E.C.—stabilizer.
Elias froze.
His stomach dropped in a way that had nothing to do with Matteo anymore. The initials were his. They had to be. No one else fit.
Stabilizer.
The word carried its own chill, colder than the clinical formatting of the page. No subject. No trial. Just that label. A stabilizer, something you used to anchor unstable systems, to keep the corruption from consuming the vessel. Not a person, but just another mechanism.
His fingers gripped the desk so tightly the wood creaked beneath them.
'That's all I am to them?' The thought clawed its way up, bitter and sharp. Not Elias Clarke. Not the man who spent nights wringing meaning out of broken data, not the one who fought tooth and nail for space in a field that tolerated him only in silence. Just a line in Adler's ledger. Just a tool.
