All Chapters of Kill Me Once More, My Love : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Dorian's POVHe has built an entire company on the principle that impossible things are usually just unlikely things that nobody bothered to verify and he has applied that principle to everything from missing persons to government intelligence gaps and it has never once failed him but he is sitting in a pulled-over car at four in the morning looking at a photograph of his father's face on a security feed and the principle is not helping him right now because he verified his father's death himself, stood at the graveside himself, arranged the headstone himself, and the man on that feed is looking at a camera with the patience of someone who has never once in his life been in a hurry.Nadia is very still beside him in the way she goes still when she is paying full attention to something — not the performed composure, the real version, the one that means every part of her available cognitive capacity is directed at a single point — and he can feel her reading his face the way she reads e

Dorian's POVThe paper is older than anything he has held before and it has the specific quality of something that survived by being kept rather than by being made to last, the edges darkened and the ink faded in places but the handwriting dense and deliberate, the handwriting of someone who understood they were recording something that needed to outlive the moment it was written in and took the appropriate care.Nadia's shoulder is against his and she is reading alongside him and he is aware of that contact with the specific awareness that has been running underneath everything since the conference room three days ago, the awareness that lives past strategy and past the plan she built and past everything that happened tonight and simply registers her presence as something his body considers significant regardless of what his mind is doing with everything else.The main body is in Latin and he reads it slowly, not because Latin is difficult but because the content requires the kind of

Dorian's POVHe makes coffee because it is four forty in the morning and his hands need something to do and because thirty two minutes is long enough to do this right if none of it is wasted and standing in his kitchen measuring grounds into a filter is the most ordinary thing he has done in six hours and the ordinariness of it is doing something useful for the part of his chest that has been holding everything tonight without a break.Sable is on the couch with the blanket he pulled from the hall closet without being asked and she is explaining something to her in a low voice and he can hear the cadence of it without the words and the cadence tells him that Nadia is giving her sister the version of the truth that is safe to receive at four forty in the morning after the night Sable has had, which is not all of it but enough, and he lets them have that while the coffee brews and looks out the kitchen window at the city going darker before dawn.He brings two cups to the window where N

Dorian's POVHe reads the message twice and the number it came from is not in his contacts and not in any directory he has access to and the four words on the screen are the four words that tell him everything the Archivist described last night has moved from theoretical to operational and the entity, which has been running this cycle for six hundred years on the assumption that the bridge was something it could always prevent, is now in a position it has never been in before and has no prepared response for.Nadia is standing beside him with her shoulder against his and the dawn is fully through the floor to ceiling windows now and the penthouse has the specific quality of light that belongs to early morning in a high building, clean and direct and without any of the softness that comes later in the day, and he looks at the message and then at her and she looks back at him and neither of them says anything for a moment because the four words have already said the thing that needed s

Dorian's POVHe looks at the word on her screen for about three seconds and then he makes the decision that he should have made at seventeen years old when Vael arrived within the hour and told him what needed to be managed and handed him a framework for his own life that he accepted because he was seventeen and terrified and had blood on his hands he couldn't explain and three seconds of someone else's certainty felt better than the alternative.He is not seventeen and he is not terrified and the only thing on his hands right now is the last page of a document that tells him exactly what he is capable of when nobody is suppressing it and he looks at the word "run" on Nadia's screen and thinks about every direction he has moved in since he was seventeen and understands that every single one of them was away and he is finished with away.He takes her phone.Not to look at the message again but to trace the number and he moves to his desk and opens his laptop and pulls up the software