The car humd like a caged animal beneath him, engine purring too smoothly for the kind of life he was currently living. He had always appreciated machines more than people. They obeyed when handled correctly, they never lied, and when they failed, they did so predictably. Humans, on the other hand, were inconveniently creative with betrayal.
Rain streaked across the windshield, blurring the night into streaks of silver and shadow. The city rolled past in quick flashes-neon reflected in puddles, the vague shapes of pedestrians, security patrols, and the quiet hum of danger lurking everywhere. He sat back against leather, perfectly still, perfectly composed, in a way that had taken years to discipline into existence.
The phone buzzed once against his palm.
He already knew the news before he read it.
Still, he opened the ssage.
The last Palatine lab was gone.
Erased.
Wiped from existence because a little beta got overly dramatic over the disappearance of his bonded friends.
Albrecht, the coordinator, had decided to demolish the lab and relocate it to another location. Unfortunately for them, Ethan Miller outperford the average betas... But he was a friend of Christopher.
It seed like both of them were prone to destroying his life.
Adonis stared at the text for a few quiet seconds, then slowly leaned his head back, exhaling a breath that might have been a laugh in another universe.
The next ssage loaded beneath the first, bringing with it the quiet weight of finality.
The lab wasn’t just compromised; it had been erased thoroughly by Trevor Fitzgeralt.
The site was sealed, the evidence confiscated, and the entire operation scrubbed from existence as though it had never drawn breath in the first place. Whatever contingency asures had been laid in place and were already accounted for, dismantled before they could even be of use. There was no equipnt hidden away to rebuild with, no scattered personnel waiting to regroup, and no shadow network to salvage.
Just silence where his infrastructure used to be.
He let the phone rest against his chest for a mont, eyes closing as he breathed through the irritation tightening beneath his ribs. This wasn’t rely an inconvenience anymore.
Countries were reassessing their political courage, and those who once spoke his na with respect now preferred to pretend he never existed.
Family included.
He supposed he should have expected that part. The Malek na had always co with power, but affection had never been part of the contract. When ruin touched soone, the family didn’t nd them... but amputated them.
His title was already hunted by others in the family, and his assets were already shared between greedy hands.
Varlen... Varlen is now doing anything to prove to Dax that he never wanted to help Adonis. That all of the information Princess Heather shared with the Consort was planned from the start.
Dax would see through that lie, either would go to war with Rohan or ignore the king for now.
Either way, Adonis was done now.
Severed.
Which left him with Benedict.
Benedict had been his partner from the very beginning... from a beginning most of the world didn’t even rember existed. It amused Adonis, in a distant, clinical way, how reality forgot and rewrote itself, how history politely erased atrocities if enough ti or blood was layered over them. But the truth never disappeared... it simply stopped having witnesses.
He still rembered every detail.
He rembered dying.
He rembered coming back.
And he rembered the reason why.
It was a secret that kept two n from different backgrounds working together seamlessly.
Adonis considered, for a brief and quietly entertained mont, whether he wanted to watch Christopher suffer again. Whether he wanted to break his dominant oga the way he had in the life before, peel him apart until nothing remained but obedience and despair.
Christopher didn’t rember any of it- not the pain, not the terror, not the way his world had collapsed around him. His pheromones weren’t even the sa anymore. But Lucas Fitzgerald... oh, Lucas might. Lucas had enough of a fractured soul to rember what it ant to drown and wake up only to drown again.
The thought alone drew a slow, delighted grin across Adonis’s face.
That last life had been perfect. He and Benedict had ruled with both hands, controlled nations, controlled fate, and tasted power so absolute it had stopped feeling like ambition and started feeling like nature.
They had lived fully, beautifully, and monstrously. And they could do it again. Why wouldn’t they? When reality ca with a reset button, when history was sothing they could simply press their fingers into and rewind. Who wouldn’t choose to relive their finest masterpiece?
Back then, he had gone to Christopher first.
He had torn apart the foundation of the man’s world. He had removed his parents, erased Andrew, and turned Mia into leverage instead of family.
Christopher eventually stopped fighting and stopped believing there could ever be a version of existence where he wasn’t already defeated.
That part had been satisfying.
What amused Adonis even more now was the private little truth Christopher had never known. In that life, without ever crossing paths with Dax Altera, the great king had died at thirty-eight. He killed himself when the prospect of having a compatible mate never appeared.
That proudful beast didn’t want to go berserk and drown what he saved.
Hah... every ti Dax of Saha had lived, he got to be the king of Saha one way or another.
Trevor Fitzgeralt, though... He’d fought the longest. He had clawed his way to the Palatine throne and held onto it with ferocious, stubborn strength. Trevor was the only reason they’d been forced to accelerate their plans and try to take the empire earlier.
Even now, the mory tasted sweet.
Two dominant ogas had shaped that life.
Lucas Fitzgeralt-the siren. A soul woven so strangely into existence that if pushed to the right edge of agony, he could drag life backwards with him. He could call the world to start again, provided he had been broken thoroughly enough to want escape more than sanity.
And Christopher Malek.
Christopher had been brilliance weaponized. One of the finest creators of controlled monsters the world had known, shaping obedient alphas, and his pheromones awakened recessives with a precision that bordered on beautiful. The strongest creations always ca from his hand.
They had owned both of them once.
Adonis intended to do so again.
It had been surprisingly straightforward, looking back. In the first life, they killed Trevor Fitzgeralt and a child sleeping in his crib, cracked Lucas’s world in half, and let grief finish what cruelty began. There had been a pregnancy too, a tragedy folded neatly into the many others they’d orchestrated, one more piece of devastation in a tapestry already soaked through.
Pain. Madness. Collapse.
Lucas shattered, the world rewound, and they began again.
So the path forward now was almost comforting in its familiarity.
They would repeat it.
They would torture Palatine’s golden oga until his soul begged for the universe to reset. They would return to the beginning. And when the world started over-when ti bent to their will once more-they would reclaim both Lucas and Christopher, not as n, not as princes or consorts...
...but as weapons.
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