Chapter 3: Control
The silence in the medical wing stretched, thin and brittle, after the door sealed. Caelis kept his eyes closed, feigning sleep, but the tension in his neck gave him away. He could feel Viktor’s presence like a static charge in the air, a dense, watchful quiet that was somehow louder than any shouting.
Viktor didn’t speak. He walked to the window—a deep-set aperture showing only the eternal dark and slow pulse of the Deepwood’s root-lights. He placed his hands behind his back, a commander surveying a problematic terrain. “You disrupt ecosystems,” he said finally, his voice flat. “Even the inert ones.”
“It’s a gift,” Caelis replied, not opening his eyes. “Like a yeast infection, but for social dynamics.”
“It’s a systemic weakness. The healer’s judgment is compromised. The guard’s discipline is eroded. All because you’re in pain. Or bored. Or simply existing.” Viktor turned from the window. “That makes you a liability that can’t be contained by walls.”
Caelis let out a short, humorless laugh. “Tell me something new, Governor. I’ve been a liability since I was old enough to sweat. People don’t like walking biohazards. They prefer their monsters obvious, with claws and a roar. Not something that makes them… complicit.”
“Complicit.” Viktor tested the word.
“They never think it’s them,” Caelis said, opening his eyes now to stare at the pulsating ceiling. “It’s always the spell. The allure. The demonic wiles.” He shifted, the med-shells creaking. “They get close, drawn in by the novelty. The beauty, the danger, the otherness. It’s exciting. For a while.” His voice grew quieter, stripped of its usual performative edge. “Then they get afraid. Because they realize they want it. The wanting feels too big, too deep. It scares them. So they have to own it. Or break it. Or lock it in a pretty box. Sometimes all three.”
Viktor listened, his expression unchanging, but his stillness was a form of intensity. “You generalize.”
“I’ve lived,” Caelis shot back, a flicker of heat returning. “I had a keeper once. A collector of rare things. He had a velvet-lined room. Called me his ‘most radiant prize.’ He’d sit for hours just watching me. Then he’d get angry if I looked bored. Started putting bells on my ankles so he’d know where I was in the house.” Caelis’s smile was a razor-cut. “He wasn’t a bad man, by some metrics. Never raised a hand. Just his voice. And the look in his eyes when he realized the prize had thoughts of its own. That’s when the real cage gets built. Not from iron. From devotion.”
The room seemed to grow colder. Viktor’s gaze was analytical, dissecting the story for tactical data, for weakness. “So your solution is preemptive offense. You provoke. You push. You make yourself unlikable before they can decide they love you.”
“It’s cleaner,” Caelis shrugged, then winced at the pain in his shoulders. “Disgust is a stable emotion. Predictable. It doesn’t curdle into obsession. It just sits there, nice and solid. Hatred I can work with. Fondness?” He shook his head. “Fondness is a slippery slope straight to a gilded cage.”
“And is that what you’re doing now?” Viktor asked, his tone deceptively casual. “Trying to disgust me?”
Caelis met his eyes. “Is it working?”
For the first time, Viktor didn’t have an immediate, cutting retort. He simply looked at Caelis, as if seeing the strategy laid bare: the sarcasm as armor, the flippancy as a moat. The heavy air between them wasn’t filled with the cloying sweetness of infatuation. It was taut with something else—a recognition, a challenge.
A low thrum vibrated through the bedframe, a subtle tremor that had nothing to do with the city’s deep rhythms. The nutrient bag suspended by Caelis’s bedside swayed gently, its tubing swinging.
Caelis’s eyes flicked to it, then back to Viktor’s face. “You’re doing it again.”
Viktor didn’t deny it. He watched the oscillating bag as if it were a fascinating anomaly. “My control is based on precision. On absolute focus. Your… emanations don’t induce longing. They induce interference. A static in the signal.” He flexed the fingers of one hand slightly. Across the room, a surgical tray on a counter rattled once, the instruments upon it jittering. “It’s not a desire to possess. It’s a destabilization of the means by which I maintain possession. Of everything.”
The distinction hung in the air, enormous and strange.
Caelis propped himself up on his elbows, ignoring the protest in his core. “So I don’t make you want me. I just make you… glitchy.”
“An imprecise term, but functionally accurate.” Viktor’s admission was clinical, yet it felt more intimate than any confession of desire could have.
“And that’s better?” Caelis pressed, a strange, sharp curiosity overtaking him.
“It’s quantifiable.” Viktor’s gaze was back on him, sharp and assessing. “I can measure a drop in focus. I can calculate the volatility of a telekinetic surge. I cannot quantify ‘fondness.’ Your method is a blunt instrument. It creates chaos. Mine… mine is a flaw in the foundation. A crack in the lens.” He took a single step closer. The tray on the counter stopped rattling, but the light above it dimmed momentarily, as if draining power. “You make others lose their minds. You make me lose my grip.”
Caelis stared at him. He had spent a lifetime being perceived as a object of want, a trigger for mania. He was a problem to be solved, a treasure to be secured, a danger to be contained. But this? Being seen as an atmospheric anomaly, a personal systems check—it was utterly, disorientingly new. “And that’s why you pulled me from the rubble yourself,” he said slowly, piecing it together. “Not to save the asset. To run a diagnostic. To see the glitch up close.”
Viktor was silent for a long moment. The pulsing light in the walls seemed to slow, syncing with his measured breathing. “Partly.” He didn’t elaborate.
The silence returned, but it had changed. It was no longer brittle. It was charged, like the moment before a lightning strike.
“So,” Caelis said, the ghost of his old smirk touching his lips. “What’s the prognosis, Governor? Am I a terminal illness for your discipline? Or just a chronic condition?”
Viktor’s eyes, cold and grey as polished shale, held his. “That remains to be seen.” He turned and walked toward the door. “The medics say you can be moved. We’re leaving.”
“Leaving? My legs are still in these decorative casts.”
“They’re stable. The traction field is mobile.” He tapped a command into the panel by the door. “This room is compromised. The personnel are compromised. You’re being relocated.”
“To where? Another cell?”
Viktor looked back over his shoulder, his profile etched against the glowing corridor light. “To the Oval Room. Where we first met.” He paused, his voice dropping into that dry, conversational tone he used for monumental statements. “The walls are living stone. It’s monitored only by bioluminescent resonance. No guards. No healers. Just you, the Deepwood, and the silence.” He finally met Caelis’s puzzled stare. “Consider it a controlled environment. For ongoing study.”
Before Caelis could form a reply, Viktor was gone, the door whispering shut behind him.
A minute later, two silent med-techs entered with a floating gurney. They worked with efficient, impersonal hands, transferring him and the humming traction field unit onto the floating platform. They avoided his eyes, their movements hurried. They’d been warned.
As they floated him through the austere corridors of the administrative sector, Caelis watched the root-strung ceilings pass by. The journey ended at the familiar, heavy door of polished heartwood. It recognized Viktor’s biometrics and opened without a sound.
The Oval Interrogation Room awaited. The air was cool and smelled of damp earth and ozone. The walls, carved from the living root, pulsed with their slow, violet heartbeat. The floor was slick, reflective. It was as he remembered, yet completely different. Before, it had been a chamber of threats. Now, it felt like a vacuum. A sterile field.
The med-techs settled him in the center of the room, the gurney locking into place. They retreated without a word.
The door sealed.
Alone in the vast, pulsating space, Caelis let his head fall back. The silence was absolute, deep and resonant. He was untethered, suspended in the dark heart of the city, a specimen under a microscope of stone and slow light.
In the observation chamber above, hidden behind one-way biosensitive crystal, Viktor Virel stood watching. His hands were clasped tightly behind his back. On the console before him, a sensor displayed a steady, low-grade telekinetic resonance—his own baseline. A second graph, superimposed over it, showed minute, jagged fluctuations.
He watched the violet light wash over Caelis’s still form below. The incubus seemed smaller without an audience, without a performance to sustain. Just a creature in a broken shell, trapped in a different kind of machine.
Viktor’s own power thrummed, a quiet, immense potential held in check. Here, in this isolated room, the static was clear. The interference was measurable. The problem was contained.
He leaned forward, his shadow falling across the bio-luminescent console.
The problem, for the first time, had a name. And it wasn’t “incubus” or “liability” or “asset.”
It was Caelis.
And he had no idea what to do with him.
And he had no idea what to do with him. So he decided to take him apart.
The next day began without preamble. The door opened and Viktor entered, followed by a floating cart bearing an array of sensors and a sealed water tank. He wore simple, dark fatigues, his sleeves rolled to the elbows. He didn’t look at Caelis as he began placing sensor nodes at precise intervals on the slick floor, his movements economical.
“Get up,” Viktor said, his voice echoing softly in the dome.
“Charming,” Caelis replied from the gurney, his legs still encased in their shells. “I’m a bit structurally unsound at the moment, in case you missed the memo.”
“The traction field provides support. Use your arms.” Viktor finally glanced over, his expression devoid of any expectation of refusal. It was an order, plain and simple.
Gritting his teeth, Caelis pushed himself up, swinging his legs with their heavy casing over the side of the gurney. The traction field hummed, holding the weight, allowing him to stand in a wavering parody of balance. The polished floor felt ice-cold under his bare feet. “Happy? I’m upright. The miracle of modern medicine.”
“Walk to the western wall.” Viktor pointed to a spot directly under one of the larger, throbbing root veins.
“Why?”
“I need a baseline measurement of the room’s natural resonance without your interference. You’re currently the source of uncontrolled variables. Move.”
Caelis shuffled forward, the motion awkward and draining. Every shift sent dull aches through his hips. He reached the wall and leaned against it, the living root warm and slightly damp against his palm. “Now what? Do I sing a tune?”
Viktor ignored him, studying a readout on a handheld slate. He made a note. “Good. The biosonar signal is clean. Your presence there registers as a minor thermal anomaly. Nothing more.” He looked up. “Now walk back to the center. Slowly.”
“This is the most boring experiment ever.”
“It hasn’t started yet.”
When Caelis reached the center of the room, Viktor approached. He stopped exactly three meters away. He didn’t raise his hands or adopt a stance. He just stood there, focusing. The air tightened. Caelis felt it first in his ears, a subtle pop. Then the sensor nodes on the floor lit up, one by one, in a steady green wave.
“No noticeable fluctuation,” Viktor murmured, more to himself than to Caelis. “At three meters, with you in a state of passive irritation, the effect is negligible.” He took a step forward. Then another.
Two meters.
The green lights on the nearest nodes flickered, stuttering to a pale yellow. A fine tremor ran through the cart holding the water tank. The surface of the water inside shivered, though nothing had touched it.
“Your control is slipping, Governor,” Caelis said, a tight smile on his lips.
“That’s the point.” Viktor’s voice was taut with concentration. He took another half-step.
One and a half meters.
The yellow lights wavered into an unstable orange. A low groan emanated from the ceiling, where ancient root met stone. A sprinkling of dust filtered down, glittering in the violet light. Viktor’s jaw was clenched, a muscle ticking in his temple. He was holding his power in a deliberate, delicate grip, and Caelis’s mere presence was prying the fingers loose.
“Are you trying to bring the roof down on us?” Caelis asked, his bravado thin.
“Not today.” Viktor’s words were clipped. “I need you to activate your other ability. The temperature manipulation. Do it now.”
“Why?”
“I need to see if a conscious application of your power correlates to a stronger disruptive event. Generate heat. A focused point.”
Caelis exhaled, irritation flaring. He held up a hand, palm open. A swirl of warmer air condensed above it, visible as a heat-haze. A small orb of concentrated thermal energy formed, glowing a faint amber.
The sensor nodes flashed red.
The groan above became a sharp crack. A hairline fracture split the mineralized sap of the ceiling, racing two feet before stopping. The entire cart rattled, the water inside sloshing violently. Viktor flinched, a full-body recoil as if struck. The orange lights on the slate in his hand spiraled into chaotic red patterns.
“Enough,” Viktor commanded, his voice strained.
Caelis closed his hand, snuffing the heat orb. He was breathing harder, a sheen of sweat making his iridescent skin gleam. The effort, coupled with standing, was draining. “Satisfied?”
“No.” Viktor retreated to five meters, the sensors calming to a wary yellow. He took notes, his handwriting jagged. “Again. This time, generate cold. As intense as you can manage.”
“I’m not a circus act you can just whistle for.”
“Aren’t you?” Viktor’s gaze was merciless. “Your contract stipulates cooperation in matters of security assessment. This is an assessment. Your biology is a security matter. Perform.”
The word perform landed like a slap. Caelis’s violet-grey eyes hardened. He raised his hand again, his expression going flat. This time, the air above his palm grew still and heavy. Frost crystallized on his skin, crawling up his fingers. The temperature in a sphere around his hand plummeted, pulling moisture from the air into a swirling knot of ice crystals.
The sensors screamed red instantly.
This time, the disruption wasn’t a groan. It was a shriek of stressed stone. A section of the wall behind Viktor, where a thick root vein pulsed, thumped inward as if shoved by a giant hand. Bioluminescent sap oozed from the new crack, sizzling where it hit the cold floor. Every piece of metal in the room—the cart, the sensor housings—emitted a high-pitched whine. Viktor stumbled back a step, his own telekinetic hold reflexively lashing out to brace the wall. The correction was brutal, a surge of force that sealed the crack with a crunch of shattered mineral but left a spiderweb of fractures around it.
The cart tipped over, crashing onto its side. Water spilled across the floor, instantly turning to slick ice where it met the cold radiating from Caelis.
Both men were panting. Caelis dropped his hand, the frost melting rapidly. He shivered, his energy sapped. Viktor leaned against the now-stable wall, his face pale, wiping a trickle of blood from where he’d bitten the inside of his cheek.
“Different energy signature,” Viktor gasped out, forcing analytical detachment into his raw voice. “Same disruptive result. It’s not the thermal shift. It’s you. The focused application of your will acts as an amplifier.”
“Terrific,” Caelis spat, shuffling backward until his legs hit the gurney and he half-fell onto it. “You’ve confirmed I’m a pain in your ass. Can I go to bed now?”
Viktor pushed off the wall. He was unsteady, a slight tremor in his hands as he righted the cart and collected his slate. “Not yet. Proximity variation. I need data at one meter. Without ancillary powers.”
“No.”
“It’s not a request.”
What followed was a grueling, silent hour of incremental torture. Viktor would approach, step by careful step, holding his power in a perfectly calibrated, invisible sheath around himself. He’d stop at measured intervals, his body rigid with the effort of containment, while Caelis just stood there, trying to breathe normally and failing. The closer Viktor got, the harder it was for Caelis to suppress his body’s natural stress responses.
At one meter, the air between them grew thick and sweet again.
The result was immediate and violent. Unbidden, a jagged piece of stone the size of a fist tore itself from the wall opposite them and shot across the chamber, shattering against the far side in a burst of pulverized rock. Viktor cursed, a raw, ugly sound, and backed away rapidly. His control hadn’t slipped; it had twitched, a grotesque muscle spasm in his mind.
“I can’t… I can’t turn it off,” Caelis said through clenched teeth, humiliated and exhausted. His skin was flushed, the aphrodisiac scent now a palpable fog in the immediate space around him. “It’s not a faucet. It’s a panic attack.”
“I know,” Viktor said, his voice hollow. He was leaning on the overturned cart again, looking at the new scar on the wall. The chamber was a testament to the experiment: hairline fractures marred the ceiling, sap wept from a crushed root vein, the floor was scarred by impact and ice. His sanctuary of control was damaged, violated by his own unpredictable power.
He looked at Caelis, who was slumped on the gurney, head in his hands, trembling with fatigue and residual pain. Viktor felt a deep, unfamiliar ache in his own skull, a granular fatigue that seeped into his bones. The data on his slate was a mess of spike graphs and anomaly flags. It told him everything and nothing.
He had provoked. He had measured. He had varied every parameter he could conceive.
The conclusion was infuriatingly simple: Caelis was a destabilizing agent. The effect was consistent, reproducible, and escalated with proximity or emotional provocation. But the why was a black hole. It wasn’t a psychic dampener. It wasn’t an energy drain. It was pure, chaotic interference, as if Caelis’s very existence was a wrong note that made the symphony of Viktor’s control fall into dissonance.
He had executed a rigorous series of tests. He had charts. He had observations.
He had no understanding. No control. No solution.
The two of them sat in the ruined, beautiful room, shrouded in the scent of crushed roots and Caelis’s despair, too weary to move, locked in a puzzle that had, for all their suffering, only become more opaque.
The two of them sat in the ruined, beautiful room, shrouded in the scent of crushed roots and Caelis’s despair, too weary to move, locked in a puzzle that had, for all their suffering, only become more opaque. Eventually, Viktor simply tapped a command into his slate. The door sighed open to admit two other guards—stone-faced, professional ones who avoided looking at Caelis entirely.
“Take him to the secured east chamber,” Viktor ordered, his voice sandpaper rough. “The one with the external venting. Post a two-guard rotation outside. No one enters without my direct authorization.”
He didn’t look at Caelis as they helped him onto a mobile gurney. The last thing Caelis saw was Viktor’s back, silhouetted against the cracked wall, staring at the data on his slate as if it had betrayed him.
The east chamber was smaller, colder. A sleek med-bed replaced the gurney, and a silent climate system hummed in the ceiling, pulling air through filters. The door was a slab of reinforced bronzewood. Caelis could feel the faint draft from the vents near the floor, a constant whisper carrying his chemical scent away. It was a solution. A brutal, efficient one.
The first day was quiet, monitored by a rotation of guards who slid food through a slot and never made eye contact. The second day, a new face appeared on the roster. His name was Rylen. He was young, with the earnest severity of a new recruit.
On the third day, Rylen was assigned the interior watch, a chair placed just inside the door. “Just procedure,” he said, his voice slightly too loud. “Governor’s orders.”
“Thrilling for you,” Caelis muttered from the bed, his eyes closed.
By the fourth day, Rylen started talking. “They say you cracked the Oval Room’s wall,” he said, leaning forward in his chair. “That the Governor’s own power did it. Is that true?”
Caelis didn’t answer.
“Must be something,” Rylen pressed, undeterred. “To get under his skin like that.”
Caelis turned his head, opening one eye. “You’re chatting. Is that in the procedure?”
Rylen flushed but smiled. “Just making conversation. It’s dull in here.” He started staying past his shift, finding reasons to adjust the climate controls, to check the bed’s stability. He brought an extra nutrient pack once. “You look pale,” he said, his concern sticky-sweet.
“It’s my complexion,” Caelis snapped, his guard slamming up. He recognized the tone, the over-eager attentiveness. He’d heard it a thousand times. “Don’t you have a real job?”
Rylen’s smile only wavered for a second. “I’m doing it.”
The next time, Rylen touched him. It was under the guise of helping him sit up, a hand lingering on Caelis’s shoulder, sliding down his arm. The touch was electric with a desperate, misplaced reverence.
“Don’t,” Caelis said, pulling away sharply, a jolt of pain shooting through his legs.
“Sorry,” Rylen whispered, but his eyes were wide, fascinated. He didn’t move back. “It’s just… you shouldn’t be in here. Locked away like some… specimen. After what you did in the tunnels. You saved people.”
“I got pinned by a rock,” Caelis corrected, his voice cold and flat. “It was incompetence, not heroism. Now get away from me.”
But the rejection seemed to fuel something in Rylen. The veneer of professional concern peeled away, revealing a raw, possessive need. He began pacing the small room during his shifts, his monologues spiraling.
“He doesn’t see what you are,” Rylen insisted on the fifth day, his voice low and fervent. “He just sees a tool, a problem. I see you. I could get you out. I know the patrol routes. We could go tonight.”
Caelis felt a cold dread seep into his stomach. This was the slope, slick and inevitable. “You’re insane,” he said, forcing a harsh laugh. “You’d be caught before we reached the first junction. They’d shoot you. Or worse, he’d look at you.” He gestured to the door. “Go. Now. Before you say something that gets you tossed into a deep-dig pit.”
Rylen stopped pacing and stood by the bed, his shadow falling over Caelis. “You don’t understand. I can’t just go.” His hand shot out, gripping Caelis’s wrist. His grip was too tight, born of panic and a terrifying conviction. “We’re meant for something else. I can feel it when I’m near you. You’re not like the others. We have to leave together.”
Caelis tried to yank his arm back, but Rylen’s strength was fueled by obsession. “Let go,” he commanded, layering every ounce of cold authority he could muster into the words. It was the wrong tactic. To Rylen, it sounded like a challenge, a test of devotion.
“No,” Rylen breathed, his other hand coming up to cup Caelis’s face. His palm was damp, trembling. “You don’t have to be afraid with me. I’ll protect you.”
The touch sent a bolt of pure revulsion through Caelis. He twisted his head away, but Rylen’s fingers dug in, holding him firm. The guard’s breath was hot on his cheek, his eyes glazed, seeing a fantasy, not a person. Caelis’s mind raced. A thermal burst would bring the whole security detail running. A struggle would aggravate his half-healed legs. His sarcasm, his defenses, were useless here. This was the raw, ugly core he’d told Viktor about.
“Rylen,” Caelis said, forcing his voice to be calm, level, a soothing counterpoint to the guard’s frenzy. “Listen to me. This isn’t you. It’s the pheromones. It’s a chemical reaction. You need to step back and breathe.”
“You think it’s just chemistry?” Rylen’s voice cracked with emotion. He leaned closer, his forehead almost touching Caelis’s. “This is real. I’ve never felt anything so real. I can’t just breathe it away!”
His grip on Caelis’s wrist tightened to the point of pain, his other hand sliding to the back of Caelis’s neck, possessive and terrifying. Caelis braced his free hand against Rylen’s chest, pushing weakly. Panic, cold and sharp, tightened his throat. The guard was too strong, too far gone.
Then, with a sound like a sigh of the deep earth, the bronzewood door slid open.
Viktor Virel stood on the threshold.
He took in the scene in a single, frozen snapshot: Rylen bent over the bed, hands on Caelis, Caelis pinned and pushing back with a strained, desperate expression. The air in the room was thick, sweet, and cloying.
Viktor didn’t shout. He didn’t rush.
He simply stepped inside and said, “Guard Rylen.”
His voice was like a cable snapping taut. It wasn’t loud. It was absolute.
Rylen jerked upright as if electrocuted, whirling around. His face was a mask of guilt, defiance, and wild confusion. “Sir! I was just—he was distressed, I was—”
“You were compromising the asset,” Viktor finished, his tone conversational, as if discussing the weather. He walked forward, his movements deliberate. The space in the room seemed to shrink around his presence. “You were touching a classified specimen without authorization. You were speaking of desertion.”
“No, sir, I was helping him, he needs—”
“What he needs,” Viktor interrupted, his voice dropping to a cold, soft register that was infinitely more dangerous, “is to not be mauled by a guard who can’t follow basic biosafety protocols.” He was close now, staring down at Rylen. “You have been breathing poisoned air for days. It has made you stupid. It has made you a liability.”
Rylen flinched as if struck. The truth of it warred with his fabricated reality. “It’s not poison,” he whispered fiercely. “It’s… it’s truth. He needs to get out of here. You keep him locked up, you don’t see—”
“I see exactly what you are,” Viktor said, his gaze slicing through Rylen. “You’re a statistic. A predictable outcome. The exact reason he is kept behind a door.” He tilted his head slightly, a predator assessing. “Your service is terminated. You will report to the deep-dig foreman for re-assignment. You will not speak of this. You will not come within five levels of this chamber again.”
The finality in his voice was colder than any cell. Rylen stared, his fervor crumbling into shock, his fantasy dissolving under the stark light of Viktor’s authority. He looked from Viktor to Caelis, who had drawn back against the pillows, his face a careful blank, and back to Viktor. The obsession didn’t die—Caelis could see it still flickering in his eyes—but it was instantly, utterly cowed.
Rylen’s shoulders slumped. He nodded, once, a broken marionette. Without another word, he walked stiffly past Viktor and out the open door.
Viktor watched him go, then tapped his slate. The door sealed shut with a heavy, final thud.
He stood there for a long moment, his back to Caelis, listening to the hum of the vent systems pulling the tainted air away. When he finally turned, his expression was granite.
Caelis met his eyes, a shaky breath leaving his lungs. He said nothing. He didn’t need to.
Viktor’s gaze swept over him, noting the red marks on his wrist, the disheveled sheets, the closed-off expression on his face. “That,” Viktor stated, the word cutting through the filtered silence, “is what I can quantify.” He took a step closer, not to comfort, but to observe, to analyze the aftermath. “The obsession. The loss of reason. The violent, possessive fixation.”
He gestured curtly at the door Rylen had just exited. “That is a known variable. A documented hazard. It can be managed with protocols, with walls, with filters.” His cold eyes settled back on Caelis, pinning him to the bed. “What happened in the Oval Room with me… that is something else entirely.”
He walked to the viewing port, a small, thick pane of crystal showing the empty corridor. “He wanted to own you. To save you. To possess you.” Viktor spoke to the glass, his reflection stark. “You don’t make me want any of those things.”
He turned, his silhouette framed by the cold light. “You make me want to tear the world apart just to hold it still for a single, stable second.” He let the statement hang, raw and unnervingly honest in the sterile quiet. “And I have no protocol for that.”