Chapter 130: It Has Always Been You

Chapter 130: Chapter 130: It Has Always Been You

I looked at Gianna.

She had touched a part of me I never wanted exposed, not with the graphs, not with Jenna’s scans, not with a chain offered in a sealed car like a key.

"I don’t know what you’re talking about."

No stutter or hesitation.

Flat and clean enough to pass for confusion on any log that only measured voice stress.

Maybe that was why she didn’t believe me at all.

A normal person would have asked why she thought that.

Would have laughed, or frowned, or demanded the shape of the regret she claimed to see.

I had simply answered.

Denial without curiosity was its own kind of confession.

Gianna cupped my face, palms warm, thumbs resting near my eyes as if she could press through them into whatever sat behind the yellow.

"I’m not interested in that anyway," she said.

The words should have been relief.

They landed like a stay of execution.

"I just wanted you to know I can feel what you feel."

Her voice stayed even.

"It’s not clean. Not language. Pressure. Direction. Enough to understand when something in you doesn’t match the story this sector tells about men pulled from labs."

I moved to kiss her.

I don’t want to hear her talk about this.

About me that doesn’t exist anymore.

The motion came out wrong, sloppy, a half-second late, mouth finding hers without the precision I had used minutes earlier when passion had still been the only risk in the cabin.

Gianna kissed back anyway, brief and real, then broke just enough to speak against my lips.

"Revien..."

"Hmm?"

"You need to know something."

"What is it?"

"You’re not made in a lab."

She held my gaze.

"Not a product some scientist grew to fill a quota."

I looked at her and tried to assemble the implication into something that fit the first days, Jenna’s facility, Mira’s baffled bloodwork, the contract bought before a central government could lock a natural genome away.

Custody.

That was the first thing I learned after coming here.

Jenna had said I was taken from breeding facilities.

This body answered to the same name I used.

I still didn’t know who the original owner of the flesh had been, or whether "original" meant anything when a transmigrated mind sat in the driver’s seat.

"Then... what am I?"

"That’s what we’d like to know too."

Gianna’s fingers stroked my cheek, gentler than the mock, gentler than the bench.

"You might think a lot of people know about your powers. They don’t. It doesn’t even reach ten percent. Only one Empress knows you exist in any detail that matters."

A pause.

"Mom is trying so hard to keep you in check, not just for the class, but for the visibility. If you go loud during the tests, if you show more power than a provisional dual team is supposed to have, it doesn’t only hit you. It hits our backs."

My hands had settled at her waist again without permission from the careful part of my brain.

"And if that Empress wants you back," Gianna continued, and her eyes shone wet without spilling yet, "I am completely at her mercy. I would have to give you up. No guild protest or review clause. No amount of primary-anchor language on a Sector 7 form would matter against that order."

"I won’t go loud," I said.

"This isn’t only the losing-control part."

She shook her head once.

"The moment you show more than necessary, clean, controlled, still too much, the wrong eyes mark you. Mom can sponsor. She cannot outrank an Empress line that already has a claim on the anomaly."

My fingers traced the wet line gathering at the corner of her eye before it could fall.

"I’m strong."

"I know."

"You’re strong too."

She let out a short chuckle that cracked.

"Shut up."

"And I’m not going to go berserk or lose control because someone else’s essence is etched near my heart."

I kissed her cheek, salt and heat, the anchor channel still humming from the chain she had held.

"I trust her more than I trust me."

Gianna’s breath shuddered once.

"That’s a dangerous sentence."

"It’s an honest one."

"You’re still deflecting about the regret."

"You said you weren’t interested."

"I’m not interested in dissecting you on a dashboard."

Her forehead rested against mine.

"I’m interested in you walking into intake without handing an Empress a reason to reclaim you like lost property. So you will run the sealed brief like a support who belongs on a dual slate, not like a miracle that needs to be proven in the first bracket."

"I can do that."

"Can you?"

The same question as the bench, different weight.

"Because whatever you are, lab story or not, the power still answers when you get scared for me. I’ve felt that pull. Don’t let fear of losing me become a light show for the board."

"I won’t use you as an excuse to spike," I said.

"I won’t use the Empress as an excuse to shrink, either. Sequence. Stagger. Named reaches. The same work that got your signature on the form."

Gianna was quiet long enough that the idle engine filled the gap.

"Mom doesn’t tell me everything," she said finally.

"She told me enough. Natural genome. Unknown origin. A holding facility that should have eaten you. One Empress with enough knowledge to make Sector 7 politics look like children’s games."

Her thumb brushed my lower lip.

"I signed anyway."

"Why?"

"You know why."

Not soft but true.

"Your place is beside me. That doesn’t stop being true because the sky has a higher predator in it."

I kissed her properly then, not sloppy, not desperate for erasure, a deliberate contact that said I had heard the warning and was still choosing the thin ice.

She met me with the same fierceness as before, tempered now by the shape of an Empress-shaped shadow neither of us could punch on a private hall mat.

Minutes blurred into mouth and breath and the chain construct long since dissolved between her fingers; her essence still spiked through my core like a second pulse.

[Primary anchor integrity: Elevated — Strained]

[Advisory: Visibility management critical before academy intake]

[Absorption pathway: Dormant]

[Host presence: Intact]

When we finally stopped, the bay lights had shifted angle with the afternoon.

Gianna’s eyes were clear again. The tears had not been allowed a second life.

"Hey..."

"What is it?"

"You are you. I’m here because it’s you. I’m kissing you because it has always been you."

Something shattered inside my heart.

"So... Revien or not, the one in front was always honest with me. And I never doubted it for a single moment."

I don’t know what to reply at all.

"Go," she said.