Chapter 193: 194 | My Girlfriend Picked Out The Wig
"Then protect that. Because Father will go through them to get to you. That’s not speculation. That’s precedent." She looked at me with something that might have been envy or might have been grief, the two looking identical on D’Angelo features. "He went through my mother to control me. He’ll do the same to yours."
The room went very quiet.
"My mother is dead."
"I know." Vivian’s voice didn’t waver. "I’m not talking about your mother."
She walked past me toward the door. Her shoulder brushed mine as she passed, and the contact lasted less than a second, but I felt the drain stir. Just a flicker. A recognition. Her Essentia registered against mine like a fingerprint on glass. Brief. Faint. But present.
Vivian was a Null.
Except she wasn’t.
Her ability was structural reinforcement. Unregistered. Hidden. Active beneath a surface that every scan in the world would read as empty.
Just like mine had been.
She paused at the door.
"Good night, Rome."
"Good night, Vivian."
The door closed behind her with a soft click. I stood alone in the golden room with the harbor lights and the empty wine glasses and the white orchid that was probably fake because nothing in this building was what it appeared to be.
I pulled out my phone.
Scrolled past Mera and Cheon’s messages.
Opened a new text to Noel.
Me: im done. heading home first. then coming to you. i promised you the truth and you’re going to get it.
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
Noel: What happened.
Me: everything. family stuff. corporate espionage. blood tests. the usual.
Noel: Are you being serious right now.
Me: unfortunately yes. ill be there in an hour. maybe ninety minutes.
Noel: My dorm. Room 4-B. Knock three times so I know it’s you and not campus security.
Me: three times. got it.
Noel: And Rome.
Me: yeah.
Noel: If you’re about to tell me something that changes everything, at least have the decency to bring food. I haven’t eaten since lunch and I make terrible decisions on an empty stomach.
I smiled at the screen.
Me: noted. any requests.
Noel: Surprise me. You seem to enjoy that.
I pocketed the phone and headed for the door. The hallway was empty. The elevator waited. The ride down felt longer than the ride up, the way descents always do when you’re carrying more weight than you started with.
The ground floor bar hummed with conversation and ambient jazz. Nobody looked at me. I walked through the entrance and into the night air, which smelled like salt and exhaust and the particular electricity that Century City generated after dark.
Marco had the Mercedes at the curb. The engine was running. He opened the back door before I reached it.
"Productive evening, sir."
"You could call it that."
I slid into the back seat and found Mera already there.
She sat in the far corner with her legs tucked under her and her tail coiled around the armrest. She wore a black hoodie pulled over her horns and dark jeans. Her yellow eyes caught the streetlight coming through the tinted glass.
"Cheon’s in the front seat."
I looked. Cheon sat beside Marco with a tablet open on her lap, the blue light of the screen illuminating her face. She had her hair down. No makeup. The severe ponytail was gone and her light blue hair fell around her jaw in a way that made her look five years younger and infinitely more dangerous.
"I thought I said I was going alone."
"You did." Cheon didn’t look up from her tablet. "We listened. We disagreed. We came anyway."
"Typical."
"Efficient. Mera portaled into the back seat six minutes ago. I walked in through the front door of the bar twenty minutes ago wearing a wig and ordered a club soda."
"You wore a wig."
Cheon produced a brown bob wig from beneath her seat and held it up.
"Mera picked it out."
"You looked adorable," Mera said from the corner. "Very incognito. Very spy movie."
"I looked ridiculous."
"Same thing."
Marco pulled into traffic. The city rolled past the windows. I leaned my head back against the seat rest.
"Silver Lexus," I said. "South side of our building. Between eight PM and four AM. Meridian Group private security. Father has three operatives rotating eight-hour shifts to surveil the apartment."
The silence that followed was different from the kind I’d gotten used to. Cheon stopped scrolling. Mera’s tail went rigid against the armrest.
"How long," Cheon said.
"Unknown. Probably since the convenience store footage went viral."
"He’s watching the building."
"He’s watching who comes and goes."
Cheon looked at Mera. Mera looked at Cheon. Something passed between them that didn’t need words, that language they’d developed over the past week of sharing a kitchen and a bathroom and a man and an impossible situation.
"What else," Mera said.
I told them.
All of it.
The facility beneath the warehouse district. Dr. Morita. The blood samples with their anomalous signatures. The comparison against eighteen years of baseline data. The fact that two of those signatures were identifiable as spatial manipulation and thermal regulation. The wedding. Daniel Park. The board. Margaret Chen. The trust clause. The timeline.
Everything Vivian had given me.
Everything except the part at the end where her shoulder brushed mine and the drain recognized something in her blood that a Null shouldn’t have.
That part I kept.
For now.
The Mercedes rolled through downtown traffic. Red lights turned green. Green lights turned yellow. The city breathed around us the way it always did, millions of lives continuing their trajectories while three people in the back of a luxury sedan processed information that could destroy all of them.
"November fourteenth," Cheon said. "The next blood draw."
"Vivian can push it to late November."
"That gives us two months."
"That gives us two months."
Cheon pulled up her tablet and started typing. I recognized the format. She was building a timeline. Color-coded. Organized by priority. Because Cheon Hae-Won responded to existential threats the same way she responded to homework assignments, with structure and deadlines and a spreadsheet that would make a project manager weep.
Mera crawled across the back seat and pressed herself against my side. Her body ran hotter than normal human temperature. Her tail wound around my wrist. Her face pushed into my neck.
"He’s not taking you." Her voice was low. Hard. The performative flirtation was gone. "I don’t care what it costs. He is not taking you anywhere."
I put my arm around her.
"Nobody’s taking me anywhere."
"Promise."
"I promise."
She bit my collarbone. Not playfully. Not sexually. A marking. A statement of territory that she delivered the way animals did, with teeth and pressure and the understanding that some things could only be communicated through the body.
"Mera."
"What."
"I need to go see Noel tonight."
