"I'll be damned…" Lucian murmured, the words almost lost to the thrum of the room.
The girl met his gaze with a stare that could cut stone—cold, detached, perfectly still. There wasn't a trace of emotion in her face, only a silence that pressed against the skin like winter air.
Then, he noticed details. The subtle gleam of her skin. The sculpted precision of her features. The unshakable poise in the way she sat.
But all of that was nothing when he looked into her eyes.
The world peeled away. Sound thinned. The weight of the room fell into nothing. In her gaze, there was no exact color—only shifting veins of amethyst, molten gold, and ice-blue, swirling in patterns that seemed too deliberate to be natural.
'What… is happening to me?'
His pulse slowed. His thoughts dissolved. He couldn't move. Couldn't want to move. It wasn't attraction—it was drowning in something vast and alien, and his body was too spellbound to fight it.
"Put the mask back on before he starts drooling," Ash said dryly.
The girl obeyed without a word. The porcelain mask slid over her face, severing the invisible tether between them.
Lucian blinked hard, breath catching like he'd just been ripped from a dream.
He prided himself on being untouchable—too sharp, too jaded to be swayed by a pretty face. But this… this was not seduction.
"What the hell was that?" he demanded.
Ash's mouth curved upward, savoring the rare crack in his armor. "One of Iralis's many… gifts. After her third awakening, most people can't think straight after looking at her for more than a few seconds. Especially her eyes. It's not something she can turn off."
Lucian shook his head, trying to scrape the static from his brain. "So the only way to contain it is the mask?"
"Precisely."
Silence followed—thick, tight, almost brittle.
Ash broke it with a tilt of her head. "I think there's an elephant in the room."
Lucian raised a brow. "What?"
He turned to the girl with a mock scowl. "You want an apology? You want me to say, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have sold you? I could… but we both know I'm not sorry. I did what I had to do to survive. And if I had to do it again, I would."
Iralis lifted her head, meeting his gaze—mask and all.
"You're right," she said. Her voice was velvet over steel. "Maybe I was naive back then. Maybe I should have seen it coming. But that's irrelevant now. Like you said—we do what we must to survive."
Lucian smirked. "Exactly. The past is dead. Forgive, forget—freedom in both."
She shook her head once.
"You misunderstand. Each breath you take is because I'm not authorized to kill you. There is no forgiveness. My restraint right now is survival."
The words slid into him like a knife would've. She wasn't bluffing. She was like him—bound, controlled, likely carrying the same microscopic leash in her blood. Following orders. And one of those orders was simple: don't kill Lucian.
Which begged the question—if she ever got the green light, could she?
"Enough," Ash cut in, rising from her chair and striding to the wall of screens. "Listen closely."
A command in her voice made the air feel sharper.
"Your joint training begins in one hundred hours. The research facility's interplanetary gateway will send you to a fallen world."
The screens flared to life—rolling satellite footage of landscapes stripped bare and blackened. Ruined cities. Fields of charred stone. Armies of grotesque demons swarming like ants across the ground.
"A fallen world," Ash said, "is a planet that failed to contain its hellgates. Eventually, Hell's forces overrun it completely. Since sending you into Hell proper would be suicide at your level, you'll start here—clearing gates one planet at a time. Each one will be harder than the last."
Lucian raised a hand lazily. "Question."
Ash pointed at him. "Yes?"
"So, in a hundred hours, you're sending me to a demon-infested wasteland… and expecting me to win?"
"Exactly."
Lucian blinked. "I'm sorry—are you insane?"
"The better question is: are you scared?" she countered.
"No," he said flatly. "I just have a functioning brain. Did you forget how I got here? I lost—completely—to a bunch of idiots with blasters. And now you want me to fight an army of demons?"
Ash's grin was sharp, satisfied. Not obedience. Not panic. Realism. She liked that answer.
"Well," she said, ticking points off on her fingers. "Three things:
First—you'll undergo a preliminary operation before deployment.
Second—you were outnumber on that day.
And third—you're not the same person you were four years ago."
Lucian's smile was faint, testing. "How different?"
Ash's grin widened. "Why don't we head to the training hall and find out?"