"Thirty seconds to convince me why you deserve to keep breathing."
Lucien's fingers closed around Vivian's throat like a steel vice, his grip calibrated with surgical precision—tight enough to cut circulation, gentle enough to avoid crushing her windpipe entirely. The Maybach's leather interior seemed to contract around them, city lights streaking past the bulletproof windows like falling stars as Marcus navigated the midnight streets of Star Harbor.
**[CRITICAL ALERT: LIFE FORCE AT 00:00:43]**
**[SYSTEM FAILURE IMMINENT]**
Black spots bloomed across Vivian's vision like ink drops in water. Her hands clawed weakly at his wrist, but she might as well have been fighting titanium cables. The stolen military chip lay between them on Italian leather, damning evidence of her betrayal glinting under the cabin's ambient lighting.
*Forty-three seconds. Not enough time to explain ten years of lies.*
**[00:00:37]**
*But maybe enough time for something else entirely.*
She stopped struggling. Stopped clawing. Instead, she did the one thing guaranteed to either save her life or end it in the most spectacular way possible.
She kissed him.
Her lips crashed against his with the desperate hunger of a drowning woman reaching for air, tasting copper pennies and twenty-year-old whiskey and something darker that made her dying pulse spike with adrenaline. For one crystalline moment, Lucien went rigid with shock, his grip loosening just enough for precious oxygen to flood back to her starving brain.
Then something miraculous happened.
The constant white noise in Lucien's head—the endless static that had been his companion since childhood trauma—went completely, impossibly silent. Not muted. Not quieted. *Erased*. For the first time in fifteen years, his mind was a still lake instead of a category-five hurricane.
His hand fell away from her throat like he'd been electrocuted.
His other arm came up to crush her against him, deepening the kiss with the kind of desperate violence that spoke of a man who'd been drowning for decades and finally found shore. She tasted like salvation wrapped in sin, like the answer to prayers he'd never been brave enough to voice.
**[LIFE FORCE STABILIZING: 19%... 34%... 52%...]**
*Holy shit, it's actually working.*
But Vivian had learned never to trust miracles. Her teeth found his lower lip and bit down hard enough to draw blood, using his moment of stunned surprise to wrench herself free and scramble to the opposite side of the seat.
They stared at each other across expensive leather, both breathing like they'd run marathons. Lucien's lip was bleeding, a thin crimson line that made him look more dangerous than a loaded weapon. Vivian's throat bore the purple fingerprints of his grip like a necklace of violence.
"Well," he said softly, his voice rough as broken glass. "That was unexpected."
"The noise stopped." It wasn't a question. Vivian's voice came out as barely a whisper, but it cut through the silence like a scalpel through skin. "The screaming in your head. The static that never lets you sleep, never lets you think clearly. It's gone, isn't it?"
Lucien's eyes went from storm-gray to arctic blue—the color they turned when he was deciding whether someone lived or died. "How could you possibly know about—"
"Because I'm the only person on this planet who can make it stop." She pressed herself against the door, putting as much distance between them as the confined space allowed. "I'm not just some random corporate spy, Lucien. I'm your cure. Your only cure."
The admission hung between them like a sword suspended by spider silk.
"You're also a thief who stole classified military encryption from my family's vault." His voice carried the kind of supernatural calm that preceded mass executions. "Give me one compelling reason why I shouldn't kill you anyway and find another solution to my... condition."
"Because there isn't another solution." She touched her throat where his fingerprints were already darkening to deep purple. "How long has it been since you had five consecutive minutes of peace? How long since you could sit in silence without feeling like your skull was being split open with a rusty axe?"
Too long. Far, far too long.
"I have resources. I could find other treatments."
"Could you?" Her smile was sharp enough to perform surgery. "How many neurologists have you consulted? How many psychiatrists, specialists, experimental treatments? How many millions have you spent trying to buy silence that never comes?"
His jaw muscle ticked like a time bomb. She was right, and they both knew it with crystalline clarity.
"What exactly do you want from me?"
"Survival would be an excellent starting point." She straightened despite the pain, meeting his predatory gaze without flinching. "After that, we can negotiate terms like civilized people."
Lucien studied her with the intensity of a scientist examining a particularly fascinating specimen. She was dangerous—possibly the most dangerous person he'd ever encountered. She could destroy him with a few keystrokes, expose his vulnerabilities to enemies who would tear him apart like wolves.
But she was also his salvation. The first person in fifteen years who could give him peace.
"Marcus." His voice cut through the tension like a blade through silk. "Take us home."
"Sir?"
"Ms. Ning will be staying with us for the foreseeable future. Prepare the blue room."
***
The Pei estate materialized from manicured darkness like a fortress built for modern emperors. Gothic spires pierced the star-drunk sky while security lights swept the grounds in endless, predatory arcs. As the Maybach glided through wrought-iron gates that probably cost more than most people's houses, Vivian counted at least fifteen armed guards and enough surveillance equipment to monitor a small nation.
*Getting out of here alive is going to require a miracle.*
Marcus opened her door with the practiced neutrality of someone who'd seen too much to be surprised by anything. His eyes carefully avoided taking in their disheveled appearance—Vivian's torn designer dress, Lucien's bleeding lip, the sexual tension crackling between them like high-voltage electricity.
"Sir, shall I prepare the guest wing?"
"The blue room. Adjacent to mine." Lucien's smile could have frozen hellfire. "Ms. Ning will be staying very, very close."
He turned to Vivian, his voice dropping to that whisper-soft register that meant someone was about to experience exquisite pain. "Consider yourself under protective custody. If your therapeutic effects prove... insufficient... I'll have that clever mouth of yours sewn permanently shut."
The threat should have terrified her into submission. Instead, Vivian felt her lips curve in a smile that matched his for pure predatory intent.
"I'm looking forward to the challenge."
***
The blue room was a gilded cage—silk wallpaper in shades of midnight, antique furniture worth more than small countries, and windows that had been sealed shut with what looked like military-grade security measures. Vivian tested the door handle the moment she was alone. Electronic deadbolt, biometric scanner, probably connected to a central security system that would alert half the estate if she so much as breathed wrong.
*I'd need his fingerprint, retinal scan, and probably a blood sample to get out conventionally.*
She was examining the crown molding for structural weaknesses when her phone erupted with an encrypted emergency alert.
**[PRIORITY ALPHA MISSION ACTIVATED]**
**[TARGET: STOLEN MILITARY ENCRYPTION CHIP]**
**[STATUS: SUBJECT ATTEMPTING FORCED DECRYPTION]**
**[CRITICAL WARNING: CHIP WILL SELF-DESTRUCT IN 00:57:23]**
Vivian's blood turned to liquid nitrogen. Lucien was trying to crack her mother's chip—the one thing that might contain answers about how she'd really died, why she'd been hiding military secrets, what enemies had been hunting them both across continents and decades.
**[MISSION PARAMETERS: INFILTRATE TARGET'S PRIVATE QUARTERS]**
**[OBJECTIVE: INITIATE SKIN CONTACT DURING SLEEP CYCLE]**
**[MINIMUM CONTACT DURATION: 180 SECONDS FOR SUSPENSION PROTOCOL]**
**[FAILURE CONSEQUENCE: TOTAL DATA ANNIHILATION]**
*Of course it comes back to touching him. It always does.*
She pressed her ear to the wall separating her prison from his bedroom. The sound of violent typing carried through expensive drywall—rapid, frustrated, increasingly destructive. He was getting nowhere with conventional hacking methods, which meant he'd escalate to more brutal techniques soon.
*Fifty-six minutes. I can do this. I have to.*
Vivian ran her fingers along the baseboards with the methodical precision of someone who'd broken into more secure locations than she cared to remember. There—a section where the silk wallpaper didn't quite align, where she could feel the subtle give of a concealed mechanism.
*Servants' passage. Every mansion built by paranoid billionaires has them.*
She pressed the correct sequence of pressure points, and the panel swung inward with the whisper of well-maintained hinges. Beyond lay a narrow corridor that smelled of dust and century-old secrets, with strategically placed peepholes offering views into every major room.
*Time to go hunting the devil in his own lair.*
The passage led directly behind Lucien's bedroom, where she could observe him through a one-way mirror, hunched over multiple laptops with the kind of obsessive focus that suggested he'd forgotten the rest of the universe existed. The stolen chip sat in a military-grade decryption device, progress bars crawling across screens like digital snakes.
**[00:52:47 REMAINING]**
*He's not going to stop. Not until he cracks it or destroys it trying.*
Vivian memorized every detail of the room's layout with professional thoroughness. King-size bed positioned against the far wall. Blackout curtains drawn tight against prying satellites. Security cameras in three corners, but none covering the blind spot directly beside the hidden panel.
*I can reach him. The question is whether I can do it without triggering World War Three.*
She watched him work, noting how his shoulders tensed with each failed decryption attempt, how his hands trembled slightly from exhaustion and withdrawal from her calming presence. He needed her touch as desperately as she needed his life-sustaining energy—two broken pieces that somehow formed something whole when pressed together.
*Fifty-one minutes and counting.*
Vivian began working on the panel's internal lock mechanism with tools she'd hidden in her hair. Time to discover exactly how much the devil was willing to sacrifice for his soul's salvation.