The vibration of the jet's engines hummed through the floorboards, a low-frequency pulse that matched the frantic rhythm of my own heart. In the dim cabin, Yuri's silhouette was a dark silhouette against the moonlight streaming through the portholes.
The weight of the realization—that my father was a broker and the Volkovs were the investors—settled into my marrow. I wasn't a girl. I was a proprietary asset.
"You knew," I whispered against his lips, the taste of scotch and salt still lingering. "All this time in the mansion, while I was recovering... you knew my life started in a petri dish funded by your father's blood money."
Yuri pulled back just an inch, his eyes dark with a mixture of possessiveness and pain. "I knew the project existed. I didn't know you were the result until I saw you in that wreckage. My father died keeping the 'Fractured Grace' a secret from me. He knew if I found out, I'd do exactly what I'm doing now."
"And what is that, Yuri? Protecting the investment?"
"I'm burning the world down so no one else can own you," he growled.
He reached for a console on the wall, his fingers flying across a haptic interface. A holographic projection shimmered into existence between us—the structural map of the UNI's primary data center in Manhattan.
"Your father is a coward, but he was right about one thing," Yuri said, pointing to the glowing core of the building. "The UNI doesn't stop. They have a redundant backup of your biometric sequence. As long as that server exists, you are never truly free. They can 'reconstruct' your identity, your history, even your legal existence at the push of a button."
I looked at the glowing red core of the skyscraper. "You want to hit the heart of the city."
"I want to delete the blueprint of Jessica Marcel," he said. "And I need the 'Key' to get through the final firewall."
The intimacy of the cabin shifted. The hunger was still there, but it had been sharpened into a weapon. We were no longer just two broken things; we were a demolition crew.
"If we do this," I said, my hand finding the cold metal of the pistol I had taken from the villa, "there's no going back to the silk robes and the marble floors. We'll be ghosts for real this time."
Yuri leaned in, his forehead resting against mine. The "Wolf" was gone, replaced by something far more dangerous: a man with nothing left to lose. "I've been a ghost since the day I met you, Jessy. I'm just waiting for the light to catch up."
As the plane began its descent toward the jagged skyline of New York, I realized the "Fractured Grace" wasn't a description of the code. It was a description of us. We were beautiful, we were broken, and we were about to fall.