CHAPTER 131: CHAPTER 131: STABILIZER (1)

The days after that dinner blurred.

Victor had been pulled into tasks Elias didn’t ask about, late meetings, calls that stretched into the night, and names that only carried weight in boardrooms and behind closed doors. He had returned when he could, sometimes long after midnight, sometimes only long enough to press a kiss against Elias’s temple before the world claimed him again.

And Elias, left to himself, finally sank into the kind of silence he once thought he wanted.

The lab table was spread with drafts, equations, and datasets he knew too well by now. His laptop screen burned with graphs and slides, half a dozen revisions waiting for one final thread to tie them together. This was the project that should have been Professor Stone’s responsibility, a mess of broken models and dead ends, a failure that Victor’s team had salvaged, refined, and then placed squarely in Elias’s hands. ’Yours to present. Yours to own.’

He adjusted his glasses, running a hand through his hair as he skimmed another line of data. The numbers fit now. They finally told a story, one Victor’s people had polished but one Elias had breathed life into again. He should have felt only relief.

Instead, he felt... the empty space at his side.

The office chair creaked as he leaned back, exhaling. He told himself he worked better alone. He had built his life on solitude, on being the one no one noticed or wanted. But now, with the manor hushed around him, he felt the absence too keenly. The silence wasn’t comforting, it pressed in, reminding him of the warmth missing from it.

He thought of Victor’s hand on his jaw, the weight of crimson eyes studying him like he was the only thing worth memorizing. He thought of that low, velvet voice telling him, ’you won me.And I don’t lose.’

The data blinked back at him from the screen, numbers waiting for his command. Yet for the first time, Elias admitted to himself that the work, his work, was easier when Victor was near. When the man was in the room, even if only seated in silence with a glass of wine, the air shifted. He didn’t have to guard every corner of himself. He didn’t have to pretend he wasn’t exhausted. He could just... keep going, because Victor was there.

His fingers brushed absently against the bond mark at his throat, warmth pulsing faintly beneath his touch.

"My alpha," Elias murmured under his breath, lips curving wry at the confession he’d never give Victor aloud. Not yet.

But the thought anchored him, steadier than the coffee cooling at his elbow or the datasets waiting for review. For once, his work didn’t feel like a lonely fortress.

—

Elias scrolled absently through the database, half his attention still on the slides waiting to be cleaned. The state-of-the-art section for his dissertation had always been tedious, a patchwork of citations and articles that blurred together into one long parade of other people’s conclusions.

But tonight something different caught his eye.

The title alone stopped him: On the Properties of Variant Etheric Resonance: A Study in Anomalous Red States.

He blinked, leaning forward, glasses slipping slightly down the bridge of his nose. Red ether.

His cursor hovered, uncertain for a beat, before he clicked.

The article wasn’t new, at least, not officially. Its header listed a conference abstract from nearly a decade ago, tucked into the proceedings of an obscure international journal no one ever cited. The language was clipped, the figures grainy, as though the authors themselves hadn’t dared polish it beyond plausibility.

Elias read quickly, the words drawing him in despite the academic flatness.

Observed resonance shift under conditions of excessive saturation, yielding unstable red-state etheric formations. Potential applications are noted, though control appears impossible; risks of systemic corruption outweigh utility.

His brow furrowed. Control impossible. Systemic corruption. And yet, potential applications.

At the bottom of the page, the name of the corresponding author burned against the screen.

Theobald Adler.

Elias froze.

He didn’t know the man; despite being his sister’s husband, they never met. Only the name, drifting like smoke through conversations he wasn’t meant to hear, whispered with caution or contempt. And yet here it was, attached to a paper about red ether.

He scrolled further, scanning the citations, the acknowledgments, and the datasets. A table of "trial subjects" appeared in the appendix, initials instead of names, thin shields of anonymity. His eyes caught on one line.

Subject M.W., high athletic performance noted (regional track records). Age: 17. Observed: competitive, volatile. Nickname in cohort: "Runner." Etheric resonance shift: irreversible.

Elias’s pulse stuttered.

Runner.

That was what the boys at school had called him, Matteo Weller, the track star. Always sprinting the length of the field at lunch, running laps long after practice was over, bragging about the scholarship scouts who might look his way. Even years later, when Matteo had joined the police academy, the old nickname lingered. Runner. It fit too well, a man who lived like he could always outrun the shadow behind him.

And now here it was. On Adler’s paper.

Subject M.W. Ether resonance shift: irreversible.

Elias’s mouth went dry. He had always believed Matteo’s descent, the fixation that turned to stalking, the late-night messages, the way he’d shown up weeks ago like a ghost were a sickness bred from his own obsession and the guts of turning his back on Victor. But no. Matteo hadn’t just fallen apart. He had been taken apart. Fed into a trial, broken down by red ether until the boy Elias remembered, the cop he had once heard about in passing became the puppet Victor had cut down.

Elias leaned back in his chair, the lamplight throwing his reflection against the laptop screen. His throat felt tight, the bond mark pulsing faintly beneath his skin as if Victor could sense his unease even across the city.

His gaze moved again on the paper only to see the last name in the table.

E.C. - stabilizer