Chapter 10
Three months.
Three months of wondering if Aren was rotting in some unmarked grave. Three months of Kei was filing missing person reports that went nowhere. Three months of Kei was checking his empty desk every morning, hoping.
And then he just walked back into the office like he'd been on vacation.
Zea watched her workmate settle at his usual desk. Same crooked smile. Same habit of tapping his pen against his coffee mug—tap tap tap, rhythm never changing. But something fundamental had shifted.
His eyes held shadows that hadn't been there before. Deep, ancient shadows that seemed to swallow light rather than reflect it.
"We thought you were dead," she whispered during their lunch break. Her voice cracked with equal parts relief and accusation.
The break room felt too empty. Too quiet. The hum of the refrigerator amplified the tremor in her words.
Aren laughed.
The sound was hollow. It echoed strangely in the sterile space, bouncing off walls at wrong angles.
"The scientist who recruited me was obsessed with early human civilization stories." He stirred his coffee with deliberate slowness.
The spoon made hypnotic circles that seemed to follow no natural rhythm—counterclockwise, then clockwise, then stopping mid-rotation. "Completely mad about them. I got curious. Applied to his institute just to investigate these tentacle specimens that supposedly came from ancient plants."
Zea leaned forward. Her forensic instincts prickled like static electricity on skin.
As a forensic botanist, she analyzed plant evidence from crime scenes. Pollen grains that could place a suspect at a murder site. Root fragments that revealed where bodies were buried. Botanical toxins that killed without leaving obvious traces. Her expertise in plant forensics made her invaluable to law enforcement.
It also made her understand how botanical mysteries could consume someone.
But three months without contact wasn't normal curiosity.
It was obsession.
Or something worse.
"Ancient plants?" The words tasted like copper in her mouth. Metallic and wrong.
"Prehistoric specimens. Pre-human." Aren's fingers drummed against the table in an irregular pattern that made her skin crawl. Too many beats. Wrong intervals. As if played by something with more than five fingers. "After I satisfied my curiosity, I decided to return to the city. Turned out the research was a dead end anyway."
His smile never reached his eyes.
And when he thought no one was looking, Zea caught him staring at his hands as if they belonged to someone else.
Flexing his fingers with a mixture of fascination and disgust. Like a pianist forced to play an inferior instrument.
Something about his story felt rehearsed. Hollow. Like a script he'd memorized but didn't quite believe himself.
The cadence was wrong. The pauses too calculated. The details too vague for someone who'd supposedly spent three months consumed by research. But Zea pushed her suspicions aside.
Relief flooded through her—warm and overwhelming. Aren was alive. Kei was allright. That was all that mattered, wasn't it?
She could investigate the inconsistencies later. Could ask more probing questions when he'd had time to readjust.
For now, she just wanted her colleague and Kei back. Her friends.
"I'm just glad you're back," she said, squeezing his shoulder.
The muscle beneath felt oddly cold through his shirt. But she attributed it to the office air conditioning.
"The lab hasn't been the same without you."
They returned to work. Threw themselves into their latest case with the familiar rhythm of professional collaboration.
The victim was a young man. Handsome maybe. But the violence done to him was horrific.
Sexual assault. Brutal inhuman torture.
His face was completely destroyed. Unrecognizable pulp where features should have been. Reduced to raw meat and shattered bone that made even seasoned investigators flinch.
Zea spread the crime scene photos across her desk. She studied the botanical evidence with meticulous attention.
"Pollen samples suggest he was killed near the old industrial district. The plant matter embedded in his clothing indicates—"
She leaned closer. Examined a particularly interesting specimen with her magnifying glass.
"—wait, this is unusual. There are spores here that shouldn't exist in this climate zone. They're subtropical species, but we're in a temperate region—"
"No. It's him!"
Aren's voice cut through her analysis. Sharp and strange. Pitched higher than his normal register.
She looked up, startled.
Aren stood frozen beside the examination table. Staring down at the corpse with an expression she couldn't read. Something between recognition and rage. Grief and satisfaction. His face had gone completely white. Bloodless. Making his eyes look too dark by contrast.
"Aren? What is it?"
"I... nothing. Just..." He swallowed hard. His hands trembled as they gripped the table's edge with enough force to make his knuckles turn bone-white. "The brutality of it. Still gets to me sometimes."
Something cold crawled up Zea's spine. Serpentine and insidious.
Chapter 11
In all their years working together, she'd never seen Aren react like this to a body. He was usually clinical. Detached. Professional.
She'd watched him examine decomposed corpses, dismembered remains, victims of the most grotesque violence—all with the same calm, analytical demeanor.
But now he looked like he might either vomit or pass out. His breathing was shallow and irregular. What she couldn't see—what no human could perceive—was the recognition burning behind those stolen eyes.
The god wearing Aren's face stared down at its own mutilated corpse and felt... nothing.
No grief. No horror.
Only mild irritation that this original shell—this beautiful vessel Kei’s loved and adored—came back to him.
At least that mad scientist had been thorough. Demolishing the head before dumping the body. No one needed to know the real Aren lay on this examination table, reduced to evidence in a manila folder.
It had been so beautiful once, this body. Perfect bone structure. Expressive eyes. A smile that could charm information from the most reluctant witnesses.
Nam'Vareth reminisced about Aren's original features the way a thief might remember a particularly fine coat they'd stolen—with appreciation but no real attachment.
“But still it was mildly inconvenient that the scientist had only just now decided to dump the remains, but the body was still perfectly preserved from its three-month rest." he silently thought.
"I'll take over this case," it said, forcing Aren's voice to sound steady. Professional. "You should go. Your boyfriend's here."
Zea followed his gaze to the doorway.
Her breath caught.
Lucien leaned against the doorframe with casual elegance. One hand braced against the wood. Shirt hanging open to reveal that lean, muscled torso—the perfect build for a submissive. Every dominant's dream.
His dark hair was disheveled in that carelessly elegant way that looked artless but probably took effort. Shirt wrinkled and half-unbuttoned as if he'd dressed in a hurry. Or simply didn't care about appearances.
Intricate tattoos flowed like dark water from his left shoulder down his arm. Ending in delicate patterns across his fingers that looked almost like ancient script.
Zea had heard rumors of his family’s deep, occult ties, whispering that the tattoos were maps to knowledge older than civilization. She never took the rumors seriously.
A flash of memory hit her—
Lucien bound and breathless beneath her. Lost in subspace. Those gorgeous sounds he made when she pushed him to his limits. The way his body would arch like a bow drawn taut...
"Zea."
Aren's voice snapped her back to reality. Sharp as a slap.
He was watching her with an odd expression. Head tilted at an angle that seemed just slightly wrong. Too far. Held too still. Like a predator calculating the best angle of attack.
"Go enjoy your date."
"He's not my boyfriend," she said automatically.
But her voice sounded distant even to her own ears. Dreamlike.
Lucien's lips curved into that maddeningly confident smirk. Dark eyes tracking the flush creeping up her neck with obvious appreciation.
"Maestra. Ready to go?"
"I'm working," she replied.
But even as she said it, she was already reaching for her jacket. Her body betraying her mind's protests with every unconscious movement toward him.
"The case can wait," Aren insisted. Moving to block her view of the body with deliberate precision. Positioning himself between her and the examination table like a barrier. "I've got this covered. Really. You've been working double shifts all week—take a break."
There was something urgent in his tone. Almost desperate.
As if he needed her gone. Needed her away from this particular body for reasons he couldn't articulate.
Then Aren's voice dropped to a husky whisper that made her skin crawl with its unfamiliar cadence:
"If he's not your boyfriend... may I claim and devour him?"
The words hung in the air like smoke.
Strange and wrong.
Lucien's laughter was rich and dark. A sound that spoke of understanding—understanding of things most humans couldn't comprehend.
"Hungry already, ancient one?"
Zea stared between them. Alarm bells shrieking in her mind like a security system gone haywire.
Since when was Aren into men?
In all the years they'd worked together, he'd exclusively dated women. Had waxed poetic about his various girlfriends with genuine affection. And what the hell did he mean by 'devour him'?
The phrasing was wrong. Too literal. Too strange. Like someone who'd learned human speech from outdated texts and hadn't quite mastered the colloquialisms.
And Lucien's response—"ancient one"?
What kind of joke was that?
Or was it a joke at all?
The thing wearing Aren's face laughed. But the sound was wrong. Too melodic. Too layered with harmonics that human vocal cords couldn't possibly produce. Like a choir singing in inhuman registers.
"Just joking," it said quickly. Forcing the laugh to sound more normal. More human. "You know how crime scenes affect me. Makes me say weird things. Dark humor and all that. I can smell he is yours."
Smell?
