CHAPTER 132: CHAPTER 132: STABILIZER (2)

E.C.—stabilizer.

Elias froze.

His stomach dropped in a way that had nothing to do with Matteo anymore. The initials were his. They had to be. No one else fit.

Stabilizer.

The word carried its own chill, colder than the clinical formatting of the page. No subject. No trial. Just that label. A stabilizer, something you used to anchor unstable systems, to keep the corruption from consuming the vessel. Not a person, but just another mechanism.

His fingers gripped the desk so tightly the wood creaked beneath them.

’That’s all I am to them?’ The thought clawed its way up, bitter and sharp. Not Elias Clarke. Not the man who spent nights wringing meaning out of broken data, not the one who fought tooth and nail for space in a field that tolerated him only in silence. Just a line in Adler’s ledger. Just a tool.

He pushed back from the desk, air catching in his lungs. His first instinct was to close the laptop and pretend he hadn’t seen it. To shove the memory into the same dark cupboard where he’d hidden every word Jonathan ever spat at him, every look that dismissed him as second-best, useless, recessive.

But this wasn’t just a look. This was proof that someone had written him down, catalogued him, a decade ago, when he was still a boy trying to keep his head down in high school halls, Matteo Weller dogging his steps.

Matteo. Runner. Reduced to a trial subject, a vessel that had come back to Elias grinning with corrupted ether in his veins. And now Elias, listed not as a person but as the thing meant to keep that corruption in line.

His stomach turned, nausea rising like bile.

"Fuck it." His voice came low, raw, the kind of sound you made when you didn’t trust your own steadiness. His hands moved before the doubt could stop them, skimming the keyboard, downloading the article in one swift motion.

The cursor hovered over Victor’s contact. For a breath, he hesitated. Some stubborn, scarred corner of himself whispered that he should keep this hidden and solve it himself, that telling Victor meant admitting he couldn’t.

But the bond at his throat pulsed warm and steady, like an answer to a question he hadn’t asked. ’You aren’t alone. You have a mate.’

With a hard exhale, Elias dropped the article into the message.

—You need to see this.

He hit send.

The moment the window blinked confirmation, the mark at his throat flared hot, tugging hard enough to make him gasp. Victor had felt it instantly, the panic Elias hadn’t been able to bury, the fear that churned sharp and fast through his chest.

Elias leaned back in the chair, staring at the dark screen, heart hammering against his ribs. The manor around him was too still, the silence pressing in like weight. Every breath echoed louder than it should, and every shadow seemed to stretch too far.

He wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t going to dig into this alone. Not when Adler’s name sat at the bottom. Not when Matteo had been reduced to a puppet. And not when his own initials, his, were branded into research he never agreed to.

Whatever this was, Adler had connections. Funding. Blessings. And Elias could guess whose. His father and family. The same people who never saw him as anything but a mistake now had proof in print.

His hands curled into fists on his lap, the bond still burning faintly against his skin.

"Of course you didn’t let me go," Elias muttered under his breath, the words sharp in the empty room. "Just because it was the better solution. Just because I asked."

They hadn’t released him out of mercy. They hadn’t stepped back because he carved his own path. They had known something about him before he even understood it himself.

His chest tightened, breath catching as the realization clawed its way higher.

He could filter Victor’s power. Stabilize it. The first time it happened, it had been instinct, a reflex to the unbearable weight of divinity pressing down on him. Now it was second nature, a quiet exchange that bound them tighter than words. Victor’s ether poured through him like fire, and Elias steadied it, tempered it, until it settled in harmony instead of collapse.

Not just bond instinct or mate compatibility, but something Adler had written down ten years ago.

Elias pressed a hand to his mouth, the tremor in his fingers betraying what his face refused to.

"How the fuck does Adler know?" His voice came raw, scraping the air. The question had no answer and yet it burned, circling his thoughts like smoke. Did they test him without his knowledge? Was his family complicit all along? Had they marked him even then, preparing him not as a son but as a stabilizer?

The thought made his stomach twist.

The cursor blinked on the closed laptop, the weight of his message to Victor sitting like a stone in his chest.

"What if I’m the last thing they need to move their puppets?"

For the first time in years, Elias Clarke didn’t want to be alone with his own mind.

—

Numencorp’s boardroom was quiet save for the shuffle of papers and the low hum of the city bleeding in through glass walls. Samael stood near the end of the long table, voice even as he reviewed the last of the projections. Connor, sprawled with deliberate ease in his chair, kept up his usual habit of puncturing the silence with comments that hovered between sharp and mocking.

Victor hadn’t been listening for several minutes.

The bond flared hot, sharp as a blade pressed to his throat. Panic. Elias’s panic. It hit him so suddenly that the breath stalled in his chest, his hand curling around the glass of water before him hard enough to crack it.

His phone vibrated against the table. One message. Elias’s name on the screen.

He opened it.

The article blinked back at him in harsh black text. His eyes swept it once, fast, before they dropped to the table, to the initials that seared in his vision like a brand.

E.C.—stabilizer.

For a heartbeat, the world was silent.

Connor leaned forward, smirking faintly. "What is it? Don’t tell me you actually miss your mate..."

Victor was already rising, the chair sliding back soundlessly. His expression gave nothing away, but the weight in the air shifted, thickening until Connor’s smirk faltered and Samael stopped mid-sentence.

Without a word, Victor set the phone on the table and pushed the article toward them with two fingers. The glow of the screen lit the lines of Adler’s research in unforgiving white.

Samael’s jaw tightened. Connor swore under his breath.

Victor didn’t wait for their questions.

Crimson ether licked across his hands, sharp as glass, searing against the dim light of the room. His presence pressed down in the space like a storm about to break, but his voice was low, controlled, and almost calm.

"You’ll study it," he said, each word deliberate. "You’ll find the rest. But Elias comes first."

And then, before they could answer, before Connor could quip or Samael could protest, Victor vanished.

The air cracked with the sound of ether collapsing, a scarlet flare scattering across the marble floor where he had stood.