CHAPTER 48 - Sylas
I kept my arm locked around her waist, my long fingers splayed across the small of her back as the heavy wool blanket finally began to trap the heat between us.
Her body had gone completely soft against mine, the fierce, stubborn resistance she had carried for weeks finally giving way to absolute exhaustion.
Listening to the quiet, slow cadence of her heart beneath my chin, the protective instinct that had driven me into the river returned as a quiet, heavy certainty.
I was going to get her out of this city.
When she spoke of the registry, her voice a faint, sleepy thread in the quiet of the vault, a grim satisfaction settled behind my ribs.
She was right. We had dismantled the multi-billion-pound infrastructure of Olympus from the inside out, leaving Vivienne holding nothing but an empty glass tower.
But as I leaned down to press my lips against her damp curls, the data didn't matter.
The global markets, the Board's panicked liquidation protocols, and the active hunting teams sweeping the surface were distant, irrelevant noises.
“Not tonight,” I murmured into her hair, my thumb resuming its slow, deliberate trail down the line of her spine. “Tonight, the system is down.”
I watched her features relax entirely in the fading amber glow of the flashlight, her eyelashes casting long shadows against her cheek before she finally drifted into a deep, unbothered sleep.
Her fingers remained loosely tangled in the collar of my sweater, anchoring her to my chest even in the dark.
I lay awake for a long time after her breathing stabilized, staring at the raw brick ceiling above us.
The rain had stopped, the under-canals were silent, and the empire we had shattered was actively bleeding into the night.
We were completely off the grid, running on a timer that would expire the moment the sun cleared the Thames.
But as I pulled the heavy wool tighter around her bare shoulders, shielding her entirely from the subterranean chill, I knew the parameters had shifted permanently.
We were no longer just operators defending a legacy.
We were a single variable—and we were going to finish the compilation together.