CHAPTER 23 - Deimos #2
On the monitor, I see her go completely still. Her eyes dart toward the corner of the room, finally finding the hidden lens of the camera. She looks directly at me, her face a mask of pure, unadulterated terror.
MADELINE: "Deimos... I can explain," she whispers.
ME: "Explain what? That my father has another child? Or that you decided to play God with my bloodline while you were pretending to be mine?"
I stand up, my shadow stretching long across the office floor.
ME: "I told you last night that you belong to me, Madeline. But it seems you’ve forgotten the most important rule."
I pause, savoring the way she’s shaking on the screen.
ME: "You don't get to keep secrets from the man who owns your breath. Stay exactly where you are. If you move, if you even think about deleting that data, I won't just kill Lucy. I’ll make sure Charles and you watch what I do to her."
Then I hang up.
The road to the morgue is a tunnel of red-hued vision. The steering wheel creaks under the pressure of my grip. Every traffic light, every car in my way, is an obstacle in my own existence.
My mind is a battlefield.
Lucy. My blood. My "sister." The stubborn little girl who kept getting in my way, whom I meant to remove as an insignificant variable... she is actually a piece of me. Charles’s next attempt at twisted perfection.
The injustice tears at my gut. But that is not the worst pain.
The worst pain is the image of Madeline in my arms. Not even hours ago, I felt her breath on my skin.
I believed that she had surrendered to me.
I believed that night, the silence, the shared exhaustion, the human warmth, was real.
And meanwhile, in that same bed, under my touch, she was planning how to steal my DNA.
How to dissect my life under a microscope.
"You little, lying bitch," I exhale into the silence of the cabin, my voice hitching with madness.
I felt like a human being with her. For the first time in my life, I closed my eyes and slept, because I trusted her. And she was betraying me with every kiss. Every gasp she let out was just a cover for her scientific curiosity.
Was I just another sample to her? Another body on the autopsy table to be studied? I slam the brakes in front of the morgue so hard the tires screech.
I step out, my eyes wearing an expression that would terrify even the dead inside.
My rational self is gone. Because of her.
Again. Only the monster remains. The one whose heart was ripped out just as he realized he had one.
Someone would call this dramatic. But I can’t handle betrayal. And certainly not from her.
I burst through the double doors of the morgue. The metallic sound ricochets off the tiles like a gunshot. I head straight to her floor.
Madeline is standing in her office, the phone still in her hand. She is white as a sheet. I can see the moment in her eyes when she realizes that the man who kissed her forehead this morning no longer exists.
"Put the phone down," I say, my voice now terrifyingly quiet, vibrating with suppressed rage.
"And step away from the monitor”
I walk toward her slowly. My footsteps thunder in the sterile silence.
"So, what did you find, Doctor?"
I growl, stopping right in front of her so she can feel the heat of the anger radiating from my body.
"Did you find what you were looking for? Did you find the darkness in my blood that you were so willing to hold last night?"
I grab her shoulder and pull her closer until her face is almost touching mine.
"Charles’s daughter," I laugh, but it’s a sound full of bile.
"My blood. And you knew it. All that night you lay in my arms, you knew you were feeding me a lie. How did it feel, Madeline? Did the betrayal taste better than my dirty talk?"
Her voice isn't trembling with fear anymore; it’s vibrating with a raw frustration that cuts right through my rage. She shoves my hand off her shoulder, her chest heaving, her eyes burning with a defiance I didn’t expect.
"You think I wanted this?"
She screams, the sound through the office walls.
"You think I wanted to find out that Lucy, the only light I have left, my best friend, is biologically tied to a monster like you? To a man like your father?"
The words hit me like a physical blow. A monster like you. It’s the truth I’ve lived with my whole life, but hearing it from her mouth, after the way she looked at me in the dark last night, feels like a serrated blade across my throat. She’s comparing me to Charles, the very man who broke me.
"I prayed I was wrong, Deimos!"
She chokes out, a stray tear finally escaping and tracking through the dust and sweat on her face.
"I stole that DNA because I wanted to prove to myself that she was safe. That she wasn't part of your sickness. But look at the screen! She’s your blood. She’s his blood. And it’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever had to witness."
I step back as if she’s struck me. The betrayal is a suffocating weight.
I want to reach out and wrap my hands around her neck to silence the honesty that’s stripping me bare, but my fingers won't move. I’m paralyzed by the image of us in that bed, the one moment I thought I was something more than a weapon, something more than Charles’s shadow.
"A monster," I repeat, the word tasting like ash.
"Is that what I was to you last night? A research project? A case study in depravity?"
"Last night was..." she starts, her voice breaking, but she stops herself.
She looks at the monitors, at the glowing proof of my lineage, and then back at me with a look of pure, agonizing pity.
"Last night was a mistake. Because I forgot for one second that no matter how you touch me, you’re still a cold serial killer."
The air in the morgue turns freezing. The rage is still there, but it’s mutated into a cold, hollow void.
I don't want to hurt her. The thought of bruising that skin again makes my stomach turn.
But that one part of me is screaming for order.
For control. If I am the monster she says I am, then I should act like one.
I reach out, not with violence, but with a terrifying, slow finality, and grab her chin, forcing her to look at the screen where the DNA results are still pulsing.
"If I'm his son, Madeline, then I've inherited his talent for keeping what belongs to him," I whisper, my voice cracking with the strain of not breaking.
My voice has changed. It is no longer the deep, passionate rasp from last night, nor the rage-filled roar from a moment ago. It is a dead, mechanical tone. The tone of a man who has just started to carve away pieces of his own soul to survive.
"Delete it," I say, gesturing to the monitor.
"All of it. Now."
Madeline looks at me, her eyes a mix of resistance and disbelief.
"Deimos, this is evidence. It’s your family..."
"This isn't evidence. It’s a death sentence," I interrupt, stepping toward the control panel until I have her pinned back against the cold metal.
"Do you think Charles doesn't know what you're doing? Do you think this data will remain safe in this godforsaken morgue?”
I grab her hand, forcing her fingers toward the keyboard. I can feel her trembling, but I don't let her pull away.
"Lucy is not a sister to me, Madeline. She is a liability. She is a weakness you just plunged into my back like a knife," I growl directly into her ear.
"Everything I was building. The wall between me and my father. You just tore it down. You’ve made her a target. And yourself, too."
I watch her face stiffen with horror. This is no longer about our feelings, about how much I hate her for this betrayal, or how much my skin burns where she touched me. This is about survival within a design that is falling apart in our hands.
"Delete it, or I will destroy this morgue myself," I add icily.
"And then I will find Lucy. Not to embrace her like a long-lost brother, but to tuck her away somewhere where no one will ever find her. Including you."
Madeline wrenches herself away, tears of frustration in her eyes, but she begins frantically wiping the files. I watch her fingers fly across the keys, destroying the results that changed us both forever.
"You’re just like him," she whispers as the screen displays Deleting...
"You’re destroying everything that could possibly make you human."
"Maybe," I reply, watching the percentage bar nearing one hundred.
"But at least I will survive to watch this world burn. Charles created me in his own image? Fine. Then I’ll show him what happens when his greatest creation loses its last reason for mercy."
The final file vanishes from the screen with a mocking, digital blip.
I let go of her hand as if it had suddenly turned into ice, stepping back.
I don't look at her. I can’t. If I look at her, I’ll see the woman who held me last night, and right now, that version of Madeline is a ghost I need to exorcise.
"Don't go home, Madeline," I say, my voice low and hollow, devoid of any of the heat that usually defines us.
"Stay here. Stay in your sanctuary of the dead. It’s the only place the Elite won't look for a living girl."
"Deimos, wait—"
She starts, her voice cracking, reaching out a hand that stops mid-air.
I don’t wait. I turn and walk toward the doors. Every step feels like a lead weight, a physical manifestation of the bridge I am burning behind me. I reached for something human last night, and it bit me.
I reach the exit and pause.
"You think you’ve seen the dark part of me, Madeline," I say, my voice dropping to a near-silent vibration that carries across the sterile tiles.
"But you’ve only seen the part of me that tried to feel something for you. You haven't seen the part of me that survives."
I take a deep breath, knowing this punishment I’m about to start is probably going to hurt me more than her.
"The next few days... they are for you to remember what it’s like to breathe without my permission. To remember what it’s like to be alone in a world that wants to consume you.”
I finally turn my head just enough to see her silhouette out of the corner of my eye. She looks so small against the backdrop of the dead, her hand still reaching out into the empty space I left behind.
Even now, through the layers of betrayal and the cold calculation of my mind, the sight of her makes my blood roar. She is a parasite in my system. A beautiful, lethal infection I can’t quite bring myself to cure.
"Don't try to find me. Don't try to save her," I warn, the threat lacing through my words like a silk cord.
"Because if you step out of the lines I’ve drawn for you, I won't just destroy your secrets. I’ll destroy the woman who was foolish enough to think she could outsmart the Arbiter."
I push the doors of her office and leave.