hands for one long silent moment.
Then softly:
“That may become a problem.”
The sentence settled into the room like a death sentence already written.
The monitors died one by one after that.
Static collapsed into darkness across the underground ward until only a few flickering
fluorescent lights remained above the children’s beds.
Luciano’s face vanished.
But the damage stayed.
Avery could still hear his voice inside her head.
You were one of my greatest successes.
She looked at Blaine differently now.
Not with fear.
Never fear.
With the terrible aching realization that someone had taken a child and carved survival into
him until nothing soft was supposed to remain.
And somehow something soft survived anyway.
The children remained silent around them.
Watching.
Especially Lena.
The little girl stared at Blaine like she couldn’t decide whether he was a monster or a
miracle.
Avery understood the feeling.
Silas finally pushed away from the wall with a sigh.
“Well. I officially hate this place.”
“That’s new?” Avery muttered quietly.
“No.” He smiled faintly. “But now it feels personal.”
Blaine ignored both of them entirely.
He had already shifted back into mission focus, scanning exits, checking old surveillance
panels, calculating routes.
Compartmentalizing.
Avery recognized it instantly now.
He survived horror by becoming useful.
Her chest tightened painfully.
“We need to move the children,” Blaine said flatly.
Silas blinked.
“All of them?”
“Yes.”
“There are at least thirty.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve finally lost your mind.”
Blaine looked at him evenly.
“They’ll liquidate the facility after tonight.”
Silence.
Because everyone knew he was right.
Luciano would erase evidence before dawn.
Which meant the children would disappear next.
Lena suddenly spoke softly from behind Avery.
“Are they going to kill us?”
The question hollowed the room.
Blaine froze completely.
Avery turned instantly and crouched beside the little girl again.
“No.”
The answer came firmly even though she had no idea how they’d save anyone.
Lena looked unconvinced.
“That’s what they said before the others disappeared.”
Avery’s throat closed painfully.
She felt Blaine physically go still behind her.
Not subtle.
Not controlled.
Like every word from these children cut somewhere old inside him.
Silas noticed too.
The amber-eyed assassin watched Blaine carefully for one long second.
Then his expression softened slightly around the edges.
Interesting.
“You know,” Silas murmured quietly toward Avery, “this is the first time I’ve seen him look
scared in years.”
Blaine didn’t react outwardly.
Which meant it was true.
Avery slowly stood.
“You knew about this place?”
Silas hesitated.
Tiny.
Important.
“Not this specific facility.”
“But you suspected.”
“Yes.”
“And you said nothing?”
Silas met her gaze calmly.
“The Theater survives by pretending not to see certain things.”
“That’s cowardly.”
A flicker crossed his expression then.
Gone quickly.
“You think I don’t know that?”
Silence.
Avery looked away first.
Because suddenly she realized something uncomfortable — Silas carried guilt too.
He just wore it prettier.
One of the younger boys farther back in the ward started coughing violently.
Wet.
Painful.
Black veins crawled visibly beneath the skin near his throat.
Avery moved instinctively toward him then stopped herself.
Fear hit immediately.
What if she made it worse?
Blaine noticed the hesitation.
Without a word he crossed past her toward the boy instead.
The child flinched hard.
“Please…”
Blaine crouched carefully several feet away instead of touching him.
Controlled distance.
Giving space.
Avery’s chest hurt watching it.
“You need stabilizers,” Blaine said quietly.
The boy shook his head weakly.
“They stopped giving us enough.”
Rationing.
Of course.
Silas swore softly under his breath.
Blaine reached slowly inside his coat.
The children visibly tensed.
The Black Vein Angel reaching for a weapon.
Instead he withdrew his own stabilizer injectors and placed them carefully onto the floor
within the boy’s reach.
He said it the same way he said everything — without asking for anything back, without
making it a moment, just placing it on the floor and stepping away. Like he had spent so
long being weaponized that generosity had no shape in his hands anymore except this:
quiet, unannounced, gone before anyone could react to it.
The boy held the injectors for a long time before he used them.
The children had stopped watching the doorways. They were watching Blaine now.
Recalibrating. She could see it happening — the careful adjustment children made when
something didn’t match the story they’d been told. The Black Vein Angel in their
nightmares had never given anything away. The Black Vein Angel took.
Lena looked up at Avery with the particular gravity of children who have learned to read
rooms quickly.
She didn’t say anything.
She didn’t need to.
Avery slowly stood.
“Blaine,” she said quietly.
He looked over immediately.
“What?”
The question hurt before she even asked it.
“When you were here…” Her throat tightened. “Did anyone ever save you?”
Silence crashed through the underground ward.
Blaine froze.
Completely.
For one terrible second Avery thought he wouldn’t answer.
Then softly so softly it nearly broke her:
“No.”