Chapter 293 Murder.

Chapter 293: 293 Murder.

"Then again, that’s going to be something we come at strictly on a case-by-case basis."

"Gotcha," she agreed quickly.

"Still on board?" I asked.

She grinned. "You kidding?" she said, casually leaning back in her leather chair with a heavy sigh. Her entire posture shifted, and she smoothly slipped into a thick, gritty Brooklyn accent. "It’s gonna be a genuine pleasure not lookin’ over my shoulder every single minute ’f every day.

"Got myself high-end protection and a stable career? And not with some two-bit boss who’s gonna be lookin’ to stab me in the back or sell me down tha river the second things get hot? Hell," she shrugged, her blue scales shimmering in the office light. "It’s practically a vacation."

"Let’s not go quite that far," I said, organizing the thin file of notes on my desk. "This is still a highly demanding business, and I fully expect you to do the actual work. But I want you to know that if there are any specific jobs you’re deeply uncomfortable with, tell me, and I’ll see what I can do. Either way, I will always ask for your explicit confirmation before I put you on a contract."

"Does that officially mean I’m hired?" she asked, her blank eyes suddenly, literally flashing with glowing pink hearts in a flawless mimicry of Psyren.

I couldn’t help but grin. "Well..."

"Uh... Miles?"

I paused, my spine instantly stiffening at the raw, unfiltered panic bleeding through Rhea’s voice in my earpiece.

"Just a second," I told Chamelea, holding up a finger before tapping the comms receiver. "Yeah?"

"You’re, uh... you’re gonna wanna see this. Right now."

I frowned. "See what?"

"I’m sending the encrypted feed to you right now. Check your phone."

What the hell was she talking about? But if Rhea was actively interrupting a closed-door hiring meeting, it had to be a tier-one emergency.

Feeling a cold knot forming in my stomach, I pulled out my phone and tapped the flashing notification, pulling up the live video feed.

The first angle looked like hijacked security footage from the main floor of the Metro First bank Glacia was currently hitting. I smiled a little as I watched her enter the scene.

A violent, freezing wind whipped around her, dramatically shattering the tempered glass windows as she floated into the lobby, delivering a beautifully boisterous, aristocratic evil monologue to the screaming civilians.

But my smile didn’t last long.

No Whey smashed through the front doors a minute later, aggressively flexing his massive guns for the cameras. The footage was slightly grainy, but I clearly saw the meathead hurl himself directly at her, violently bulling his way through several freezing blasts. A massive, reinforced wall of ice erupted from the floor tiles to block him, and he smashed straight through it like a wrecking ball. Glacia rose gracefully into the air, narrowly dodging a heavy oak desk that No Whey heaved off the floor and hurled at her head. In theatrical answer, Glacia summoned and hurled several huge, blunt chunks of ice at the burly hero. He braced himself, his massive arms crossed in an X; the frozen blocks smashed harmlessly against his biceps, failing to drive him back even a single inch.

No Whey belted out a booming laugh and struck a heavy front double-bicep pose.

"You’ll have to do significantly better than that to stop No Whey, foul villain! For with the awesome power of raw protein, absolutely none can withstand my thews!"

"Then let us see your mighty thews face down the true wrath of the winter storm!" Glacia cried out flawlessly.

And that was exactly when it all went catastrophic.

I stared, completely flabbergasted, as Glacia suddenly swept her hand in a wide, vicious arc. Massive, jagged, razor-sharp icicles instantly manifested in the air around her—and then violently slammed directly into the startled hero.

No Whey reeled backward, his eyes going wide with shock. He fell hard to the marble floor with a sickening, heavy thud.

Three massive spears of solid ice were jutting violently out of his chest.

A massive pool of dark crimson blood rapidly began to spread across the pristine white floor tiles.

Oh, fuck.

I felt my entire body go ice cold. Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no. This was bad. This was unbelievably, unsalvageably bad.

"Holy shit," Psyren whispered, peering closely over my shoulder at the glowing screen. "She straight up iced that guy."

"Yeah," I breathed. I watched in total, paralyzed horror as a massive blast of thick white fog enveloped the bank, perfectly covering Glacia as she made her pre-choreographed escape through a side wall. "Yeah, she did. Rhea? How far has this spread?"

"Fuck, Miles. It’s absolutely everywhere. It’s all over the net! The trending metrics are just exploding!"

"Is this feed real-time?"

"No, there was a tiny delay. But—"

"Patch me directly through to Glacia. Now!" I barked.

"She’s not answering the comms, but she’s just landing on the back lawn right now, Miles!"

I shoved my phone into my pocket, jumped to my feet, and burst through the heavy oak doors, sprinting down the hallway. Face-to-face would be better. Doing damage control like this was infinitely smarter.

As I ran, I heard a sudden, deafening mechanical rattle.

The heavy brass light fixtures, the doorknobs, the metal picture frames—everything metallic around me began vibrating violently against the drywall, reacting to the massive, panicked spike in my magnetic field.

I forced myself to aggressively clamp down on my emotions, actively tamping down the quivering magnetic pulse threatening to tear the walls apart.

Don’t panic. Just breathe. Take this one absolute nightmare of a step at a time.

I reached the grand foyer exactly as the heavy front doors swung open. Glacia stepped inside, the icy villainess absolutely beaming with pride.

"Sir!" she called out, brushing a dusting of frost from her white coat. "Did you see?"

"I saw it, alright. What the hell happened out there?!"

Glacia stopped dead in her tracks, her triumphant smile vanishing into blank surprise.

"Happened, sir?"

"Yes! Why the hell did you kill No Whey?!"

She gave me a deeply shocked, utterly bewildered look. "Kill him?! But... but sir, I never!"

"Glacia, I literally just watched the video feed. You pumped an entire meat locker’s worth of razor-sharp icicles directly into his chest cavity!"

"What?!" she gasped, her jaw dropping in total confusion. "Sir! I would never! I left him alive on the floor, exactly as you taught me! I never physically harmed him!"

I stared hard into her eyes. Something wasn’t right here. Glacia absolutely wasn’t the type of person to lie to my face. She was fiercely loyal to the rules.

And she definitely would have remembered violently executing a registered hero on live television. What the actual fuck was going on?

"You seriously don’t remember doing this?" Psyren asked. She stepped up beside me, flipping her phone around and pressing play on the viral video.

Glacia watched the grainy footage in sheer bafflement. But the exact second the jagged icicles plunged into No Whey’s chest, her already pale face went utterly, sickeningly ashen. She looked up at me frantically, absolute terror in her icy blue eyes.

"Sir," she pleaded, her voice cracking. "I swear to you on my life, it did not happen that way! I never summoned those icicles! I never killed him!"

Oh, yeah. Something was very, very wrong here.

Glacia took a shaky, stumbling step backward, staring at the glowing screen in dumb, horrified amazement as the brutal execution looped endlessly. "I didn’t," she repeated, wrapping her arms around her chest. "I swear, sir. I never... I would never violate your rules..."

"Glacia. Glacia!" I barked, stepping forward and grabbing her firmly by the shoulders, jerking her spiraling attention back to me. Forcing my voice to remain level and calm, I said, "Tell me, very carefully, exactly what happened in that room."

My authoritative tone seemed to anchor her. She took a deep, shuddering breath and let it out as a cloud of frost.

"Everything happened exactly as it did in that video right up until the icicles, sir. I didn’t fire those! That was exactly when I initiated my retreat! I threw up a massive blast of icy air to fog the room and cover my escape through the reinforced wall. Then, I flew straight back here to the chalet. I swear to you, sir, he was completely alive and flexing when I left that building! I never killed him!"

She whirled to look at Psyren, her eyes blazing with desperate intensity. "You! Read my mind right now! See for yourself if my memory is any different from what I just said!"

"Should I?" Psyren asked, shooting me a cautious look.

I barely caught the question, my mind racing a mile a minute. I looked closely at Glacia’s terrified, desperate face. "No," I said thoughtfully. "You don’t need to, Psyren. Glacia?"

"Sir?"

"I believe you," I said flatly.

She stared at me as if she was terrified to believe it. "Y-you do, sir?" she whispered, her voice trembling violently.

"Yeah. I absolutely do," I said grimly, crossing my arms. "There are way too many ways that specific feed might’ve been digitally faked or manipulated. Or worse."

Glacia immediately drew herself up, her face schooling itself, growing as hard and resolute as a glacier. "That may be true, sir. But I still insist. I am completely innocent of this crime, and I want it proven."

"I really should dive in anyway, boss," Psyren put in seriously, all the bratty playfulness completely gone from her voice. "I need to check if she got actively mind-controlled for a few seconds on the floor. If the rival telepath was good enough, she might not even consciously remember pulling the trigger."

It was incredibly hard to argue with that terrifying logic. And it was a mandatory security protocol to cover our bases either way.

"Alright. Do it," I said grimly, stepping back as Psyren’s eyes flared a brilliant, pulsing pink. I looked between the two of them, the cold, lethal reality of the situation finally settling deep into my bones.

Because if Glacia was telling the absolute truth, and her mind hadn’t been hijacked... then who the hell had just framed my league for murder?