Chapter 10: Past check
The recovery ward was too quiet. The single candle in its silver holder guttered, casting frantic shadows over the walls of antique surgical saws and morphine bottles. The scent was wrong here—not the crisp ozone of Lina’s presence, but the cloying mix of bergamot from Jace’s tea and the faint, metallic tang of gunpowder he could never seem to wash from his hands.
Vito stood by the window, his broad back tense. He spoke to the darkening glass, his voice a low, gravelly mutter in Russian. “Bozhe moy, ne napominay mne o tom, chto proizoshlo segodnya utrom.” God, don’t even remind me about the thing just happened this morning.
Jace, reclining against a mountain of velvet pillows, didn’t turn. He answered in the same language, his accent purer, more academic. “Chto sluchilos?” What is it?
“Pace slomal krovat.” Pace broke a bed.
A soft, wheezing laugh escaped Jace. It turned into a cough. He winced, pressing a hand to his bandaged torso. When he recovered, a genuine, if weary, amusement lit his grey eyes. “Nu chto zh… on s nikem ne spal, i nakonets-to nashel yeyo. A my-to s sredney shkoly pomnim, on vsegda byl tem, kto szhimal svoi zhelaniya v kulak. Bol'shinstvo chlenov semi i druzeya, dazhe ya, dumali, chto on asexualen.” Well… he hasn’t slept with anyone, and he finally found her. And since we’re in high school, he’s always been the one holding his desire in his fist. Most family members and friends, even I, thought he was asexual.
Vito turned from the window, his face a landscape of exasperated worry. “Yobanyi v rot.” Fuck it all. He switched back to English, the words harsh in the quiet room. “Anyway. Tell me more about Theron. The girl. Her father.”
Jace’s amusement faded, replaced by that chilling clarity. He picked up a sterling silver pen from the bedside, rolling it between his pale fingers. “Aris Theron wasn’t just a biochemist. He was an idealist. A purist. He believed his work could cure neurodegenerative diseases, reverse muscular atrophy. A noble cause.”
“How’d he get tangled with us?”
“Money.” Jace said it simply. “His research was bankrupting him. Our grandfather, Silas, offered a lifeline. Unlimited funding. State-of-the-art labs. All Theron had to do was apply some of his cellular manipulation theories to… a different set of problems. Enhancing certain genetic predispositions already present in our bloodline. Strength. Durametry. Neural conduction speed.”
Vito grunted, understanding. “He made super soldiers.”
“He thought he was making medical breakthroughs with a private donor.” Jace corrected softly. “But Silas was impatient. He began pushing for more aggressive applications, bringing in other… consultants… with fewer scruples. Theron discovered the real endgame. He threatened to go public. To destroy all his research.”
The candle flame shuddered. Vito’s voice dropped. “The fire.”
“Wasn’t an accident,” Jace confirmed, his gaze fixed on the pen. “It was a sterilization. Silas ordered it. The lab, the notes, the man. All of it had to disappear. But the girl…” He finally looked at Vito. “The seven-year-old girl who was supposedly there that night. Her body was never found. It was assumed she was vaporized. A tragic footnote.”
“But she wasn’t.”
“No.” Jace’s smile was thin, bitter. “She was extracted. By a rival syndicate, perhaps. Or by a compassionate cleaner who couldn’t shoot a child. She vanished into the foster system, a ghost with a new name. Lina Vesperine. A name she built into a fortress of intellect and isolation.”
Vito processed this, his jaw working. “And her research now? The stuff that brought her to Pace’s attention?”
“Is a direct, brilliant descendant of her father’s original work,” Jace said. “She’s been piecing it back together from memory, from public fragments, for two decades. She’s not just continuing his work. She’s perfecting it. And she has no idea who really holds the patents to her own genius.”
“Christ,” Vito breathed. “Pace doesn’t know.”
“He knows she’s valuable. He knows she’s his,” Jace said, a sharp edge returning to his voice. “He doesn’t know she’s a walking bomb waiting to detonate the second she learns the Augustus family is the reason she grew up an orphan. The reason her father was burned alive.”
The implications settled in the room like ash. Vito rubbed a hand over his face. “Why tell me? Why not use this?”
Jace set the pen down with a precise click. “Because I’m not our grandfather, Vito. And Pace, for all his brutish poetry, isn’t Silas. That bomb goes off, it doesn’t just destroy her. It destroys him. And this family fractures into a thousand bleeding pieces.” He met Vito’s worried gaze. “We contain it. We manage it.”
“How?”
A faint chime echoed in the room—the delicate, antique pocket watch on the mantel. Jace’s eyes drifted toward the sound, then back.
“We give her a different truth. One she can swallow. One that points the finger at a convenient, external enemy. We keep her close. We keep her… invested.”
“You mean we keep her fucked and grateful on Pace’s cock,” Vito stated bluntly.
Jace didn’t flinch. “If that’s the lever that works, yes. But I think her mind is a stronger tool. Appeal to it. Give her a puzzle where the solution benefits us. Make her need us to survive the fallout of the past she’s chasing.”
Down the hall, in the vault-like silence of Pace’s bedroom, Lina stirred.
The bed was empty. The space beside her held only the lingering heat of Pace’s body and the faint, medicinal scent of the ointment. Her body ached with a deep, pervasive soreness, a catalogue of his possession. But her mind was a crystal-clear, frozen lake.
Theron.
The name echoed in the vault of her memory. Not a memory of a face, but of a feeling. The smell of isopropyl alcohol and lemongrass. The sound of a man’s laughter, warm and bright, cut short by a scream that was not human. The blinding orange heat.
She sat up, the sheets pooling at her waist. The torn dress was a heap on the floor. She saw Pace’s discarded black t-shirt and pulled it on. It swam on her, falling to mid-thigh.
She needed to move. To think in motion.
The estate was a tomb at this hour. She padded barefoot down the corridor, past closed doors hiding unknown histories. Her feet carried her not aimlessly, but with a subconscious pull, away from the living quarters, toward the older, western wing.
She found a heavy, oak door slightly ajar. A study, not Pace’s. This one was older, dustier. Shelves lined with leather-bound ledgers, not books. It smelled of decayed paper and old cigar smoke.
On a massive, scarred desk, a ledger lay open. The page was illuminated by a slant of moonlight through a high, narrow window. Her eyes, adjusted to the dark, scanned the entries. Shipment manifests. Dates from twenty-two years ago.
And a name, scrawled in elegant, faded ink in the ‘Consultant Fees’ column: A. Theron.
Below it, a series of astronomical payments. And a final, single-word entry six months later, circled in frantic, angry red ink: TERMINATED.
A cold sharper than any winter shot through her veins. This was not a rumor, not a ghost story from Jace’s lips. This was a record. Here, in the belly of the beast.
A floorboard creaked behind her.
She didn’t turn. She already knew the weight of that presence, the specific density of the air it displaced.
“Couldn’t sleep?” Pace’s voice was quiet, devoid of its usual command. It was just a voice in the dark.
Lina kept her eyes on the damning word. TERMINATED. “I was looking for a glass of water,” she lied, her tone flat.
He moved closer. She felt the heat of him at her back. He didn’t touch her. He looked over her shoulder at the ledger.
His silence was different. It was heavy with recognition.
“This is my grandfather’s study,” he said finally. “He kept… messy records.”
“He kept records of murder,” she said, the words leaving her mouth like chips of ice.
Pace’s hand came up then, not to grab her, but to slowly, deliberately close the ledger. The sound was a dull, final thud in the quiet.
“That’s one word for it,” he said, his breath stirring the hair at her temple. “It was a business dissolution. It turned messy.”
She turned to face him then. In the moonlight, his face was all stark planes and shadows, his dark eyes unreadable. The vulnerability from the shower was gone. The mask was back, but it was cracked, weary.
“Was I a business dissolution, Pace?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper. “Am I?”
For a long moment, he just looked at her. She saw the calculations firing behind his eyes, the same brutal calculus that governed his world. Weighing truth against control. Then his hand rose, his knuckles brushing her cheek, a touch so faint it might have been the moonlight itself.
“No,” he said, and the word felt like the first true thing he’d ever given her. “You’re the unforeseen variable. The one that breaks all the models.”
He leaned in, his lips hovering a breath from hers. Not claiming, not taking. Hesitating.
“What do you want to know, Lina?”
Everything. Nothing. She wanted the before and the after. She wanted the smell of lemongrass and the sound of that laugh. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out.
From the depths of the house, a phone began to ring. A shrill, persistent, landline ring from another era. It shattered the fragile tension.
Pace’s eyes hardened. The moment ruptured. He stepped back, the patriarch snapping back into place.
“Go back to bed,” he said, his voice once more edged with steel. “This wing isn’t safe. The floorboards are rotten.”
He turned and strode toward the ringing, leaving her alone in the dark study with the closed ledger, the word TERMINATED burning like a brand behind her eyes.
She didn’t go back to bed. She stood there, in the ruins of a truth, knowing the foundation of her new cage was built on the bones of her old life.
She stood there, in the ruins of a truth, knowing the foundation of her new cage was built on the bones of her old life. The phone stopped ringing. The silence it left behind was thicker, more threatening. Footsteps echoed back down the hall, measured and heavy, coming toward her.
Pace filled the doorway again, his frame blocking the faint light from the corridor. He’d been talking to someone. His voice had been a low, violent rumble she couldn’t decipher. Now it was gone, replaced by a stillness that felt like the moment before a detonation.
He looked at her, then at the closed ledger, then back at her face. He didn’t ask why she was still there.
“You found your ghost,” he said finally. His voice was drained.
“I found a word in a book,” she corrected, her own voice hollow. “Terminated.”
“It was a different time. My grandfather was a different animal.” He took a step into the room. The old floorboards groaned under his weight. “You think I knew? You think I keep a spreadsheet of everyone he had killed?”
“Did you know who I was? When you brought me here?”
The question hung between them. She watched his eyes, those dark pools that hid everything. He didn’t blink.
“I knew you were the only person who could fix what was happening to Jace,” he said. A half-truth. It tasted like ash. “I knew your work was… familiar. In a way that felt like fate. Or a threat. I didn’t dig. I didn’t want to know.”
“Because knowing would make it messy.” The cold in her veins was turning into a sharp, clarifying anger.
“Yes.” He didn’t deny it. He moved closer, until she could see the faint stubble shadowing his jaw, the pulse in his throat. “Knowing makes it this.” He gestured between them, at the charged, ruined space. “You, standing in a dead man’s dust. Me, trying to decide if the truth will make you run or make you break.”
“What is the truth, Pace?” The whisper ripped from her. “Tell me how he died.”
Pace’s hand came up. He cupped the back of her neck, his thumb pressing into the taut cord of muscle there. It wasn’t a caress. It was an anchor.
“The lab burned. It was meant to be a clean wipe. No witnesses. He was inside.” His words were clipped, brutal. “Your being there was an accident. A oversight. A complication. My grandfather’s men reported a child’s body found. It was a lie. To close the file.”
A child’s body found. The words were icy water. She had been erased, officially, before she’d even begun.
“Who pulled me out?”
“I don’t know.” His grip tightened slightly. “If I knew, they’d be dead. For taking what was mine before I even knew it existed.”
The possessiveness in the statement should have revolted her. Instead, it felt like a perverse thread of continuity, the only thing tethering her shattered past to this unbearable present. He was claiming not just her now, but the ghost of the child she had been.
She sagged against his hand. The adrenaline bled away, leaving a vast, hollow exhaustion. Her knees felt unhinged.
“I need to sit down,” she murmured.
He guided her, not to a chair, but down to the dusty floor, his back against the giant desk, her body between his legs. He pulled her against his chest. The steady thump of his heart vibrated through his shirt into her cheek. They sat in the dark, surrounded by the ghosts of ledgers.
Time slipped. The moonlight moved across the floor. Her mind, usually a chamber of precise, whirring analysis, was silent. She was aware only of the solidity of him, the scent of his skin cutting through the dust, the dull ache spreading through her muscles from the night’s collisions.
She didn’t know how long they stayed there. Eventually, he shifted.
“You’re shaking,” he observed, his voice low.
“I’m cold.”
“You’re in shock.” He stood, bringing her up with him. “Bed. Now.”
He steered her out of the study, down the long hallways back toward the living wing. Her feet were numb blocks. The estate felt like a dream she couldn’t wake from.
They reached his bedroom. He guided her inside, but she stopped at the foot of the disheveled bed. She looked at the tangled sheets, the imprint of their bodies, the physical evidence of a claiming that now seemed part of a much older, darker transaction.
Pace waited for Lina’s response as she stood there.
“Should I fuck you to make you go to bed?” The question was blunt, stripped of its usual predatory gleam. It was just a tool, a crude solution to a physical problem.
“Pace…” Her voice was a frayed thread. “I’m not—”
“Lina, I’m serious.” He ran a hand through his hair, a gesture of rare frustration. “You’re pale. You’re locking up. Your brain is eating you alive from the inside. I know one way to shut it off.”
“And I’m too.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “I need to find—”
“Lina, it’s 2 AM.”
“But my brain—” she protested, the scientist in her clawing for control, for analysis, for a spreadsheet to make sense of the fire and the word ‘terminated’.
“Enough.” The word was final. It wasn’t shouted. It was a door slamming shut.
She stared at the floor, at the pattern in the rug. The fight drained out of her, leaving a void. “I… fine.”
He stepped closer, his finger under her chin tilting her face up. The harshness in his eyes softened, just a fraction. “I know you’re tired and your scientist brain works best during the middle of the night. But I also care about—”
She kissed him. It was a hard, desperate press of her mouth against his, stealing the words, replacing them with sensation. “Mmph—yes, I know,” she breathed against his lips. “Take me to bed.”
He looked down at her, a slow, weary smirk touching his mouth. “Now you’re being needy. You really want me to fu—”
“Pace?!” She pulled back, her violet eyes wide.
“Kidding.” He kissed her, softly this time, a brief sealing of a pact. Then he lifted her, his arms strong under her knees and back, and placed her in the center of the bed. He didn’t undress her. He didn’t undress himself.
He lay down beside her, on top of the covers, and pulled her back against his chest, wrapping himself around her. His nose buried in her hair.
“Sleep, Lina,” he whispered into the silver-blonde strands. “The ghosts can wait until morning.”
She closed her eyes. The solid reality of him at her back was the only thing holding the chaos at bay.
The solid reality of him at her back was the only thing holding the chaos at bay. His breathing deepened into sleep’s rhythm, a steady metronome against her spine. But her own mind refused to quiet, replaying the faded ink, the echo of that single word.
Terminated.
It unspooled a film reel of imagined horrors—the scent of lemongrass swallowed by acrid smoke, the warm laughter she could almost remember shattering into a scream. She trembled. The shake started in her core, a fine vibration she couldn’t suppress. She was cold, so cold, despite the heat of him.
She needed it gone. The memory. The ice. The haunting, analytical spiral. She needed to be yanked violently into the present, into a sensation so overwhelming it would scorch the past away.
She turned in his arms. He stirred, a low, sleepy grunt in the dark. His eyes opened, pupils vast and black.
“Pace.” Her voice was thin, a frayed wire.
“Mm.” His arm tightened around her waist, pulling her closer. “Go to sleep.”
She pressed her palms flat against his chest, feeling the scar tissue and the powerful drum of his heart. She swallowed. The words felt foreign, desperate, clawing their way up her throat.
“Please…” she whispered, the sound almost lost in the linen. “Sleep with me… I need you.”
He went perfectly still. The sleepy languor evaporated from his muscles. He was fully awake now, alert, assessing her in the darkness. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said, his voice gravelly with sleep and caution.
“I know.” She tipped her head back, meeting his gaze. Her violet eyes were wide, not with fear, but with a stark, unsettling need. “Just hug me. Kiss me. Come on, while I’m in the mood.”
A beat of silence. Then a surprised, weary huff of air that was almost a laugh. “Gosh, you’re unbearable.”
A faint, ghost of a smile touched her lips. It felt alien on her face. “Yet, you love me.”
He stared at her. The confession, flung at him so casually in the aftermath of his grandfather’s ledger, hung between them. It was a weapon and a surrender. His jaw tightened. Something raw and unguarded flashed in his eyes, too fast to name.
“Shut up, kitten,” he muttered, and crushed his mouth to hers.
This kiss wasn’t gentle. It was a claiming, an answer, a drowning. He rolled her onto her back, his weight settling over her, a familiar anchor. His tongue thrust past her lips, tasting her, demanding a response. She gave it to him, arching up, her fingers tangling in his raven hair, pulling him closer. She wanted to be consumed.
He ripped his own t-shirt—the one she wore—up and over her head. The air hit her skin. His hands were everywhere, not with their earlier clinical gentleness, but with a hungry, frantic urgency. He palmed her breast, his thumb scraping her nipple to a tight, aching peak. He bent his head and took it into his mouth, sucking hard, and the sharp sting-pull of it drew a broken gasp from her throat.
“You’re freezing,” he growled against her skin, his mouth moving to her other breast.
“Then warm me up,” she challenged, her voice breathless. “Fuck me warm.”
He shoved the covers aside. The night air was cool. He kneeled between her thighs, his eyes raking over her naked body in the sliver of moonlight. The bruises from earlier were dark shadows on her pale skin. He traced one on her hip with a blunt finger, then pushed her legs wider.
“Look at you,” he said, his voice thick. “All marked up. Mine.” He dipped his head, but not to kiss her. He pressed an open-mouthed kiss to the inside of her thigh, right over a faint blue vein. Then he licked a hot, slow stripe upward.
She jerked. “Pace—”
He didn’t answer. He just pushed her thighs back further, exposing her completely, and buried his face between her legs. His tongue was a ruthless, specific instrument. It laved over her clit, circled it, then speared inside her. He ate her with a focused, brutal intensity, his hands pinning her hips to the mattress as she bucked.
The pleasure was a lightning strike, obliterating thought. She cried out, her heels digging into his back. The coil in her belly wound impossibly tight, fueled by grief and rage and this desperate need for oblivion.
“I’m gonna… right there, don’t stop—” Her words dissolved into a sharp, choking moan.
He sucked her clit hard between his lips, and she came, a violent, silent convulsion that ripped through her. Waves of sensation pulsed through her, leaving her shuddering. He didn’t let up, lapping at her through the aftershocks, drawing them out until she was whimpering, oversensitive, pushing weakly at his head.
He rose up then, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, his eyes wild. He fumbled with his trousers, shoved them down just enough to free his cock. It stood thick and angry, the head glistening. He was breathing hard.
“You needed me?” he panted, positioning himself at her entrance. She was soaked, pulsing. “You need this?”
“Yes.” It was a hiss.
He drove into her in one deep, searing thrust. The fullness was breathtaking, a stretch that bordered on pain. She gasped, her nails biting into his shoulders. He didn’t pause. He set a ruthless, pounding rhythm, each snap of his hips jolting her up the bed. The headboard knocked a dull, rhythmic tattoo against the wall.
“This what you wanted?” he gritted out, his face a mask of strain and something like fury. “To not think? To just feel my cock splitting you open?”
“Harder.” The word was a plea. “Fuck me harder.”
He swore, a filthy, grateful curse, and obeyed. His thrusts became animalistic, brutal. The slap of skin was loud, wet, obscene. She wrapped her legs around his waist, taking him deeper, meeting each drive with a lift of her hips. The new angle made him groan, his rhythm faltering for a second.
“Your cunt is so goddamn tight,” he choked out. “Like it’s trying to milk me dry. You gonna come again? Come on my cock while I fill you up.”
His words, crude and explicit, ignited her. The friction was building again, a hotter, slower burn this time. She could feel him swelling inside her, his control fraying.
“Pace—I’m close—”
“Look at me.” He grabbed her chin, forcing her eyes to his. “Look at me when you come.”
Their gazes locked. In his, she saw the storm—the possession, the fear, the startling vulnerability laid bare. She felt the pressure crest and break. Her orgasm rolled through her, a deep, internal quake that clenched around him, milking him desperately.
With a ragged shout, he followed her, pounding into her one last, devastating time as he came. She felt the hot, liquid pulse of his release inside her, wave after wave. He collapsed onto her, his full weight driving her into the mattress, his face buried in her neck. Their sweat-slicked skin fused together.
They lay there, wrecked and breathing in shattered unison. The chaos was gone, burned away for now. In its place was a heavy, spent stillness.
His lips moved against her throat. “Lina.”
She didn’t answer. She just held him, her arms wrapped tight around his back, feeling the rapid hammer of his heart slowly decelerate against her own. The truth was still there, waiting in the ledger in the dusty study. But here, in the dark, soaked in him, she could almost believe it belonged to someone else.
His breathing evened. She thought he’d fallen asleep. Then he shifted, pulling out of her gently, and rolled to his side, taking her with him. He pulled the covers over them both.
His voice was a low rumble in the dark, already slurred with exhaustion. “Don’t ask me to fucking say it back.”
She pressed a kiss to the center of his chest, over the scar. “I won’t.”
He held her tighter. Sleep pulled at them both.