Chapter 467: Restarting the Battle
The apartment was too quiet again.
Arkai stood by the window, his arms crossed, his wolf ears twitching every few seconds toward sounds that weren’t there.
Oathran sat on the edge of the couch, elbows on his knees, his eyes fixed on the floor as though it might reveal something useful.
And Eastiel... Eastiel paced. Back and forth across the living room rug, his lion tail lashing behind him like an agitated metronome, his ears flat against his head.
"She’s fine," Arkai said, though the words came out tighter than he intended.
"I know." Eastiel didn’t stop pacing. "I just can’t stay here and fucking wait."
His half-day work day had made him miss everything. He had come home at two in the afternoon only to find out that no one had told him that Cecilia had gone to meet Arzhen Vasiliev. Alone. At ten in the morning. While he was still at work, oblivious, answering emails like a fool.
He had been mad. He was still mad. Especially at the universe for arranging things so that he was always one step behind when it came to protecting her.
Right after he was going to protest at his brothers for not notifying him about anything, Arkai’s phone had lit up.
"Damon, what’s up?"
"I was busy cleaning up the zombie rift from last night, so I just got this info too." Damon said, rough with exhaustion and frustration, maybe, and also some guilt.
"I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you sooner. My deputy director is not my person, and he was bought to stop this from spreading. This happened around ten to eleven this morning."
Damon apologized a couple more times, but the three men had already stopped listening.
Arkai was pulling up the footage on the apartment’s big screen, Oathran stood rigidly beside Eastiel, their eyes locked on the television.
The video played.
It was shaky, clearly shot from a phone, perhaps a pedestrian who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The morning sun was bright, and a figure crashed into frame, half-shifted, his body torn between human and tiger in a way that looked painful.
Striped fur rippled across his arms and chest. His hands were claws. His face was caught mid-transformation, fangs bared, golden eyes wild and unseeing.
He moved like a storm, erratic and violent, his tail, fully manifested, smashing through a cafe window that was already broken, sending more glass spraying across the sidewalk.
"CECILIA!"
The roar was distorted by the phone’s microphone, but the name was unmistakable. He screamed it again. And again. And again. Each time, his voice cracked more. Each time, his movements grew more desperate, more directionless.
"CECILIA—WHERE—"
He threw a street vendor’s cart aside and it crumpled against a lamppost. He lunged at a parked car, his claws raking across the hood, leaving furrows deep enough to see the engine beneath. Passersby scattered. Someone was screaming. Someone else was calling for help.
Then the hunters arrived.
They circled him, while police in tactical gear flanked them, dart guns raised. Arzhen didn’t seem to see them. He just kept turning, kept searching, kept screaming her name like it was the only word he remembered.
The first dart hit him in the shoulder. He barely flinched.
The second hit his thigh. He stumbled.
The third, his neck. His roar faltered and his movements slowed.
When his claws retracted and his legs gave out beneath him, he finally collapsed onto the asphalt, his chest still heaving, his lips still forming her name even as his eyes slid closed.
The video ended.
And it ended two hours ago. It was four pm already.
"She’s fine," Oathran said, repeating himself. "She’s fine. We don’t see her in the video, nor did we get anything about her from Damon. He didn’t know where she was either."
"Her last online was five minutes ago." Arkai was already checking his phone, refreshing the location app, the group chat, anything. "She’s fine."
Eastiel took a deep breath. It was the nth deep breath he had taken in the last ten minutes, and it wasn’t working any better now than it had the first time.
"Lay on the floor." Arkai said. "We lay on the floor and feel the building’s sway. Let’s go."
"I’m gonna throw up just from the sentence you just said, alright." Eastiel shot him a look.
"Let’s go out and find her. One of you call her phon—"
Beep, beep, beep, bee—
The sound of the apartment door’s keypad stopped all three of them mid-motion. They turned as one, their broad shoulders crowding the narrow hallway as they hurried toward the entrance.
The door swung open.
"H-huh?"
Cecilia stood there, blinking at them with confusion. Her cream blouse was slightly rumpled, and her hair was windswept. Her eyes were tired but clear, and in one hand she carried several small grocery bags.
"Cecilia—"
Arkai stepped forward, his mouth already opening to ask where she had been, why she hadn’t called, was she hurt, was she—
Two more heads peeked around both sides of the doorframe.
"Hello, downstairs neighbors!"
The three men were immediately blinded by unfathomable beauty.
Like staring into the sun or like being struck by lightning made of cheekbones and blue eyes and a smile that rearranged something fundamental in their souls, they were starstruck.
Momo’s face, framed by blonde hair, was an assault weapon of aesthetic perfection. Beside her, Bunny’s face was its usual self, which was to say, significantly less devastating only because of the comparison, and still unfairly handsome.
"Umm." Cecilia lifted the grocery bags slightly, as though they explained everything. "I brought them along. Can we have dinner together?"
She stepped fully inside, and the two gods followed... that revealed that Momo and Bunny also carried more bags in their hands too.
"They’re our neighbors now," Cecilia added. "They moved in upstairs."
The three men stared at her. Then at the gods. Then back at her.
Weren’t she... being suspiciously too close to these two strangers...?
***
Thalia walked into her law firm office with her phone pressed to her ear, her heels clicking against the marble floor faster than usual.
The sun was setting outside her window, painting the city in shades of gold and amber, but she didn’t notice. She hadn’t noticed much of anything since Gregor’s name had flashed across her screen.
"Say that again," she said, shrugging off her coat and letting it fall onto her chair without looking. "Slowly."
Gregor’s voice crackled through the speaker, strained. "Master Arzhen suddenly made a strange decision regarding the Barrier Invention," Gregor said. "Madam’s technology."
"I know which invention it is, Gregor." Thalia dropped into her chair and pulled her laptop open, her fingers already flying across the keyboard. "What about it?"
"He’s withdrawing."
Thalia’s fingers stopped mid-keystroke.
"What?"
"He’s withdrawing from the contract. Effective immediately. He’s informed the Hunter Association that he will not be producing the barrier technology. He will not be licensing it. He will not be releasing it to any other manufacturer either." Gregor paused, and Thalia could hear him breathing, trying very hard to stay calm.
"He’s pulling out entirely."
Thalia stared at her laptop screen. The email was already there, flagged urgent, the subject line a cold, clinical string of words that made no sense together. VOLUNTARY WITHDRAWAL FROM BARRIER PRODUCTION AGREEMENT.
"I don’t understand, Gregor." She leaned back in her chair, her mind racing through possibilities and finding only dead ends. "What is he trying to do?"
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Then Gregor said, very quietly, "Could it be... to lure Madam out...?"
"What do you mean?" Thalia sat forward again, her brow furrowing. "Wouldn’t it be the opposite? Madam doesn’t want any sole exclusive contract. She wanted to patent it for everyone to use and improve. That was always her position."
"Arzhen keeping exclusive rights was a loss for her, not a win. If he’s giving that up—"
"No, Thalia." Gregor’s voice was heavy now. "Arzhen still won’t give up the patent."
"Again... what... do you mean...?" Thalia whispered.
"I mean," Gregor said, "he might want to threaten to hoard it all. Withdraw all production. Not release the design at all."
He sounded like he desperately hoped it was wrong.
"The patent is under Vasiliev. The exclusive rights are his. He can choose to do nothing with them. He can choose to let the technology sit in a vault, unused, unproduced, while everyone begs for it."
Thalia’s hand had come up to cover her forehead. Her eyes were wide.
"To force Madam to return," she finished, her voice barely audible.
Gregor didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.
The Barrier Invention was Cecilia’s life’s work... or at least a significant portion of it. The technology she had built from scratch, refining it day after day, year after year, through the marriage and everything in between.
It was designed to protect hunters during rift closures, to create safe zones in corrupted areas, to save lives. It was, by all accounts, revolutionary. And Arzhen Vasiliev held the patent.
She had walked away from it. She had let it go. Because staying and fighting for it would have meant staying entangled with him, and she had chosen her freedom over her work.
Now he was using it as a weapon.
The Hunter Association was counting on that technology. Every rift closure project in the country, maybe beyond, had been planning around its implementation.
It wasn’t just useful or innovative. It was essential. And Arzhen was threatening to bury it. Not sell it. Not license it. Not even produce it himself for profit.
Bury it.
Unless Cecilia came back.
"He’s insane," Thalia breathed. "He’s actually insane. The Hunter Association won’t stand for this. They’ll fight him. They’ll challenge the patent. They’ll—"
"They can’t."
"They won’t be able to... without Madam."
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