Chapter 60 CHAPTER SIXTY

Chapter 60 CHAPTER SIXTY
Amelia’s POV

The city was still breathing when I woke.
A low, mechanical hum vibrated somewhere beyond the thin walls of traffic, maybe. Or the faint pulse of something hidden, electric. I sat up slowly, the unfamiliar ceiling above me gray in the half-light. The rain had stopped hours ago, leaving behind a hush so complete it felt staged.

For a moment, I forgot where I was.
Then it came back in pieces, he alley, the SUV, Damian’s voice cutting through the storm. Adrian’s hand was dragging me through the narrow street until my lungs burned. The sirens that followed. And then darkness.

Now, only silence.

I swung my legs off the bed and winced. My feet were raw, covered in faint scrapes from running barefoot. Adrian had bandaged one ankle while I was half-conscious; his neatness gave him away with tight wraps, precise, deliberate. He always fixed what he could, even when everything else was falling apart.

I looked around. We were in what used to be a maintenance flat, the kind left to rot above warehouses. The air smelled of iron and dust. A single lamp glowed near the corner, illuminating a desk littered with printed maps and drive fragments. The hum I’d heard wasn’t the cit;y it was a small generator in the adjoining room.

Adrian wasn’t here.

A wave of unease rippled through me.

I crossed to the window. The glass was cracked, smeared with dried rain. Below, the streets were empty except for the faint smear of headlights in the distance. Dawn was crawling in gray, reluctant.

Something inside me whispered: He shouldn’t have gone alone.

I found him in the next room.
He was crouched over a half-open case, a portable surveillance console flickering with distorted images of city intersections, a parking lot, a single alley where two sets of tire marks curved into darkness.

He didn’t turn when I stepped in.
“You should be resting,” he said quietly.

“I couldn’t sleep.”

He exhaled through his nose, still watching the screen. “Neither could I.”

The light from the monitor painted his face in cold blue, his eyes rimmed with exhaustion. He’d changed clothes, a dark shirt, sleeves rolled. His hands moved mechanically, shifting cables, tapping through feeds.

“What are you looking for?” I asked.

“Confirmation.”

“Of what?”

He paused. “That he’s still hunting.”

The way he said it made my stomach twist.
Damian.

Adrian pressed a key, and one of the feeds sharpened a freeze-frame of a familiar car parked near the waterfront. The license plate was obscured by mud, but I didn’t need to see it. The sleek frame and the tinted windows were Damian’s.

He’d already found our trail.

“How long?” I whispered.

Adrian’s jaw flexed. “Hours, maybe less. He’s rerouting through the municipal cameras again, I can feel it. The system’s slowing down.”

“Then we should leave.”

He shook his head. “We can’t keep running, Amelia. We’ll run out of shadows.”

The way he said my name, soft but deliberate, pulled at something deep inside me.

“Then what do we do?”

Adrian finally looked at me. His eyes were tired but focused. “We finish what we started.”

He spread out a stack of papers across the desk: maps, documents, photocopies of handwritten letters, all linked by one name: Helix.

The word looked harmless in ink, but I could feel its weight. Every road, every death, every secret circled back to it.

Adrian pointed to one of the sheets. “These are from the drive we recovered before the blackout. They reference a second site.”

“Another facility?”

“Not exactly. More like a vault. A place where they stored personal data, genetic, psychological, and behavioral patterns. Everything tied to Project Helix was archived under the Blackwood line.”

“And you think Damian knows?”

Adrian’s silence was answer enough.

I sank into the nearest chair, staring at the endless lines of text. My father’s name appeared twice, once as “Founder”, and again under a note titled Access Protocol: Generation II.
Right beneath it: Amelia E. Rowan.

My own name looked foreign now. Manufactured.

“Tell me the truth,” I said, voice low. “Did you know? Before all this, before the cameras and the drive, did you know who I really was?”

His gaze didn’t waver. “I suspected. But not like this. Not that you were part of the design.”

“The design?”

“Helix wasn’t about preservation, Amelia.” He leaned forward, voice roughening. “It was about control. Bloodlines engineered for influence, paired for dominance. You weren’t chosen by chance. You were built into his story before you could even speak.”

My throat felt tight. “Then what am I now?”

He hesitated, and that silence told me the truth.
A weapon. A legacy. Something neither of us could fully understand yet.

I didn’t realize I was crying until one of my tears hit the document, bleeding the ink into a smear.

Adrian reached across the table, his hand brushing mine. “You’re not what they made you, Amelia. You’re what you choose now.”

It should have been comforting. It wasn’t.
Because part of me didn’t know what I’d choose if given the chance.

Outside, thunder rolled faintly again, a reminder that storms never really end; they circle back.

By evening, the generator was dying. The lights flickered, then steadied again. Adrian was pacing near the door, scanning through a handheld scanner, trying to catch any tracking signals.

“Still clean?” I asked.

“For now.”

But there was tension in his posture, the kind of stillness that hides fear.

I walked closer. “You’re not telling me something.”

He looked at me, and for a moment I saw the crack behind the calm. “Damian sent a message. Encrypted. It came through one of my old access routes.”

“What did it say?”

He met my eyes. “Welcome home.”

My breath hitched. “He knows where we are.”

“No,” Adrian murmured. “He wants us to think he does.”

I frowned. “Then why send it?”

“To make us move. To drive us somewhere he’s already waiting.”

It was working.

My pulse drummed in my ears. “So what now?”

“We go where he expects us to go,” he said quietly, “but on our terms.”

I shook my head. “That’s suicide.”

He gave a faint, humorless smile. “Not if we’re faster.”

Night fell again.
Adrian’s plan was simple in theory, impossible in practice: lure Damian into the open. But to do that, we’d have to walk straight into the heart of the Blackwood estate, the same place my father’s note had warned about.

“If she remembers, everything ends.”

I didn’t know if that meant me or the truth itself.

I stood at the window, watching the city dim under the rain’s return. In the reflection, Adrian appeared behind me closer than I’d realized. His voice was low, steady.

“We leave at dawn.”

I nodded slowly.

But inside, something in me whispered: He won’t let us reach dawn.

The sound came just after midnight.
A soft click, almost tender, followed by the faint whine of a system coming online. Adrian froze mid-step.

The monitor on the desk flickered. Static filled the room, then an image formed.

Damian.

He stood in his penthouse, dry, immaculate, a glass of amber liquid in his hand. Behind him, the city skyline burned with electric light.

“Running suits you,” he said, voice distorted slightly by the feed. “But you were never very good at hiding, were you, Amelia?”

I couldn’t breathe.

Adrian stepped forward, fury flickering under his composure. “How did you find this channel?”

Damian’s smile was small and patient. “I didn’t. You opened it. Every time you accessed those files, every time you tried to trace me, you left the door open.”

He raised the glass, almost like a toast.
“Curiosity,” he said softly, “was always your weakness.”

The screen cut to static.

And then the lights went out.

We stood in the dark. The generator had been severed. Outside, faint movement tires crunching wet gravel. Headlights bloomed briefly across the wall, then died.

Adrian grabbed my wrist. “Back door, now.”

We ran. The narrow hall echoed with our footsteps, the air thick with the smell of rain-soaked metal. My heartbeat drowned out everything.

We reached the stairwell nd stopped.

Footsteps echoed below.

Not rushed. Measured. Calm.

The same kind of calm that always came before he appeared.

I felt Adrian’s grip tighten. He looked at me, eyes flicking toward the upper exit. “Go. Now.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

He shook his head once. “If he gets me, he doesn’t get you. That’s enough.”

“Adrian...”

But he was already moving down the stairs, his silhouette swallowed by the flickering shadows.

I hesitated, then followed.

The bottom floor smelled of oil and smoke. The storm outside roared again, slamming wind against the building. I crept through the darkness until I reached the corner of the loading bay.

There he was.

Damian.

He stood just beyond the open gate, the rain haloing him in silver. He wasn’t even looking at Adrian; his eyes found me instantly.

“I told you,” he said, voice steady even over the storm. “The rain never hides you.”

Adrian moved to block his line of sight. “Let her go.”

Damian’s mouth curved into a slow, haunting smile.
“Why would I let go of what’s mine?”

The words struck harder than any blow.

I took a step back, heart hammering. Adrian’s hand twitched toward his coat, but Damian only raised his.

“You’ve both been chasing ghosts,” he said. “Neither of you knows where this ends.”

“Then tell us,” I shot back. “Tell me what Helix really is.”

He tilted his head, almost pitying. “You still think it’s about you.”

Lightning flashed, flooding the warehouse in white. For a second, everything was frozen: three bodies, three different truths.

When the light faded, Damian was gone.

Adrian spun around, searching. “No, no, no...”

The power came back with a snap. The screens on the console flickered to life, showing dozens of feeds: he estate, the labs, the roads. And in the center feed: Damian, standing at the gates of the Blackwood property.

He looked straight into the camera.

“Welcome home,” he said.

The feed cut to black.