Chapter 315 Chapter 316

Chapter 315 Chapter 316
Chapter 316

Nikolai’s POV 

The air inside the clinic turned bitterly cold as the midnight hour arrived.

I walked down the quiet, dimly lit corridor toward my mother’s private neuro-suite, my heavy boots making no sound against the polished black stone floor. The quiet hum of the filtration units echoed through the empty hallway. Everything felt calm, still, and completely controlled.

As I reached the corner leading to the ante-room of suite four, I noticed the inner glass door was standing slightly ajar. A thin strip of warm light spilled across the dark tiles outside.

I stopped two feet from the entrance, my tactical instincts making me freeze in place.

Through the clear glass panel, I saw them.

Freya was sitting on the edge of the small medical sofa near the window. Her long, dark hair was loose over her shoulders, her white lab coat discarded on the floor beside her feet. And sitting right beside her, holding her tightly against his chest, was my identical twin brother, Nicholas.

He was wearing my black wool coat. He was sitting in the exact posture I always maintained.

Freya’s hands were wrapped around his neck, her fingers digging desperately into his dark hair as she tilted her head back. She was crying softly, silent tears running down her flushed cheeks, her lips parted as she looked up into his face with an expression of pure, uninhibited devotion.

"I was so afraid for you, Nikolai," Freya whispered, her voice trembling through the thin crack in the door, filled with a raw, agonizing love that made my heart violently stop in my chest. "I see how much pain you carry for your mother... I just want to take it away. I love you, Nikolai. I love you so much."

Nicholas did not correct her. He did not say his name was Nicholas. He did not tell her that the man she was crying for, the man whose burden she wanted to lift, was standing two feet away in the shadows.

Instead, Nicholas tightened his arm around her waist, leaned down, and captured her lips in a deep, possessive kiss.

Freya let out a quiet, breathless gasp against his mouth, surrendering completely to him. Her fingers tightened on his shoulders, pulling his body flush against hers as she melted into his embrace, completely unaware that the mouth consuming hers belonged to the twin who had stolen my face.

I stood completely still in the dark hallway.

My breath caught in my throat, a suffocating, crushing weight slamming into my chest until I couldn't pull a single molecule of oxygen into my lungs. The world around me lost all color, fading into a dull, terrifying gray. The blood in my veins turned into liquid nitrogen, freezing every nerve ending, every emotion, and every piece of my soul into absolute stone.

I watched my own face, my own body, being used to steal the only woman I had ever allowed myself to love. I listened to her whisper my name while my brother's hands slid beneath her sweater, pulling her bare skin against his chest.

I did not scream. I did not draw my gun. I did not hurl my fists through the glass wall.

I simply stepped forward, pushing the heavy glass door open with a dull, quiet click.

The sudden movement made them both freeze.

Nicholas pulled his mouth away from hers, his head snapping toward the door. When his dark eyes locked onto mine—when he saw me standing there in the doorway wearing my dark tactical sweater, looking at him with eyes devoid of any human life—every ounce of color instantly drained from his face. He went as pale as a corpse, his hands freezing on her body.

Freya blinked, looking back and forth between the man in her arms and the man standing in the doorway.

The exact same face. The exact same height. The exact same dark eyes.

She looked at Nicholas, then looked at me, her eyes widening in utter, catastrophic horror as the horrifying truth crashed down upon her head. Her jaw trembled violently, her hands instantly flying to her mouth as a muffled, terrified gasp escaped her throat.

"N-Nikolai?" Freya choked out, her voice high, thin, and entirely broken. "What... who..."

She pulled away from Nicholas as if he had suddenly turned into a poisonous viper, scrambling backward on the sofa, her hands shaking so hard she could barely hold herself up. She looked at Nicholas's terrified face, then looked back at me, tears streaming rapidly down her pale cheeks as the sheer, sick cruelty of the deception shattered her mind.

Nicholas scrambled to his feet, adjusting his clothes with frantic, trembling hands. "Nikolai... wait... let me explain... it wasn't..."

The room fell into a total, heavy, suffocating silence.

I looked at my twin brother. I looked at the woman who had whispered my name while wrapped in his arms. I felt something vital inside my soul snap clean in half, a quiet, permanent death that took every drop of warmth I possessed and buried it beneath five miles of solid ice.

I did not yell at him. I did not look at her.

"That is disrespectful," I said.

My voice came out flat, cold, and entirely hollow. There was no anger in it. No sorrow. No passion. It was the voice of a corpse speaking from the bottom of an open grave.

Nicholas took a small, terrified step forward, his hands reaching out in a desperate, frantic gesture. "Nikolai, please! I didn't mean for it to go this far! I swear to God!"

I turned my back on both of them without saying another word.

I walked out of the room, my heavy boots clicking against the dark stone tiles in a slow, steady, mechanical rhythm. Behind me, the sound of Freya's quiet, heartbroken sobbing echoed through the empty hallway, but I did not stop. I did not turn back.

Nikolai Sokolov, the man who cared, died in that quiet hallway in Tokyo. Only the tactical soldier remained.