Chapter 416: Chapter 416

The room had an unpleasant odor of chemicals and regret.

The walls were damp, plaster cracking under the strain of humidity, and the ceiling light flickering in a tired rhythm that matched his pulse. Benedict sat hunched at the table, his once-impeccable posture reduced to a slouch born of exhaustion. The air was thick with suppressant fumes, half-evaporated from the glass vials scattered around him. Each breath scraped down his throat like rust.

He pressed the injector against his skin, the hiss of the serum loud in the silence. For a few seconds, the world steadied, his heartbeat slowed, and his vision cleared, but the reprieve never lasted. It never did. The suppressants were losing their grip on him, and so was he.

He exhaled shakily. "Still breathing," he muttered under his breath, his voice hoarse and cracking. "Still mine."

He repeated it to himself frequently these days, as if it were a ritual to keep him grounded. It wasn’t working.

The mirror across the room caught his reflection, though what stared back was barely a man anymore, pale, hollow-cheeked, pupils too dilated, the faint shimmer of pheromone overexertion still crawling beneath his skin. The faint glow at his collarbone betrayed the implants buried under flesh, old biotech designed to enhance alpha dominance, to manufacture control. Once, it had made him unstoppable. Now, it was killing him by degrees. Without Vivienne to replace them, they were useless at best and toxic at worst.

Each use of his power left him shaking. Each command tore through muscle and bone like static. His scent was no longer the clean burn of control; it had turned metallic, chemical, and sour with decay.

He gritted his teeth. "Not yet," he whispered, forcing the words through his clenched jaw. "I’m not done."

A tremor rolled through his hands as he reached for the communicator on the table. The casing was cracked and stained with old blood and dust. It still worked, barely. He had burned through every contact he had left, every pawn, every debt. Everyone except one.

The name burned behind his eyes like light through smoke. The last thread that tied him to the empire. The last mind he could still touch, if he pushed hard enough. He had marked Christian once, not fully or completely, but enough. Enough that some small part of him still carried Benedict’s echo.

He’d been trying to reach him for weeks, pushing through psychic static and pheromonal interference until his body screamed in protest. Trevor had shielded Christian well... too well. It reeked of Fitzgeralt precision.

Benedict’s mouth twisted. Of course it did.

He’d underestimated Trevor once. The polished Duke, with his quiet voice and unbreakable resolve, had proven harder to destroy than he looked. He’d taken everything, Lucas, the empire’s favor, the seat of power Benedict had nearly secured. And now he had a child. Their child. The one fate had promised to Benedict first.

The thought sent a pulse of fury through his chest. His pheromones flared, sharp and unstable, flooding the room with the scent of burning metal and ozone. The walls seemed to breathe with it, trembling faintly before the suppressant burned through the surge. He could almost hear the faint hum of the implants under his skin overheating.

"You think you can erase me," he said softly, voice trembling with a rasp that wasn’t quite human. "You can’t."

He dragged the communicator closer, thumb brushing over the dented edge. The screen flickered to life, static spilling across it in uneven bursts. He tuned the signal manually, teeth gritted, until the distortion sharpened into faint, broken noise.

"Christian," he murmured, his tone low and deliberate, pheromones threading through the sound like invisible fingers. "You can hear me. You always could."

He inhaled sharply, forcing another pulse of his scent into the transmission. The effort made his vision blur, his stomach twist. "You remember me," he continued, voice dark and coaxing. "You remember what I gave you. What you were before they tamed you."

For a heartbeat, something stirred on the other end... a flicker, a distortion that wasn’t his own. A single breath that didn’t belong to him.

"There you are," Benedict whispered, smiling faintly. His teeth looked too sharp in the low light. "Good boy."

But then the connection cut, severed abruptly. Static hissed, and the screen went black.

The silence that followed was absolute.

Benedict sat there, breathing hard, his chest heaving as though he’d run miles. The scent of ozone still clung to the room, heavy and choking. He laughed once, low and breathless, a sound too close to hysteria to be called amusement. "So you’re still fighting it. Good. Fighting makes it interesting."

His reflection in the mirror smiled back feral and feverish. He looked like a ghost haunting his own ruin.

He ran a hand through his hair, slick with sweat, and looked down at the half-empty vials on the table. His fingers shook as he reached for another, the motion more habit than hope. He didn’t have many left, and even these would stop working soon. The implants were rejecting them now, rejecting him. The pheromone glands under his skin burned with every breath, like molten wire.

He knew what that meant. Burnout. Collapse. The manufactured dominance that had made him feared was eating itself alive. Once it failed, he would go with it, his mind, his body, maybe even his scent.

But not before he took something back.

If he could reach Christian before that, if he could anchor through him, he might survive long enough to finish what he started. Long enough to make Trevor and Lucas watch everything they’d built crumble. Orıginal content can be found at novel·fire.net

He smiled faintly at the thought, even as the tremors began again.

"One more move," he whispered. "One more, and then we end this."

Outside, rain slicked down the windows, the faint sound mixing with his ragged breath. The storm blurred the skyline into streaks of silver and black, like the world itself was bleeding color.

Benedict closed his eyes and leaned back, the suppressant needle still in his hand, the scent of burnt pheromones heavy in the air.

He was running out of time.