Zaeryn felt the relief Ysmeine was offering wash over him, finally loosening the tight knot of anxiety in his chest. Her logic was sound, and he realized he might have been overreacting. The person had seen Viora speaking to him, so what? It wasn’t like this unknown intruder would immediately connect the dots and know his most dangerous secret. Ysmeine was right; his secret was safe.

He looked at Ysmeine’s serene, flawless face, feeling a surge of gratitude, and leaned in to plant a soft, quick kiss on her cheek. He turned around and was about to leave the room, but Ysmeine’s fingers tightened securely around his. She didn’t let go of his hand.

"Get back here, Zae," Ysmeine purred, her smoky green eyes looking up at him with a sudden, mischievous gleam. She gave his hand a gentle but firm tug, pulling him back into her personal space. "If you are going to thank me, give me a proper kiss. I demand it."

Zaeryn paused, a teasing smirk creeping onto his face despite the fact that her icy sister was sitting just a few feet away. Actually, knowing that Kayla was standing there and she hated seeing anyone in the family show him affection was why he was all the more eager to give Ysmeine exactly what she demanded.

"What’s a proper kiss? I might have forgotten,"

Ysmeine’s smile widened into something much more seductive. "Let me show you," she murmured.

Using her grip on his hand, she pulled him flush against her body. Her free hand slid up to cup his cheek, her thumb gently brushing his jawline before she guided his face down to hers. She didn’t just peck his lips; she captured his mouth in a deep, passionate, and thoroughly unapologetic kiss.

It was the kind of lingering, heated kiss that completely erased any remaining traces of her old maternal role, her lips soft yet demanding as her tongue brushed against his, sending a familiar jolt of heat straight through him.

From her spot, Kayla could not hide her dislike. She looked away, but immediately her eyes returned focusing on how their embrace.

Ysmeine broke the kiss slowly, her lips glistening and a triumphant, breathless smile on her face. She turned, looking at her disgusted sister, and then she returned her smoky eyes on Zaeryn, her hands resting possessively on his chest.

Zaeryn finally pulled back from Ysmeine’s touch. "I’m going to call viora again" he turned and strode out, leaving the two sisters alone in the quiet aftermath of his departure.

Kayla watched the empty doorway for a long moment, her brow furrowing into a deep scowl.

Ysmeine noticed her sisters look and her expression turned serious. "What’s wrong?"

"I’m still confused," Kayla muttered, crossing her arms tightly over her chest. "He must have used forbidden magic or something."

Ysmeine let out a soft, elegant sigh, turning to face her younger sister. "Kayla, you and I both know there is no such thing as forbidden magic that works like this. And even if there were, it wouldn’t have worked, he’s a male. We know what happens when a man tries to gain Vitae through forbidden methods; it just damages their cognitive function and turns them into a mindless Feral . He’s just a special boy."

"No, he’s a weirdo," Kayla snapped back, her green eyes flashing with stubborn irritation. "And how else would you explain everything that’s weird about him? If he didn’t use forbidden magic, then he must have participated in some weird science experiment. That’s the only logical explanation for an anomaly like him."

"No, he didn’t," Ysmeine replied softly. A warm, fond smile spread across her face as her mind drifted back eighteen years. "Zaeryn grew up right in front of me. From the day he was born, he was an anomaly."

Ysmeine’s smoky green eyes took on a distant, nostalgic look, recalling the glowing room where Athea had first handed the baby to her. "I remember it perfectly. It was like he was already aware of the world from the exact moment he was born. He didn’t just cry like a normal infant; he looked around, processing things."

Kayla paused. Her mouth opened slightly to argue, but she found herself completely at a loss for words. She stared at Ysmeine, her sharp mind failing to produce a counter-argument to a baby possessing immediate self-awareness.

Finally, she just huffed, looking away with a cold look. "Well... he’s still a weirdo... and I still don’t like him."

-In the capital sector - aegis division.

The sterile blue light of the bio-weapons division reflected off the reinforced glass of Subject Nine’s containment field. Sage stood by a primary console, her eyes scanning streams of Vorthak genetic data while Dr. Illara Veyne adjusted the stasis calibration.

The heavy blast doors hissed open with mechanical precision, and Princess Athea stepped through.

Athea moved with her signature unhurried grace, her dark robes absorbing the lab’s clinical glow. She bypassed the rows of busy workstations, her piercing ice-blue gaze fixed solely on Sage.

Sage was elbow-deep in Subject Nine’s energy conduit data.

She didn’t look up immediately. The door opened roughly every four minutes in this lab. Someone fetching equipment, someone returning it, someone asking Illara a question that Illara answered while simultaneously apologizing for the answer.

Sage had started mentally timing the intervals an hour ago as a way of not thinking about how much the ventilation system sounded like someone breathing wrong.

Then she felt it. Not a sound. Not a movement. Just a shift in the room’s atmosphere, the way a cold front moved in before the temperature actually changed.

She looked up.

Princess Athea stood just inside the threshold.

She held herself the way certain structures held themselves, not through effort, but through fundamental design. Her ice-blue eyes moved across the lab in one clean sweep before settling on Sage with the focused calm of someone who had already decided what they wanted from this room.

Illara had gone rigid at her workstation. Venus had set her stylus down without seeming to realize she’d done it. Whenever Athea entered this place, she would question those two, and if she wasn’t satisfied she usually gave them a very hard time. It made sense that Illara and Venus would be this nervous to see the princess here again.

They were a little relieved seeing that Sage was the one Athea seemed to focus on this time. Illara couldn’t be more grateful that she wasn’t leading anymore and someone else was, and that meant she didn’t have to always stand before this intimidating princess all the time.

Sage put her own stylus down deliberately.

"Your Highness," she said.

Athea crossed the floor. Her footsteps were quiet on the lab tile, which somehow made them louder.

"Doctor Stellan." She stopped at a comfortable distance from the workstation, close enough for a conversation, far enough to make it clear she wasn’t here to look at the data. "Walk with me."

Not a question. Not quite an order. Something in the clean middle space between them that left no real room for alternatives.

Sage read the tension in the room for two seconds, found nothing she could use to fix the atmosphere, and accepted it gracefully.

She turned to Illara, who was already watching her with the specific, twitchy expression of someone trying very hard to look like they weren’t watching. "Run the secondary resonance analysis on the neural tissue samples. Don’t overlay the results yet; keep them separate. I want clean data before we start looking for patterns."

"Right. Yes. Separate. Clean." Illara nodded rapidly, her fingers already hovering over her console with the desperate urgency of someone grateful for a distraction.

Sage looked at Venus. "The calibration on terminal four is drifting. If it hits three percent variance, shut it down and flag it."

Venus didn’t look up, giving a short, sharp nod as she began the recalibration sequence.

Sage fell into step beside Athea. They walked out into the corridor, and the heavy blast doors sealed behind them with a soft, pressurized click.

Inside the lab, the sudden absence of the Princess was like a weight being lifted from everyone’s lungs. Venus let out a long, jagged breath and slumped forward, her forehead nearly touching her console.

"Unbelievable," Venus muttered, her voice sharp with a sudden spike of resentment.

"What?" Illara asked without looking up, though she adjusted her glasses with one hand.

"The way she talks to Sage," Venus said, her fingers flying across the terminal four calibration controls with unnecessary force. "She treats her like an equal. She practically smiled. When it was just us leading this, Athea spent half her time threatening to send us to the front lines as monster bait."

Illara paused, her gaze fixed on the shifting holographic interface. "Sage is Cassia Stellan’s daughter. The Stellan name carries more weight than our entire division combined."

Venus scoffed, a dry, bitter sound. "That’s probably the only reason she’s here, and why they handed her the lead. You were the one who did the heavy lifting, Illara. You’re smarter than her, yet they sidelined you for a corporate legacy hire who probably spends her weekends at garden parties."

"That’s enough, Venus," Illara countered, her tone turning uncharacteristically firm as she looked at her colleague. "I’ve followed Sage’s research for years. Her work on various things is a decade ahead of anything we were attempting. She earned this lead. Honestly, she’s significantly more qualified to run this division than I am."

Venus rolled her eyes, her gaze drifting back to the scrolling calibration data. "You’re just being humble. I’ve seen your internal logic maps; you’re every bit as sharp as she is. Sharper, maybe."

"Results don’t care about humility," Illara reminded her, gesturing toward the containment field where Subject Nine loomed in its stasis field. "In just a few days, she’s stabilized energy conduits that had us stuck for a month. If the Princess is being nice to her, it’s not because of her name. It’s because Sage is actually delivering the results Athea demanded."

Outside,

The hallway stretched ahead, empty and long, lit in that cold, functional way that made the Capital’s high-rises look eternally serious. Their footsteps fell into an unintentional, synchronized rhythm.

Sage waited.

Athea did not rush to fill the silence. She was either choosing her words or testing Sage’s patience likely both. Sage had spent enough time around strategic women to know the difference between a person who hadn’t decided what to say and one who was watching to see if you’d blink first.

She didn’t blink.

Outside a wide viewport set into the corridor wall, the Capital sprawled across the afternoon, orderly and intentional.

"How is the work going?" Athea said finally. It was an opening, not a casual question. "And what is your opinion on Dr. Veyne?"

"Faster in some areas. Slower where it matters," Sage replied, her tone neutral. "Illara is good. Better than her file suggests. The neural tissue data is the most interesting thing I’ve touched in two years. Whatever the Vorthak use instead of a nervous system, it doesn’t behave like anything with a biological analogue. It’s more like architecture."

A short pause followed.

"Architecture," Athea repeated.

"Built for a specific load. Optimized. Not grown." Sage glanced sideways at the Princess. "It implies something designed them. Or something designed itself very deliberately over a very long time."

Athea’s expression didn’t shift, but her pace slowed by half a step. It was the most visible reaction Sage had gotten from her yet.

"You haven’t put that in a report yet," Athea noted.

"I wanted to be sure before I said it out loud to someone who makes decisions."

"Good instinct," Athea said.

They walked another few meters as the corridor curved with the architecture of the tower.

"I appreciate directness, Doctor Stellan," Athea said, her voice dropping a fraction, signaling the shift into the actual conversation. "I wanted to ask how you were finding the Capital. Outside the lab."

Sage considered this. "Quieter than Sector 7."

"Is that a complaint?"

"No. It’s simply what I’ve noticed."

Athea looked at her briefly, her ice-blue eyes unreadable. "You left a great deal behind to come here."

"I left a comfortable position," Sage said. "But it was about time I got out of Cassia Stellan’s shadow."

Athea was quiet until they reached a wide intersection where the corridor branched. She stopped, and Sage stopped with her.

"You’ll have full autonomy on the Vorthak project," Athea stated.

"Whatever resources the division has. If something is obstructing your work, you bring it to me directly."

Sage nodded. "Understood."

"And if you find something significant," Athea continued, putting a very specific weight on the word significant, "before it reaches a formal report, I would like to know."

"Directly," Sage agreed.

"Directly."

They continued for a moment, the air thick with things left unsaid, until Athea stopped again and looked squarely at Sage.

"And how is your boyfriend taking all this?" Athea asked.

"He’s taking it well," Sage responded, meeting the Princess’s gaze.

There it was the actual point of the walk. Sage had suspected Athea would bring up Zaeryn. After all, Athea knew exactly who her son was dating, and her interest was far more than professional.