Chapter 191: But we can fight about it later

Sienna adjusted her voice through the auto-tune filter she’d built years ago, dropping it low, disguising it as something unrecognizable, something safe.

"Hey," she said. "It’s the Invisible Shadow. You good?"

On the other end, Aria’s eyes widened. She couldn’t place where the voice was coming from, couldn’t see a face, couldn’t be certain of anything except that it was working, that somehow, impossibly, she was hearing a familiar presence reach through the walls meant to keep her isolated.

A small, relieved smile broke across her tired face. Whatever happened next, at least she wasn’t completely alone anymore. She finally had the chance to speak to her friend one more time.

"I’m okay," Aria said softly. "It’s good to be able to say goodbye, my friend."

"Listen to me," Sienna said, her disguised voice steady even as her chest ached. "I will get you out of there. Alright? You just need to stay strong and fight. I promise you."

"You don’t have to," Aria said, a tired kind of calm settling over her words. "It’s too late now. The virus has spread. I’m already showing symptoms."

"It’s me. Trust me. I will find a way." Sienna’s voice cracked slightly despite the filter, tears already sliding down her face.

On the other end, she could hear Aria’s breath catch too, a quiet, broken sound.

"I’m sorry," the man’s voice cut back in. "That’s all the time we can allow." A pause. "Will you leave our system alone now?"

Sienna didn’t answer. She sat frozen for a moment, tears streaming silently down her cheeks, before her fingers moved almost on their own, planting a small, untraceable trojan deep inside their network before severing the connection completely.

It wouldn’t act immediately. But in a few days, quietly, invisibly, it would begin unraveling everything they’d built.

Before logging off entirely, she managed to pull whatever fragments of data she could notes on the virus, partial vaccine formulas, incomplete records. It wasn’t much. At some point, it seemed, they’d abandoned the digital system altogether and gone fully manual, which made the rest difficult to reach.

Still, she had something. She opened new tabs, pulling up research papers, old virology studies, anything that might help her understand what she was dealing with, and lost herself in it.

She was still there, hours later, when the door opened, and Viktor stepped back in. He’d assumed, hours ago, that she’d finally come out to eat something. He hadn’t realized she’d been sitting in that exact spot the entire day.

"Simon’s in the hospital," Viktor said, watching her carefully as he crossed the room. "Marcel took Aliya, Elena, and Don Capri to the old Capri mansion. I’ve had men keeping tabs on their movements." He paused. "So far, Aliya’s only left to go shopping for clothes."

He delivered the report evenly, as if she’d asked him to, though his eyes kept drifting to the dried tear tracks on her face, to the exhaustion pulling at her shoulders, worry quietly building behind his calm expression.

"Sienna, baby, I’m sorry about what I said," Viktor said, crossing the room to kneel beside her chair. "You were angry, and you wanted to save your friend. I only wanted to protect you."

"Yes, I’m angry," Sienna said, not looking away from her screen. "But we can fight about it later."

She turned to face him now, her expression sharpening into something more focused, more urgent.

"I saw a few targets when I got into Don Konstantin’s system," she said. "In the lab. West Philadelphia was on the map. It means the virus is coming here, Viktor. That would explain why Aria was infected in the first place." She pulled up a map on her screen, pointing.

"We need to be prepared. And if I’m wrong about any of this, I still need to save Aria."

Viktor studied the screen for a long moment before nodding slowly. "Fine. What do you need?"

"Send word to them," Sienna said, already pulling up a list of names. "The best researchers I know. My mentors. I worked with them for years, though somehow, over time, they all ran from me." Her mouth twisted slightly, something bitter in the memory.

"I would have reached out myself, but they wouldn’t want to hear from me."

"I’ll work on it," Viktor said.

—--

A few days passed.

Aria’s condition worsened steadily. Her skin had gone pale, almost gray, and the fever had settled deep into her bones. The doctors kept her fed on vitamins and fluids, but none of it slowed the virus creeping through her system.

Meanwhile, in the lab, Mr. Cross and his team finally reached a breakthrough. After days without proper sleep, after pushing his team to the edge of exhaustion, they sealed the finished formula inside a vacuum-locked briefcase.

"We believe we have made the cure," Mr. Cross said, sweat beading along his forehead as he stared down at the case in his trembling hands. "All the test samples show great improvement."

He looked up at the researchers around him, his voice tight with a mixture of relief and terror, then at Carina.

"I’m going to go give my daughter the first shot," he said. "Now."

"No need," Carina said, stepping between Mr. Cross and the door, her voice calm and final.

"The boss already has plans for her. Your job here is done. Your money is already in your account. Take your wife and leave. Speak of nothing that happened here, if you care for your lives."

"No way," Mr. Cross said, his voice cracking, desperation flooding every word. "That was not what you promised me. I did my work. I need to save my daughter."

Carina’s expression didn’t shift. "There is always a price to pay," she said. "And you have paid your due. Now leave." She reached over and set a small timer on the console beside her.

"You have a few minutes before this whole place comes down in ruins," taking the briefcase of the vaccines.

Behind her, men in thick protective suits dragged Aria out of her cubicle, her body limp and weak between them. From a window down the hall, her mother saw it happen and screamed her daughter’s name, pressing helplessly against the glass of her own sealed room.