Chapter 163 Chapter 163
Dominic’s POV
The hard drives hum like heartbeats in the night. I sit cross-legged on the concrete floor of my garage, the vault’s contents spread around me like the remains of a body picked apart for truth.
My laptop’s blue glow cuts through the dark but my hands are trembling with sweat. The files are endless of encrypted folders, logs, lab results, fragments of data that read like code and confession.
I don’t even know what I’m looking for anymore, evidence or a ghost. Then I find it. A single file labeled “AUDIO-0712-E”.
I hover the cursor over it, pulse stuttering. “E,” for Elia. My throat tightens as I click. There’s a hiss of static, then the faint hum of fluorescent lights. And then…
“Stanley, please. I want out.”
Her voice. I freeze. My breath lodges halfway up my chest. It’s her, soft, cracked at the edges, stripped of the calm, deliberate tone she used to wear like armor. There’s no mistaking that tremor, that breathy urgency. Elia.
“You promised I could walk away when it was done. I’ve done everything you asked. Please… I can’t do this anymore.”
There’s a pause, the kind of silence that feels alive. Then another voice, colder. Male. Stanley’s.
“You think you can just leave this, Elia? After what you’ve seen?”
I grip the edge of the laptop so hard my knuckles ache. The sound quality is raw, unprocessed like someone hid a recorder under a table.
“I don’t care about the money,” she says, her voice breaking. “I’ll disappear. I’ll erase myself. You’ll never hear from me again. Just let me go.”
My mouth goes dry. Elia, the same Elia who once told me fear was “a luxury of the unprepared.” She’s begging. Begging.
Then comes Stanley’s sigh l, it was long and weary.
“You know too much. You think they’d let you vanish after what we’ve built?”
“We?” she spits. “Don’t you dare pretend this was ever mine.”
The audio distorts and a crash, a thud, something metallic rolling. Then static. The last thing I hear before it cuts off is Elia gasping, “Please…Stanley, don’t…” Then silence.
I sit there, listening to nothing, for what feels like an eternity.
It’s like the air has been sucked out of the room. My heartbeat echoes in my ears. The words replay themselves, looping mercilessly. I’ll disappear forever. She meant it. She knew.
I lower my head into my hands, pressing my palms against my eyes until sparks flash behind them. The image of her pleading is unbearable, it doesn’t fit the woman I knew.
The one who could look an armed investor dead in the eye and smile like she’d already won. The one who didn’t fear anything but maybe that’s the point. Maybe she wasn’t fearless, just trapped.
I look at the drives again, at the label on the side of the vault case: Project Eden. The name that’s been haunting me since the grave. If this recording was on the same drives as the project data, then Stanley didn’t just betray her, he buried her.
And he made sure no one would find her voice. I push back from the floor, pacing. The concrete feels colder now, the shadows deeper. My reflection in the laptop screen looks like someone else, hollow-eyed, jaw tight, obsessed.
Because now the question isn’t what happened to Elia. It’s when did Stanley decide she was disposable?
I scroll through the drive again. Dozens of logs open and close experiment IDs, timestamps, references to “E-subjects.” E-01 through E-09. One of them is E-07, the same code I saw carved into that woman’s wrist in the morgue.
My stomach turns. What if Elia didn’t disappear? What if she was turned into one of them?
No. I shake the thought away, it’s too monstrous, too impossible. And yet the evidence keeps circling back. The gravesite vault. The recordings. The data tied to human trials under Eden.
Elia’s voice begging to vanish might not have been metaphor. Maybe she meant it literally. The air smells faintly of rust and dust. I catch myself whispering, “What did he do to you?”
The recording replays in my head, the strain in her voice, the way she says “I’ll disappear.” It’s like she already knew death wasn’t the worst outcome.
Something inside me fractures, guilt, fury, maybe both. I should’ve seen it sooner. When Stanley insisted on closing the case. When he told me to “let the past rest.” I thought it was grief. Turns out, it was concealment.
I slam my fist on the table, the metal clang echoing through the garage.
I can’t stay here. Not another second with her voice trapped in digital limbo. I eject the drive, shove it into my jacket pocket, and grab my keys.
The night outside is thick and heavy. The city hums like an old machine trying to stay alive, distant sirens, the faint buzz of neon through rain. My car’s engine coughs awake, and I just drive. No plan. No direction. Just motion.
Every red light feels like a trap. Every passing face in the street feels like a watcher. I can’t shake the feeling that Stanley’s already one step ahead that he knows I’ve heard the recording but if he thinks I’ll bury it again, he’s wrong.
I park in an empty lot near the waterfront, the same place Elia used to go when she needed silence. She once told me, “Still water hides the deepest things.” Back then, I thought it was poetry. Now it sounds like prophecy.
I play the recording again, through my car speakers this time. Her voice fills the space.
“I’ll disappear forever.”
“Not yet,” I whisper. “Not until they pay for this.”
The sound of the waves blends with her plea, turning it into something almost sacred, a promise I have no choice but to keep.
I lean back, eyes closed, and let the fury settle into focus. If Stanley thought burying her would erase her, he underestimated the one thing he never understood my inability to let go.
Elia’s voice might’ve been buried under six feet of data and dirt, but now it’s mine. And I’ll use it to burn Z-Core to the ground because the truth isn’t buried anymore, It’s awake and so am I.