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 eventhink 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 callthis 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."
