The echo of Harry's voice still clung to the walls long after Silas Marlow left the study.
He didn't look back.
He moved with ghostlike precision, footsteps silent on the antique floorboards, his gloved hands clasped behind him like a man carrying the weight of his obituary.
Every corridor he passed through reminded him of paintings that had watched him for over a century, wood panels that creaked only when he stepped upon them.
You're not aging.
Not like the rest of us.
Harry's words gnawed at the edges of his calm, though he didn't allow his breath to hitch. That particular suspicion had been inevitable. The director was too clever, too paranoid. It was only a matter of time.
But the way Harry had said it… with that same brittle condescension Mara once wielded before her disappearance. That same tone that assumed Silas belonged to them.
They always forgot who built the walls first.
He descended the narrow servant's stairwell near the eastern wing, where the gas lamps hadn't worked in a decade.
His boots brushed past cobwebs that no one dared to clear. Outside, the wind moaned against the high windows, stirring the ivy vines like twitching fingers.
And that's when he felt it.
A pressure in the air.
Wrong.
A beat too silent. A breath too close.
He stopped.
The corridor was empty, on the surface. Silas had survived more than wars, more than science. He'd survived time itself, and time had taught him how to read the world through texture. Air pressure. Shifts in light. The way shadows leaned.
And something… was watching him.
His fingers flexed in the glove.
"Come out, Eight," he said softly. "I know you're there."
No answer.
But the heat of a body lingered at the edge of the corridor, behind the brittle curtain of ivy that snaked in through the cracked glass near the servants' garden gate.
Silas turned his head slightly. "I didn't report you. I haven't restrained you. I even let you remove the collar without consequence. You think that was an oversight?"
Still no answer. But the tension in the hallway had a heartbeat now. Slow. Controlled. Dangerous.
"You could kill me," he said quietly. "And I'm not sure I'd stop you."
A breath.
Then nothing.
He continued walking.
But this time, he didn't clasp his hands behind his back.
This time, he kept them at his sides, near his concealed blade and the thin syringe strapped inside his coat.
Not because he feared Igor.
But becausehe didn't know what version of Eight was watching him anymore.
And for the first time in decades…
Silas Marlow did not feel like a predator.
He felt like prey.
Silas descended below the estate into the crypt chambers, a forbidden level few even knew existed, carved beneath the foundation centuries ago.
The air turned to frost with every step, the stone corridors narrowing as though the past itself were trying to suffocate him.
At the far end, hidden behind an unmarked wall panel, a door hissed open to the subzero containment hall.
Inside, silence reigned.
Not sterile, but reverent. Like a cathedral with no god.
Rows of vertical suspension chambers stretched in a half-circle, their glass etched with frost-like tombstones that glowed.
Each pod held the sleeping remnants of the Marrow line, his cousins, siblings, uncles, and aunts, faces slack in stasis, skin nearly blue with stillness, eternally preserved by the serum they once believed would make them gods.
Silas stepped slowly toward the one at the center.
It bore his reflection.
Or… what should have been his.
The face inside the chamber was his younger twin, his brother Eli. Or was it?
They were indistinguishable in life, but Eli had volunteered first. The first trial. The prototype serum had left him comatose for decades before the refinements came.
They never revived him. Couldn't. Selene said there was too much corruption in his brain tissue. That he was safer frozen than failed.
Silas placed a gloved hand against the glass.
The frost burned through the leather, and his hand trembled.
His reflection stared back at him, eyes closed, lips blue, body unmoving. A mirror that never aged never forgave. Time had stolen their differences. Now they were one face, two fates.
Is this the legacy?
Is this what Selene called a gift?
No answer came.
Just the whisper of the refrigeration units and the ghost of memory trailing behind it. The taste of regret, clinical, bitter, and permanent.
He turned away.
Back upstairs, the surveillance terminal flickered in the corner of the security room, tucked behind a mirrored cabinet in the laundry wing. He approached it in silence.
Feed 03-B. Garden perimeter. Night of breach.
Gene's masked face.
Half in shadow, half bathed in mag light. Her figure frozen mid-step at the fence caught like a moth in static.
He hovered over the footage.
Pressed delete.
Confirmation required. He entered the clearance manually. His code.
The screen blinked white.
Gone.
He didn't even sigh.
He simply turned.
Then, in the silence that followed, the faint vibration of his comm device trembled in his coat pocket.
A message.
Encrypted.
No signature.
Just a line of text, blinking faintly:
"Silas. Not all of us forgot what came before the Angels."
His eyes narrowed, lips parting slightly.
There was someone else.
Not from the Marrows.
Not from Harry's house of false kings.
But someone who remembered the original design.
The betrayal beneath the betrayal.
Silas Marlow stood still in the dark, one hand still warmed by the glass of a coffin. And for the first time in a century…
He wasn't sure whose side he was on anymore.