CELESTE
The lab was silent at midnight except for the hum of machines and the soft clicking of my keyboard.
I'd been staring at the same sequence for three hours, and it still wouldn't break.
My father had layered the encryption with redundancies upon redundancies—each one requiring not just technical knowledge but intimate familiarity with his thinking patterns, his paranoia, his absolute conviction that someone would try to steal his life's work.
He'd been right.
I rubbed my eyes, exhaustion making them burn. Luna was upstairs with a night nurse Jae-won had assigned—another reminder that even in sleep, we were monitored, controlled, owned.
The code blurred on the screen in front of me.
I was missing something. Some key, some pattern, some connection that would unlock the next layer. But my mind was too tired, too fractured by fear and anger and the constant weight of Jae-won's presence even when he wasn't physically in the room.
I stood and paced, trying to clear my head, trying to think like my father would have thought.
What would you hide here, Papa? What truth were you protecting?
The lab door slammed open.
I spun around, my heart leaping into my throat.
Jae-won stood in the doorway, still in his suit despite the late hour, his tie loosened and his expression carved from stone and fury.
"Three days," he said, his voice dangerously quiet. "Three days since you arrived, and the decryption has barely progressed past the first firewall."
"The encryption is complex—"
"The encryption is deliberate stalling." He crossed the lab in four strides, and I found myself backing up instinctively. "You're playing games, Celeste. Buying time. For what? An escape plan? A better deal?"
"I'm doing exactly what you brought me here to do!" My voice rose despite my efforts to stay calm. "My father didn't design this encryption to be broken in days. He designed it to be unbreakable."
"Then why did you promise to decrypt it?"
"Because I'm the only one who can!" I was shouting now, weeks of fear and exhaustion boiling over. "Because my daughter is dying and you're holding her treatment hostage! Because I don't have a choice!"
"You had a choice three years ago." He was close now, too close, backing me against the cold metal of the gene sequencer. "You chose to run. To hide. To steal from me."
"I didn't steal from you—"
"You took everything!" His hands slammed against the sequencer on either side of me, caging me in. "Three years of lost time. Three years you hid from me. Three years I searched for you while you—what? Started a new life? Had a child with someone else?"
His breath was hot on my face. His body radiated fury and something darker, more dangerous.
I should have been terrified. Should have pushed him away, demanded he back off.
But I couldn't move.
Because beneath the hatred—beneath the three years of betrayal and bitterness—I could feel it. The old current. The one that had pulled us together in late-night lab sessions and heated debates. The one that had turned professional respect into something electric and inevitable.
It was still there.
God help me, it was still there.
"I had reasons," I whispered.
"I don't care about your reasons." His voice dropped lower, rougher. "I care that you disappeared without a word. That you made me think—"
He stopped abruptly, his jaw clenching.
"Think what?" I forced myself to meet his eyes, those dark eyes that had once looked at me with something other than contempt.
"That you were dead." The words came out like a confession torn from his chest. "For six months, I thought you were dead. That someone had gotten to you. That I'd failed to protect you."
The vulnerability in his voice cracked something in my chest.
"Jae-won—"
"Then I found the trail. The false passport. The bank transfers. And I realized the truth was worse." His gaze dropped to my mouth, and the air between us changed. "You weren't dead. You just wanted to be dead to me."
The silence stretched, taut as a wire about to snap.
I could see the exact moment the past drowned out the present in his eyes. Could see him remembering other nights like this—standing too close in empty labs, the professional boundaries dissolving into something neither of us could control.
His gaze lingered on my lips.
For a heartbeat, I thought he was going to kiss me.
For a heartbeat, I wanted him to.
Then he shoved back from the sequencer as if I'd burned him, his face twisting with something that looked like self-disgust.
"Just finish it," he snarled, already turning toward the door. "I don't care how complex the encryption is. I don't care about your excuses. Finish it, or the child doesn't get into the next phase of treatment."
"You can't—"
"I can do whatever I want, Dr. Moreau. You're in my building, using my resources, breathing because I allow it." He paused at the door, his back to me. "Don't test me again."
The door slammed behind him with a force that rattled the equipment.
I stood frozen against the sequencer, my legs trembling, my heart racing so hard I thought it might break through my ribs.
My fingers went to my lips without conscious thought, touching where his gaze had lingered.
Three years.
Three years of running, hiding, building walls around my heart.
And it had taken less than three minutes for him to remind me why those walls had been necessary.
Because Jae-won Choi was dangerous.
Not because of his power or his money or his ability to destroy me with a single phone call.
But because even now, even after everything, some treacherous part of me still responded to him. Still remembered what it felt like to be the center of his world instead of his enemy.
I forced myself to turn back to the computer, to the endless strings of code that held my father's secrets.
My hands were shaking as I typed.
Behind me, the lab door's security panel blinked red.
Locked in. Again.
Always locked in.
I pulled up the next layer of encryption and stared at it until my vision blurred.
Somewhere in this code was the key to Luna's survival.
Somewhere in this building was the man who could save her or destroy us both.
And somewhere in my treacherous heart was the truth I'd been running from for three years.
That leaving Jae-won Choi hadn't made me stop loving him.
It had just made me better at lying to myself.
– – –
JAE-WON
I made it to the elevator before I had to stop and lean against the wall, my fists clenched, my breathing ragged.
What the hell was wrong with me?
I'd gone to the lab to confront her about the stalled progress. To remind her of the stakes. To maintain control.
Instead, I'd nearly—
My hand went to my mouth, the taste of almost still burning on my tongue.
Three years. Three years I'd trained myself to hate her. To see her as nothing but a thief and a liar.
One moment standing too close, and all that careful control had nearly shattered.
I could still smell her—lavender and exhaustion and the faint chemical tang of the lab. Could still feel the heat of her body trapped between mine and the sequencer. Could still see the way her pupils had dilated when I'd looked at her mouth.
She'd wanted it too.
The realization was somehow worse than if she'd pushed me away.
My phone buzzed. A message from building security: Subject Moreau locked in Lab 4 as requested. Monitoring active.
Good.
Let her stay there. Let her work until she broke through whatever mental block was keeping her from finishing the decryption.
Let her stay far away from me until I remembered why I hated her.
But as I rode the elevator back up to my apartment, I couldn't stop replaying those seconds when the past had bled into the present.
When I'd looked at her and seen not the woman who'd betrayed me, but the one I'd woken up next to that last morning. The one whose name I'd whispered in the dark. The one I'd thought I'd spend my life with.
That woman was a lie.
She'd never existed.
So why did she still feel so devastatingly real?
The elevator doors opened, and I stepped into my empty apartment, the silence suffocating.
My phone buzzed again. My father: Progress report required. Board is getting restless. I stared at the message, then deleted it without responding.
Tomorrow, I'd push harder. Demand faster results. Remind her exactly what was at stake.
Tomorrow, I'd be back in control.
But tonight, alone in the dark, I could still feel the ghost of her breath against my face.
And I hated myself for wanting more.