Chapter 14 Sebastian's Isolation
The door to the observation room clicked shut behind him.
The sound was final. A vault sealing.
Sebastian stood for a moment with his back to the door, staring at the bank of monitors mounted on the wall. Four screens. Four different angles of the same small, white room.
The interrogation room.
And in the center of every frame—Aria.
She sat motionless in the metal chair, her head bowed, her shoulders curved inward like she was trying to make herself smaller. Disappear. The fluorescent lights overhead washed all the color from her skin, made her look like a ghost. Like she was already gone.
He had just spoken to her through the intercom. His voice had been steady. Cold. Clinical.
What is provable is all that matters.
The words still hung in the air, toxic and bitter.
He turned away from the monitors. Walked to the single chair positioned in front of the console and dropped into it. The leather was cold against his back. He leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees, and buried his face in his hands.
His fingers dug into his scalp. The pressure was almost painful, but it didn't touch the real ache—the one that pulsed behind his eyes, low and constant and unrelenting.
He had done it.
The broadcast. The public denouncement. Every word carefully chosen, every syllable designed to cut her out of his organization like a surgeon excising a tumor. Clean. Precise. Necessary.
He had sounded like a king. Calm. Controlled. Untouchable.
He felt like a building that had been gutted by fire—walls still standing, but nothing left inside.
The door opened behind him.
He didn't look. He knew those footsteps. Even with the slight drag of exhaustion, even in the flat-soled tactical boots instead of her usual sharp heels.
Lia.
She walked in slowly, her movements careful. Stiff. Her injured arm was still in the sling, and there were new lines of pain around her mouth. The bruise on her cheekbone had deepened to a mottled purple-green.
She leaned against the wall beside the door, arms crossed—her good hand gripping the edge of the sling. She didn't speak right away. Just watched him with those sharp, assessing eyes.
"The teams have been briefed," she said finally. Her voice was flat. Empty of emotion. "Morale is… stabilized. They're confused, but they'll follow orders. She's the enemy now. It's cleaner for them that way."
Sebastian didn't lift his head. "Cleaner," he repeated. The word felt like gravel in his mouth.
"It is," Lia insisted. Her tone sharpened, took on an edge. "You gave them a narrative. A clear target for their anger over the men we lost in that ambush. You stopped the rumors before they could start spreading like poison through the ranks. You protected the structure. You did what you had to do."
"I protected a lie." His voice was muffled against his palms.
"You protected us!" Lia pushed off the wall, her movement jerky with frustration. With pain. "What was the alternative, Sebastian? Stand up in front of everyone and say, 'I believe her, evidence be damned, because I'm in love with her'? You think that would inspire loyalty? You think that would keep the wolves at bay?"
She took a step closer, her eyes blazing. "Wells would leak that video to every rival, every contact, every dirty cop on his payroll within hours. They'd all see it. A man who chose a woman over his empire. A man compromised by his feelings. And they would destroy you. They'd tear you apart piece by piece. They'd tear her apart."
Her voice dropped, became almost urgent. "This cage you've built around her—it's the only thing keeping Wells from just putting a bullet in her head and washing his hands of the whole mess. This is protection. Ugly, brutal protection, but it's all we have."
He knew she was right.
Every tactical instinct he possessed screamed that she was right. The broadcast was a shield. The imprisonment was containment. Damage control. It was all logical. All necessary.
It felt like he was drowning.
"She looked at me," he said. His voice came out raw. Scraped. He lifted his head slowly, but he couldn't meet Lia's eyes. He stared instead at the scuff marks on the floor. Dark streaks against pale linoleum. "Through the glass. During the interrogation. She knew I was there, watching. And for just a second…"
He stopped. Swallowed hard.
"For just a second, I saw it in her eyes. She looked right through the glass, right through the performance, and she saw me."
"And what did she see?" Lia asked. Her voice was quieter now. Almost gentle.
Sebastian's throat worked. He stood abruptly, the chair scraping back with a harsh screech that echoed off the concrete walls. He couldn't sit still. The room was too small. The air too thin.
"She saw that I don't believe it," he said. The words came faster now, tumbling out. "She saw that the broadcast was a performance. That I'm standing here playing the role Wells wrote for me. And that's worse, Lia. Don't you see? If I actually believed she'd betrayed me, I could hate her. I could lock her away and never think about her again. It would be clean."
He started pacing, his movements sharp and agitated. A caged animal. "But this—this is torture. For both of us. She knows I don't believe it, and she has to watch me destroy her anyway. And I have to live with the fact that I'm doing it. That I'm choosing this."
"You're choosing survival," Lia said, but there was no conviction in her voice.
"Am I?" Sebastian stopped mid-pace, spinning to face her. His face was a landscape of torment—jaw tight, eyes wild, every muscle strung taut. "Or did I just prove that Wells knows me better than I know myself? That when it comes down to it, I'm exactly the broken, control-obsessed monster he thinks I am?"
His voice rose, cracking at the edges. "He handed me a perfect lie. Airtight evidence. A clean narrative. And I took it. I took it because the alternative—believing her, trusting her, choosing her over everything I've built—was too terrifying. Too messy. Too human."
He laughed, a harsh, bitter sound. "So I chose the lie. I always choose the lie. Because lies are safer. They're controllable. And that's all I know how to do anymore—control things. Even if it means destroying the one person who made me feel like I could be something more."
The words hung in the air between them.
Lia had no answer. Her expression was pained, conflicted. She opened her mouth, closed it again.
The silence stretched.
Sebastian's shoulders slumped. The manic energy drained out of him all at once, leaving only exhaustion. Bone-deep. Soul-crushing.
"I need to be alone," he said quietly.
Lia studied him for a long moment. Then she nodded once—a small, resigned movement. She turned and walked to the door, her footsteps heavy.
She paused with her hand on the handle. "Sebastian—"
"Please," he said. His voice was barely above a whisper. "Just… go."
She left. The door clicked shut behind her.
Alone.
The silence in the observation room was absolute. Not peaceful—oppressive. The hum of the electronics, the distant buzz of the ventilation system, the faint crackle of the monitors—it all blurred together into a white noise that did nothing to quiet the storm raging in his head.
He couldn't stay here.
He couldn't keep staring at those monitors, at the live feed of her sitting in that sterile white room, broken and alone because of him.
He left the observation room, walking quickly through the underground corridors. His footsteps echoed off concrete walls. He passed security stations where guards straightened as he approached, their faces careful. Respectful. Wary.
The boss is ruthless. He cut out his own heart. Don't cross him.
He could see the thought in their eyes. It was exactly the effect he'd wanted. The message he'd needed to send.
It made him sick.
He didn't go to the penthouse.
Couldn't.
The penthouse was full of her. The scent of her shampoo lingering in the bathroom. The book she'd been reading, left open on the arm of the sofa. The coffee mug she'd used that morning, still sitting in the sink because he hadn't been able to make himself wash it.
The echo of her laughter—rare and real and precious—bouncing off the high ceilings.
He couldn't face it.
Instead, he took a different elevator. One that required a separate keycard, that accessed a private level few people in the building even knew existed.
The doors opened onto a silent, thickly carpeted hallway. Soft lighting. No windows. Just a single door at the end.
He walked to it slowly, each step heavier than the last.
The door required his palm print. His retinal scan. Two layers of security to protect what lay inside.
The lock disengaged with a soft whisper.
He pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The shrine room.
The air was still. Perfectly preserved, like the inside of a museum. Soft, hidden lights glowed from recessed fixtures, casting a warm, golden illumination over the photographs that lined the walls.
Elena.
Her gap-toothed smile, bright and unguarded. Her serious expression as she bent over a book, glasses sliding down her nose. A candid shot of her laughing, head thrown back, joy radiating from every pixel.
The world she represented—innocence, hope, a future built on something other than blood and fear—felt impossibly far away now.
Sebastian didn't turn on the overhead light. He walked slowly to the small wooden cabinet in the corner, opened it, and pulled out a crystal decanter and a single glass. The whiskey inside was amber and expensive and older than Elena had ever gotten to be.
He poured two fingers into the glass.
The liquid caught the soft light, glowing like captured gold.
He didn't drink it.
He just stood there, holding the cool glass, staring at the photographs.
At Elena's face.
But superimposed over her features, all he could see was Aria.
Not as she was now—broken and hollow-eyed in that cell.
As she had been.
That morning in the kitchen, arguing with him about coffee, her hair still messy from sleep. In the library, brow furrowed in concentration as she studied the security schematics, determined to understand his world. In his bed, her skin warm against his in the darkness, her breath soft against his neck.
Alive. Real. His.
He had built this empire so he would never have to feel helpless again. So he would never have to stand outside a burning building and hear someone he loved screaming for him while he could do nothing.
Control. Total, absolute control. That was the promise he'd made himself over Elena's grave.
Now, the woman he loved was locked in a cell he'd put her in. Silent. Suffering.
And the screaming was all inside him.
He lifted the glass finally. Drained the whiskey in one long swallow. It burned going down, harsh and sharp, but it did nothing to touch the cold void in his chest.
He set the empty glass back on the cabinet. The soft click of crystal on wood was loud in the sacred quiet of the room.
He looked at Elena's smiling face for a long moment.
Then his gaze dropped to the floor. To his own shadow, stretched long and dark across the polished wood, distorted by the angle of the light.
His voice, when it finally came, was barely a whisper. Hoarse. Torn from someplace deep and daaged and desperately familiar.
It wasn't quite a prayer. It wasn't quite a confession.
It was just the truth, spoken to the only witness left who might understand.
"I'm doing it again."