All Chapters of Kill Me Once More, My Love : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

56 Chapters

I'm Coming With You

Dorian's POVHe reads the message twice and by the second time he is already standing up and reaching for his jacket on the back of the chair because there is only one kind of person who tells someone not to call the police and only one kind of person who takes a civilian to deliver that message and he has spent fifteen years building a company that operates in the exact space between what the police handle and what they don't and he knows precisely what this is.Nadia is already on her feet with her phone in her hand and her bag over her shoulder and that look on her face that he is beginning to understand is what she looks like when she has shifted from feeling something into managing it — the composure dropping over everything like a shutter closing, efficient and total, and under different circumstances he would find it remarkable but right now he is finding his car keys and thinking about the text message and what it means that whoever sent it knew to tell her to come alone."Whe

She Remembers

Nadia's POVThe last time she was in this building she was twenty-three years old and it was 1891 and she made it as far as the second floor stairwell before everything went wrong, and the reason she knows that detail with the kind of clarity that belongs to lived experience rather than research is that dying in a specific location leaves a mark on the soul the same way a scar leaves a mark on skin — permanent, specific, yours whether you want it or not.The corridor ahead of her is different now, the walls repainted and the floors replaced and a century of renovation sitting on top of the bones of the original structure, but the bones are the same and her body knows them the way her body knows the layout of her own apartment in the dark — not thought, not recalled, just known, and she follows that knowledge through the ground floor without hesitating and does not look back at Dorian because if she looks back at him she will see his face and she cannot afford what his face does to her

Seventy-two Hours

Dorian's POVHe has done the math three times between the building and the car and the answer is the same every time — seventy-two hours from the moment she stayed during the episode, which was approximately nine forty-five PM, which means the clock ran out at nine forty-five PM three days from now and that is not enough time for the kind of careful, methodical approach he would normally apply to a problem of this complexity but it is enough time to do significant damage to whatever Vael has been building if he moves without hesitation and he has never once in his life had a problem moving without hesitation.Nadia is walking beside him with her sister's hand in hers and her phone in her other hand and that look on her face that he is learning to read — the one that means she is three steps ahead of the current moment and running calculations he cannot see and coming to conclusions she has not decided whether to share yet — and he lets her have the thirty seconds between the building

Did I Do That To You

Nadia's POVShe knows what the entity just did and she has about thirty seconds to get to him before it works.The image was not a threat — she understood that the moment it loaded on every screen simultaneously, too deliberate, too specific, chosen with the precision of something that knows exactly which lever to pull and how hard. A threat would have been the words on the wall again, the message on her phone, the taking of Sable. This was something else entirely. This was the entity reaching into six hundred years of Dorian's accumulated soul memory and cracking the door open from the outside because a Dorian who starts remembering on the entity's terms is a Dorian it can move through, and she did not stay during that episode and survive Vael's seventy-two hour countdown and get Sable out of that building to lose him to a five second image on a television screen.She crosses the room before she finishes the thought.He is standing in front of the largest screen with his back to her

The Archivist

Dorian's POVHe has driven past this building his entire life and every single time — without exception, without a reason he could ever locate or explain — his foot comes off the accelerator.Not a conscious decision. Not something he ever noticed until tonight when Nadia reads the address from her phone and he turns onto the street and his foot does the thing it always does and this time he is paying attention and the recognition that moves through him is not the reaching uncertain feeling from the conference room or the raw unguarded thing from the apartment — it is older than both of those, heavier, the specific weight of something that has been waiting a long time to be acknowledged and has finally run out of patience.He pulls up outside and cuts the engine and the three of them sit looking at it through the windscreen — four stories, old stone, the kind of building that has been standing long enough that the city grew up around it rather than the other way around. A bookshop on

Face To Face

Nadia's POVThe Archivist doesn't move from her chair and that tells Nadia everything she needs to know about how afraid they should be right now — which is not at all, or completely, and the difference between those two things is going to depend entirely on what happens in the next sixty seconds.Dorian is already on his feet and positioned between her and the door with the specific instinct of a man who does not think about protecting people, he just does it, and under different circumstances she would spend time examining what that does to the plan but the plan has been ash since approximately the moment she grabbed his wrist on his couch and told him not to answer his phone, so she lets him stand there and she looks at the Archivist and waits for the instruction she can already see forming behind those ancient eyes.Behind her Sable has gone completely still against the shelving, the particular stillness of someone who understands that the most useful thing they can do right now

What He Does In The Dark

Dorian's POVThe darkness is the first thing in six hours that has felt like an advantage and he uses it before anyone in the room has finished adjusting to it.He moves toward where Vael was standing — not quickly, not with the urgency that would make noise and give position away, but with the deliberate economy of someone who spent two years in military intelligence learning that the difference between finding a person in a dark room and not finding them is almost always patience — and he tracks him by the one thing Vael cannot control, which is the specific quality of stillness he carries, that particular displacement of air that Dorian has been aware of since the man walked through the door and that is, in the complete absence of visual information, considerably easier to follow than Vael would have anticipated.He finds him near the window and puts his hand on the wall beside Vael's shoulder and leans in close enough that when he speaks it is below the range that carries across a

The Part I Didn't Tell You

Nadia's POVShe has rehearsed this conversation in seventeen different versions across eight months of preparation and none of them started with the Archivist announcing that the person who built the mechanism running through Dorian's bloodline is still alive and none of them had Dorian looking at her the way he is looking at her right now — not with the professional assessment or the raw vulnerability or even the careful controlled filing she watched him do when Vael put the plan in the room, but with something that has all three of those things underneath it and none of them on the surface, just his full attention on her face and the question still sitting in the air between them waiting for the answer she has been deciding how to give since he asked it.The Archivist's revelation is in the room too — the person who originally induced the mechanism is still alive — and it is pressing against the edges of everything she needs to say next like a second conversation waiting for the fir

The Choice Nobody Made

Dorian's POVHe has spent his entire adult life making decisions with incomplete information and the skill he developed for doing that — the ability to assess what he has, identify what he doesn't, and move forward anyway without the paralysis that incomplete pictures produce in most people — is the thing that built Ashvale Meridian from two people in a rented office to forty-three employees and a client list that governments don't publicly acknowledge, and it is completely useless to him right now because the incomplete information sitting in this archive room at midnight is not the kind that yields to assessment.The Archivist said she'll tell you when she's ready and the way she said it — with the specific finality of a woman closing a door on a conversation — told him that pushing on it tonight is not going to produce anything except a closed door pushed harder, so he turns his attention to the thing she is willing to talk about and he looks at her in the chair and says: "The brid

The Drive Home

Nadia's POVThe silence in the car has the specific weight of a conversation that has already happened and hasn't been processed yet — all the words said and unsaid in the Archivist's archive room sitting in the space between the three of them like something that needs time and air before it becomes anything other than raw material.Dorian drives the way he does everything — with the controlled economy of a man who has decided what he is doing and is doing it without the performance of effort — and she watches his hands on the wheel in her peripheral vision and thinks about the document on the console between them and the Archivist's voice saying "your soul is not just a vehicle, it never was" and tries to build a coherent picture from everything the last six hours produced and finds that the picture keeps rearranging itself every time she gets close to a shape she recognizes.Behind her Sable is quiet in a way that is different from the quiet she maintained in the archive room — not

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