*Third POV limited*
"How much is the treatment?"
The hacker’s hands were still shaking as he named the figure, his voice cracking in the middle of each word like he was scared of saying it wrong.
Saint’s face remained unreadable.
"You’ll surrender every file, every copy, everything you pulled from my system. You’ll tell Milo exactly how you got in, step by step. You’ll help him confirm whether anyone else touched what you took. And you’ll cooperate with every question he has until he’s satisfied you’ve held nothing back."
"Yes. Yes, of course, anything." The man nodded so fast his glasses slipped.
"Your sister being sick doesn’t erase what you did." Saint’s tone stayed flat. "You breached something you had no right touching. That doesn’t disappear because you had a reason."
"I know. I know that. Thank you." The man’s voice cracked on the last word, relief and shame tangled together, his knuckles white around the strap of the laptop bag he still hadn’t let go of.
Two of Saint’s guards pushed the door open and stepped forward, pulling him toward the side door to be handled under Saint’s terms. Aurora watched the whole exchange without a word, her arms wrapped loosely around herself. She was relieved he was alive, genuinely relieved, but there was nothing in her that wanted to celebrate it.
Something about the coldness Saint had shown even in mercy, the way he’d handed out conditions like a man closing a business deal rather than sparing a life, sat uneasily in her chest. She knew Saint had noticed her expression, but he said nothing about it.
The ride home was silent. Aurora kept waiting for him to say something, anything, about what had just happened, about the gun, about the hacker, about the way she’d answered those men’s questions without thinking twice, the words about him leaving her mouth before she’d even realized she meant them.
He stared out the window instead, jaw set, one hand resting on his knee.
"Are you angry with me?" she finally asked, unable to sit in the silence any longer.
"Why would I be?" Saint answered, eyes still fixed on the passing streets. It wasn’t cruel, but it was colder than when he’d shouted.
He was simply pulling away, folding back into whatever version of himself had existed before all of this. She thought of how tense he’d gotten around Theo, the way his jaw had tightened every time she laughed at one of his jokes.
She wondered if this had anything to do with that. She didn’t ask. The city blurred past the window, neither of them offering the other anything more for the rest of the ride.
Back at the mansion, Saint put distance between them without needing to say a word.
The version of him she’d started to recognize, the one who softened around Alyssa, who’d looked at her like something worth protecting when Marchetti had briefly surfaced, was folding itself away again, piece by piece, until barely anything of it showed on the surface.
It wasn’t because he’d stopped caring. That was the part Aurora couldn’t see. It was the opposite. The last few days had shown Saint something he didn’t want to know about himself, that she could move him, shift his decisions, pull reactions out of him he hadn’t authorized.
He’d watched himself hesitate with a gun in his hand because of the look on her face. He’d felt Marchetti calm at the sound of her voice when nothing else had reached him. That kind of influence wasn’t safety.
It was a door left open for anyone smart enough to walk through it, and Saint had spent twenty years making sure no door stayed open long enough for anyone to use.
The hacker had reminded him of that too, a stranger desperate enough to breach his systems over someone he loved. Enemies didn’t need to touch him directly. They only needed something, someone, close enough to use as leverage, and he’d just proven, in front of witnesses, exactly who that someone was.
His war with Edmund wasn’t finished. His trust in anything outside his own control hadn’t grown, not really, no matter what his body kept insisting otherwise.
Saint decided, quietly and without discussion, that he needed to pull the reins back in before Aurora became one more weakness someone could aim at him.
The next morning, Alyssa was a whirlwind of excitement, tearing through her room while Aurora helped her get dressed for the excursion.
"We’re going to see the butterfly garden first, Miss Meridian said, and then the orchid house, and I already packed extra snacks because Kayla always forgets hers and I share with her," Alyssa rattled off, spinning to check her reflection in the mirror. "When I get back I’m going to show you the pictures I take, and maybe I’ll bring you a flower if they let us pick one."
"I can’t wait," Aurora said, smoothing down the collar of her uniform, doing her best to match the girl’s excitement even with the weight still sitting in her own chest from the night before.
Saint stood near the doorway, unusually quiet, watching Alyssa with an intensity that Aurora chalked up to nothing more than his usual protectiveness.
Alyssa waved goodbye from the doorway, backpack bouncing against her shoulders as she climbed into the car that would take her to meet her class.
Edmund sat at the head of a long conference table, the room windowless, lit in the flat white light reserved for places that didn’t want to be remembered clearly. Around him sat five other members of his team.
"The latest results aren’t sufficient," the woman at the far end said, sliding a folder across the table. "Stabilization is failing past the seventy-two-hour mark in every trial."
Edmund flipped it open without much interest, numbers he’d seen variations of a dozen times before. Meridian existed to solve one problem, the same problem that had haunted every altered body since the first hybrid was ever made, the moment the engineered form began rejecting itself from the inside. The Fracture. Every subject reached it eventually, some sooner than others, and Meridian was supposed to be the thing that kept the door shut for good.
"We need viable material," another voice said. "Fresh tissue samples, something the last batch didn’t give us enough of."
Edmund said nothing, his eyes still on the folder.
"There’s another acquisition being arranged," the man beside him said quietly once the meeting broke, leaning close enough that no one else could hear. "How many?" Edmund asked, voice flat.
"Twenty-three." The number made Edmund’s stomach twist.
He gathered his folder, nodded once, and left the meeting the moment they dismissed him, leaving them to proceed with the parts of it they clearly weren’t planning to tell him.
Later that evening, alone in his office, Edmund reviewed the operational details sent to his private line. Locations. Logistics. A general count of subjects tied to an upcoming school-related acquisition, numbers and coordinates without names attached, nothing that made it feel personal.
He simply understood, closing the file and setting it aside, that the next stage of Meridian was about to begin.