Page 35 of Laundering Down the Legions
I looked at him. Really looked. He was standing there holding the fact that the woman he'd healed, absorbed injury for, protected with his silence, was the architect of the thing destroying his best friend and fracturing his team.
"How long have you known?" I asked.
"Suspicions, for a while. Confirmation for an hour. Verifying the chemistry, cross-referencing it against research published under her name, confirming the timeline. I needed to be certain before I brought it to you."
"Is this the full scope?" Grayson asked quietly. "Or is there more?"
Kearan moved to the last document. "If the inhibitor was built to keep the whole team frenzied, it wasn't built only for Parker."
Quiet. The kind that comes after something reorganizes your whole understanding of what you're fighting. This wasn't sabotage, it was strategic weaponization.
"There's more," Grayson said. "If they built this test protocol for Trux, they built it for other Agenti. Other assets. This isn't about Parker or Trux or this team. It's a capability the inner faction has been quietly building. A program that manufactures controlled berserkers by fragmenting mate bonds."
I got there before he finished. "They're making an army."
"There is not telling how many times they've attempted this. How many bonds they've ruined or how many lives they've destroyed."
"What do we do?" I asked.
His gaze met mine. "We complete the bonds before they can stop us. We find Maren and Evelyn and pull whatever they know about the larger program out of them. And then we burn the whole thing down."
"And Trux," Grayson asked.
"Trux stabilizes. That's the priority. Finishing the bond will stabilize the Alpha. Everything else waits until he's not actively self-destructing." He gathered the files, arranging them, the motion keeping him upright. "I need to tell the team."
"Not tonight," I said. "Let them rest. Tomorrow we will tell them about what you found."
"And then," Grayson said quietly, "we hunt."
Kearan met his eyes. "Then we hunt."
CHAPTER 19
Iwas face down on my bed with my boots still on when my room reorganized itself around her. That was how Zandia moved through a space, not entering so much as redefining it, making the walls apologize for trying to contain her. I didn't lift my head. I was too hollowed out from days of watching Trux come apart on a clock somebody else was setting, from holding Kearan while he absorbed things he wasn't supposed to survive, and from learning everything else systematically destroying my life.
The mattress shifted under her weight. Not gentle, not a request. She settled on the edge of my bed like she'd been invited.
I turned my head so I could see her. "Breaking into people's rooms is a weird flex for someone who claims to care about your own privacy."
"I care about efficiency," she corrected, her mild accent making even that sound like a lesson. "Your bedroom is where you keep the part of yourself that lets information land. In public you're too guarded. Here you're honest."
I pushed up onto my elbows. My body was heavy in the way it gets when you've run a crisis too long and finally stopped. "So you broke in for a heart-to-heart."
"I broke in to tell you what the demon wearing your father actually is. Because you're going to try to pull him out, and if you don't understand what you're pulling out of him, the dagger will tear you apart instead."
"Of course it will. Just charming." I sat up. "Okay. Tell me."
"Your father's demon is not one of the scouts," she said, watching for a reaction she clearly didn't expect to get. "Not one of the ones moving through bodies like temporary tenants. This is older. It predates the current hierarchy. It was placed in your father's body deliberately, by someone who understood exactly what they were doing."
"Placed. So he didn't just get possessed at random."
"He was targeted. Someone understood what he was, what his reach was, and decided breaking him had strategic value. So they sent something very specific into his body, with instructions to do exactly what it's been doing."
"Which is to destroy everything he touches."
"While wearing his face," she corrected. "Using his relationships as weapons. Corrupting every system he can reach and making it look like it came from him. The cruelty, Parker. That viciousness isn't hunger. It's a choice. Deliberate sabotage dressed up as demonic impulse."
I got there before she finished. Every cruelty I'd ever pinned on my father's nature might have been the demon's decision. Every betrayal strategic. Every manipulation aimed. Or none of it. That was the other possibility.
