The ride to the apartment was the quietest thirty minutes of Chase's life. Vincent sat in the passenger seat of the SUV, his hands folded neatly in his lap, staring out the window at the neon blur of the city. He didn't ask questions; he didn't even seem to breathe.
In the back seat, the leather-wrapped case hummed with a low, mournful frequency that made the car's rearview mirror vibrate. Chase gripped the steering wheel, silently grateful he had decided to drive to work instead of taking the train. Letting Vincent on the subway—a place already packed with tension and human proximity—would most likely have ended in a localized spiritual disaster.
When they reached the door, Chase paused, his hand on the handle. "Remember the deal, Vincent. Civilized."
"I am a guest," Vincent whispered, his voice like dry leaves skittering across a grave.
Chase pushed the door open. The apartment was deathly still. Rixsa was standing in the center of the living room, her tail puffed out to twice its normal size, her claws subtly extended. Alex was peeking from behind the kitchen island, her eyes wide with divine anxiety, her halo flickering with a frantic, static light.
And Kaelen was standing by the window.
She had dressed in her finest black silk, her hair pinned back with a silver comb. But as her eyes landed on the pale, lavender-haired boy in the doorway, the comb slipped, clattering against the floor with a sound like a gunshot.
"Vincent," she breathed. The word was a sob and a prayer at the same time.
Vincent stepped into the room. He didn't look at Rixsa's bared teeth or Alex's glowing hands. He only looked at Kaelen. His hollow, twilight eyes finally showed a flicker of light—a painful, searing recognition that seemed to burn through his porcelain skin.
"You look exactly the same," Vincent said softly. "The gods kept you well while I was digging through the dirt for your ghost. Time is a luxury only the traitors and the divine seem to afford."
Kaelen didn't move. She couldn't. The suppressor around her neck pulsed a frantic, jagged violet, struggling to contain the sheer volume of grief and terror flooding her system. "I... I thought you were dead. I saw the fire, Vincent. I saw the Legion fall. I watched the sky swallow everything we were."
"They did fall," Vincent said, taking a slow, heavy step forward. Rixsa growled, a low vibration in her throat, but Chase placed a firm hand on her shoulder, signaling her to stand down. "They died calling your name, Kaelen. They thought you had gone to get reinforcements. They died smiling because they thought their Commander's wife was bringing them hope. I had to watch that hope turn to ash in their eyes."
Kaelen sank to her knees, her silk skirts pooling around her like a funeral shroud. She buried her face in her hands, her voice breaking into ragged, ugly sobs. "I only wanted to save her! Alex was going to be erased! I didn't think... I didn't know the Council would use the coordinates for a Divine Strike! I thought I was buying a life, not selling a legion!"
Vincent stopped a few feet from her. He didn't reach for her. He stood like a monument to a lost age, cold and unyielding. "The 'why' stopped mattering after the first century, Kaelen. I spent the second century wondering what I would say when I finally found you. I wondered if words even existed for this."
"Are you going to kill me?" she whispered through her fingers, her body trembling.
Vincent looked at Chase, then back at the broken demon on the floor. He slowly reached into his trench coat and pulled out a small, tattered object. It was a dried flower, preserved in a glass vial, its petals turned to grey dust long ago.
"I came to ask why," Vincent said, his voice trembling for the first time, cracking the melodic facade. "And I came to return this. You dropped it when you ran. It's been the only thing in my pockets for two hundred years. I don't blame you for the ending, Kaelen; the day we joined the war, we all accepted our death. I just didn't expect you to be the one to sign the order."
He placed the vial on the coffee table. The "Conclusion" Chase had smelled at the office was still there, but it wasn't a death—it was the ending of a long, agonizing chapter.
"I won't kill you," Vincent said, looking at her with a profound, weary pity. "Killing you would mean I'd have nothing left to look for. And I am too tired to be truly alone."
Kaelen let out a high, broken wail and collapsed forward, her forehead touching the floor at his feet in a gesture of absolute surrender. Vincent stood over her, his hands hovering as if he wanted to touch her hair, to feel the silk of it one last time, but he hesitated. His fingers curled back into fists.
He looked down at her, the silence stretching between them like a canyon. He wondered if, after all these years of blood and silence, she still loved him—or if the woman he loved had died in that fire along with his men, leaving only this shell of guilt behind. Was it too late for a ghost to love a traitor?
The silence that followed was heavy, but the killing intent that had followed Vincent into the room had vanished. In its place was a cold, quiet grief that made even Rixsa lower her guard and retract her claws.
"He stays on the sofa," Chase said, breaking the silence. He moved to the gun safe, his movements deliberate as he locked the leather-wrapped case away. "And tomorrow, we figure out what 'civilized' looks like in the twenty-first century. No more gods, no more legions. Just the mess we have left."