Chapter 135: The One Thing He Never Trained For

Chapter 135: Chapter 135: The One Thing He Never Trained For

Victor’s POV

Victor took the stairs two at a time, Silver half a step ahead of him, and every year of discipline he’d built into himself — the interrogation training, the years of learning to slow his own heartbeat under duress, the particular cold clarity he’d relied on to survive a syndicate that had wanted him dead before Silver ever pulled him out of that room — none of it was doing a single thing to steady him right now.

Won’t wake up.

Two words, and his whole body had gone somewhere past fear into something colder and more absolute, a kind of stillness he only vaguely recognized from the worst nights of his life.

"Which room, sir," he said, voice rougher than he wanted it to sound.

"End of the hall." Silver didn’t slow down, didn’t look back, his own weapon still raised, eyes still sweeping every doorway they passed with the same relentless vigilance he’d apparently been running on since he woke. "She’s breathing. Pulse is strong. She’s just—"

"Not awake. I heard you the first time, sir." Victor didn’t mean for it to come out sharp, and he softened it immediately with the deference that had never once wavered in the years since Silver had pulled him out of that room. Silver didn’t react to either version anyway, which told Victor more about the state of things than any explanation could have. The Silver Azar he knew — controlled, immaculate, a man who measured every word before it left his mouth in every conversation Victor had ever witnessed him have — was moving through his own house like a soldier clearing a hostile building, and something about that scared Victor almost as much as the two words that had brought him running in the first place.

They reached the door. Silver pushed it open.

Victor’s chest seized the moment he saw her.

Dahlia lay across the bed exactly as Silver must have left her, dark hair spread across the pillow, chest rising and falling in slow, even breaths that should have been reassuring and somehow weren’t, not with her eyes closed and her body so completely, unnaturally still.

He crossed the room before he’d consciously decided to move, dropping to his knees beside the bed, both hands hovering over her the way a man’s hands hover when he’s afraid that touching something will somehow make the wrongness of it real.

"Doll." His voice cracked on the single syllable, and he didn’t care, didn’t have room left to care about anything except the fact that she wasn’t answering. "Baby doll, come on. Open your eyes."

Nothing.

He pressed two fingers to the side of her throat, the way he’d been trained to check a pulse in the field a thousand times over, in circumstances far worse than this — except none of those times had ever made his hands shake the way they were shaking now.

Steady. Strong. Alive.

Just not there.

"She’s been like this the whole time, sir?" Victor asked, not looking away from her face, cataloguing every detail — the color still in her cheeks, the absence of any visible wound, the particular, deep stillness that reminded him uncomfortably of surgical anesthesia rather than ordinary sleep.

"Since I woke up." Silver’s voice had gone quieter behind him, some of the earlier iron control cracking at the edges now that the immediate threat of an empty house had resolved into something else — grief, maybe, or the specific helplessness of a man who had spent his entire life solving problems with force and had just discovered one that didn’t respond to it. "I don’t know how long that’s been. Hours. Maybe longer."

Victor brushed a strand of hair back from her face, gentle in a way he rarely allowed himself to be in front of anyone, let alone her father. "Persephone, sir. Do you know where she’d have been?"

"Penthouse." The answer came immediate, certain, the one thing in this entire house Silver seemed to have no doubt about at all. "It’s mine — I keep it near the university for her. She stays there during the school week, comes back here on weekends." His jaw tightened. "This isn’t a weekend she was scheduled to be home. Which means, if I’m right, she’s alone in that building right now, however many floors up, with no idea what’s happened outside her own windows."

Victor closed his eyes for a moment, forcing air into his lungs the way he’d trained himself to during every worst moment of his life — slow, deliberate, refusing to let panic dictate the next ten seconds even when every part of him wanted to. He’d survived interrogation rooms with this exact breath. He’d survive this too.

He opened his eyes and looked at Dahlia’s face again, and the breathing exercise did absolutely nothing to steady the ache sitting directly beneath his ribs.

She treated me like Victor, he thought, distantly, the memory arriving unbidden the way memories did when a person was standing at the edge of losing something. Not like a weapon. Not like her father’s soldier. Just — me.

He’d spent years training himself to believe that attachment was a liability, that the men who survived the longest were the ones who never let themselves need anyone too much. He’d believed it completely, right up until a woman who wasn’t intimidated by anything about him had looked at him across a room and simply refused to see a weapon.

He wasn’t going to lose that. Not to whatever this was. Not without understanding it first, and not without doing everything in his power to bring her back from wherever she currently was.

"What do we do, sir," he said quietly, not really a question, more a demand aimed at the universe in general. "What do we do."

Silver was quiet for a long moment, and when he finally answered, his voice carried the particular exhausted honesty of a man who’d already run through every option and found none of them satisfying.

"We wait," he said. "And in the meantime, we find out what killed my security detail, what’s wrong with my house, and how fast we can get across the city to Persephone’s building." A pause, sharper now, some of his usual command reasserting itself. "And you’re going to tell me, on the way, exactly what put those bruises on your knuckles and why you drove here like the building was on fire."

Victor glanced down at his own hands — split knuckles, dried blood he hadn’t fully registered belonged to him rather than to whatever he’d fought his way through to get here — and let out a short, humorless breath.

"It’s a long story, sir."

"We have time," Silver said, though something in his voice suggested he didn’t fully believe that either. "Apparently more time than we’d like, given how long we were both asleep."

Victor pressed one more, careful kiss to Dahlia’s forehead, murmuring something low enough that even Silver, standing a few feet away, couldn’t have made out the words. Then he rose, steadying himself, forcing the soldier back to the surface over the man who’d just been kneeling there falling apart.

"Then let’s use it, sir," he said. "Persephone first. Everything else after."

Silver nodded once, already moving toward the door, and Victor cast one last look back at Dahlia — still, breathing, unreachable — before following him out into a house that no longer felt like it belonged to anyone he recognized.