Chapter 332: Chapter 332: Wrong Family
Down in the palace’s sub-level the air was cooler, the light harder. The anterooms smelled of cold metal, antiseptic, and the faint ozone sting of equipment recently plugged in. Caelan sat behind a pane of tempered glass in the observation bay, one elbow resting on the steel arm of his chair, watching the man in the interrogation room below.
Alexander Stone, Odin to his devotees, looked smaller without the tailored suits and the careful lighting. The hood had been pulled back, his wrists cuffed to the table, and under the flat LEDs he had the grey cast of a man who’d lived too long on adrenaline and narcotics. His eyes flicked to the mirrored glass once, trying to gauge where the Emperor might be. Caelan didn’t blink.
Inside the room, two intelligence officers were taking their time, sliding documents across the table, playing him tapes of his own voice, and asking the same question three different ways. Each time Alexander tried to smirk or tried to spin a story, they brought out another piece of evidence. A spreadsheet. A text thread. A photograph.
On the next monitor, a different feed showed Ophelia. Alone now in a holding suite two floors up, midnight silk wrinkled from her struggle, hair falling loose from its pins. She sat on the edge of the sofa with her arms wrapped around herself, eyes fixed on nothing. She looked like a child playing dress-up at the edge of a cliff. Caelan had left her there on purpose. He wanted her to sit with the silence, to feel the absence of the voice that had been directing her every move.
He tapped a finger once against the arm of his chair, then flicked his gaze to the third monitor: Misty Kilmer. What was left of her.
The medical unit had brought her in hours ago from one of Alexander’s safehouses. She was technically alive, breathing, and with her heart beating, but her eyes didn’t track, and the EEG readouts scrolling across the screen were a ruin. Months of experimental injections, receptor-burning compounds, and sleep-deprivation cycles. Vivienne’s notes had called them "stabilizers" and "priming agents."
Caelan called them what they were: torture disguised as research.He let the images cycle: a vial labelled "Series V-Omega," a tray of syringes, Misty’s slack face. Alexander and Vivienne had been trying to force dominance and memory-retention traits into omegas with chemicals, to sculpt what nature had denied them. Misty had been one of their test cases, turned into a laboratory animal.
In the room below, Alexander started to talk faster, hands twitching against the cuffs, some of the composure finally bleeding out of him. Caelan’s jaw set. He didn’t need to go in there. He’d learned long ago that the power of an Emperor was to make other people fill the silence.
"Keep him talking," he told the lead interrogator through the comms mic, his voice low but carrying. "Everything he gives us leads to the next nest. Cross-match his supply lines with Vivienne’s labs. I want names, shipments, and every address he’s ever used."
"Yes, Majesty," came the quiet reply.
Caelan muted the channel and leaned back, eyes on the three screens. Alexander caught in his own web. Ophelia alone with her choices. Misty breathing but already gone. This was the rot that had crept in under his walls, and tonight it was being cut out.
The door to the observation bay opened without ceremony; a gust of cooler air swept in with the soundless efficiency of guards stationed outside. Lucius stepped through first, jacket immaculate, dark hair combed back so precisely it caught the LED spill from the monitors. Sirius followed more loosely, hands in his pockets, blue eyes flicking over the room with the easy brightness he wore like a mask.
Both paused behind Caelan’s chair, their gazes falling to the glass panel and the man shackled at the table below.
"He’s talking," Caelan said without turning. His voice stayed level, but there was a weight under it. "Sloppily, but talking."
Lucius came to stand at his father’s shoulder, eyes narrowing on Alexander’s hunched posture. "He always looked taller in the reports," he murmured. "Now he just looks like another parasite."
"He is," Caelan said. One hand tapped the armrest once, the only outward sign of tension. "Vivienne’s notes line up with his testimony so far."
Sirius drifted closer to the bank of monitors, watching the Ophelia feed for a moment, then the static shot of Misty’s hospital room. His usual smile had faded; his voice came low. "And the woman?"
"Alive," Caelan replied. "Technically. What’s left of her isn’t coming back. Her brain’s a burned-out circuit board. Months of Vivienne’s stabilizers, Alexander’s dosing schedules." His jaw tightened. "They were trying to manufacture dominant omegas out of flesh."
Lucius’s eyes moved from Misty’s image to the slim folder tucked under Caelan’s hand. "Vivienne?"
"Paralyzed in a hospital bed," Caelan said. "Trevor handled it weeks ago. We’ve kept her alive only long enough to get her testimony." He shifted the folder a fraction, a neat habit. "She gave us her formulas and Odin would give us the rest." He sighed. "There are Benedict and Velloran too, but that is Trevor’s to deal with."
Sirius’s mouth curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile. "That is if Velloran is still alive. I’ve heard they wanted to use Lucas as their reference."
Lucius’s jaw flexed once, the only outward sign of his disgust. "Reference," he repeated quietly, as if tasting the word. "They were never going to stop with one experiment."
"No," Caelan said. His eyes stayed on the feed from the interrogation room, Alexander’s hands twitching against the cuffs as the evidence piled higher in front of him. "They wanted a template. Something to refine their drugs against. Lucas was just the most viable option they could see."
Sirius kept his eyes on the feed, jaw tight. "They’re lucky Trevor got to Vivienne first," he said. "If I’d walked into those labs, there wouldn’t have been a hospital bed left."
Caelan’s fingers tapped once against the folder, a small tell that only his sons ever noticed. "That’s why I gave Trevor this file," he said. "He knows where the lines are. I don’t want you two picking through the wreckage they left behind."
Lucius’s gaze slid from Alexander’s twitching hands to the pale image of Misty on the monitor. "You think they wanted him for the formula," he said, not quite a question.
"I think they wanted to use Lucas for everything," Caelan answered, voice low. "What he survived, what he is. Build an army out of it. Control recessive alphas first, then anyone else they could get their hands on."
Sirius’s mouth curved but it wasn’t a smile. "Then they picked the wrong family."