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The basement walls were padded, the lighting soft, and the clock on the wall was purposefully removed.
It wasn’t a precinct room.
It was Ella’s personal profiling space—her sanctuary. And Vinci was sitting in the center, his legs spread, arms resting on his thighs. Calm on the outside. Turmoil vibrating under his skin.
“You asked me to be honest,” he said, his voice low.
“No,” Ella corrected. “I asked him.”
Vinci blinked.
“I want to talk to Eon.”
He chuckled, hollow. “You won’t get far with that.”
“Try me.”
For a moment, silence. Then Vinci’s hands curled into fists.
“Ella… this isn’t a game.”
“I’m not playing. You say you want me safe? Then trust me with the monster too.”
He looked away. “You’re asking to wake something I’ve spent my whole life suppressing.”
Ella took a deep breath, placed her recorder on the table, and leaned forward. “Tell him I’m not afraid.”
“Eon,” she said, her voice dropping, intimate and firm, “I want to understand you. You protect. You kill. But why him? Why Vinci?”
Something in Vinci shifted.
His posture straightened.
The air thickened.
And when his eyes met hers again—they weren’t Vinci’s.
“Because,” he said in a smoother, colder tone, “he is weak. And I? I love what he hates in himself.”
Ella froze. It wasn’t the words. It was the voice. Detached. Precise. Controlled chaos.
“You’re not real,” she said.
“I’m the part of him that remembers pain and gives it back.”
“Then what do you feel about me?”
He smiled—eerily serene. “You’re the only variable. The crack in the wall I can’t seal.”
Ella’s breath caught.
“I could kill for you,” Eon whispered, “or because of you. He won’t admit it. But I already have.”
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