ROSALINE
Rosaline took a deep breath, still standing in the doorway, her eyes darting to the floor before meeting his once more. The words were harder to say than she expected, but the guilt gnawed at her relentlessly.
"I... I made a mistake," she said quietly, stepping further into the room. Her voice was quieter now, laced with regret. "I shouldn’t have sided with Neoma." The name felt strange on her tongue, heavy with the consequences. "I was just trying to protect her, but I see now how it hurt you."
She shifted uneasily, her fingers nervously playing with the hem of her sleeve as she spoke. "I don’t know how to make up for it. I just... I was wrong. And you didn’t deserve that." Her heart pounded in her chest. "You’ve always been there for me, Quixor. And I... I let my emotions get in the way."
Rosaline paused, looking at him with eyes full of uncertainty but also a quiet determination. "I don’t expect you to forgive me right away. But I want to try—if you'll let me. I want to make things right between us."
She waited, her breath shallow, unsure of what his response would be.
EON
Eon’s eyes flicked to Tristan as they walked into the room, his attention sharp, noting the heavy silence that hung between them. Tristan was predictably uneasy, but that was to be expected. The boy was a bundle of nerves, torn between his loyalties and his knowledge of Neoma's whereabouts. Eon knew what that kind of conflict did to a person, and he relished the discomfort in Tristan’s every movement.
Eon settled into his seat at the console, his fingers brushing across the touchpad with practiced precision, his mind already racing ahead. The Vanguard's network pulsed under his fingertips, a latticework of information, data, and intelligence waiting to be extracted. His thoughts were calm, detached—familiar with the weight of the situation, though it wasn’t Tristan’s anxiety that interested him.
No, it was the fact that Tristan knew. He knew Neoma was a prisoner, perhaps even where she was being held, and that knowledge weighed on him like a thousand ton of bricks. Eon could almost hear the thoughts whirring in Tristan’s head, the desperate calculations of what to say and when. It was delicious, this human fragility. Eon floated between the quiet hum of the room and the sudden adrenaline rush of his own calculations, all the while maintaining his perfect, detached composure.
He didn’t care that Tristan could feel the tension rising in the air—he had learned long ago that control was an illusion, and those who clung to it only looked weaker in the end. What mattered was that Eon would find Neoma, would break whatever weak will the enemy had placed around her, and would use the very information that Tristan clung to so tightly against them. He could see it already—the pieces of the puzzle falling into place. The Vanguard’s systems were a mess of encrypted data and hidden caches, but that didn’t matter.
It was just a matter of time. Neoma would be found, and when she was, Eon would be the one to decide what happened next. Not Tristan, not any of them.
A slow smile tugged at the corners of Eon’s lips as he leaned back in his chair, fingers still flying over the pad.
Heat Wave
