The one who stayed

Chapter Four: “The One Who Stayed”

“He let you wear the necklace?” Zephyre blinked, not hiding the surprise as he shut the door behind her.

Sabrina nodded, pacing the safehouse floor like a lioness on a scent. “Not just let. Defended it. Publicly. Against his own assistant.”

Zephyre crossed his arms. “That’s not just odd. That’s unprecedented.”

“That’s what she said. And the way he looked at me—like he was trying to figure me out, but also... like I reminded him of something he couldn’t name.”

She stopped, eyes sharp.

“I think he suspects something.”

Zephyre studied her for a long moment. Then: “Or he recognizes something.”

Sabrina arched a brow. “Like what?”

“Like someone who’s lost their god too.”

She didn’t respond to that. Couldn’t.

Because part of her wondered if that’s what made Valen dangerous—he walked like a man with nothing to lose. Just like her.

But as she turned away to think, Zephyre watched her. Quiet. Fierce. A silent war of emotion beneath his cool exterior.

He had always watched her that way.

He remembered the first time he saw her.

Fifteen. Broken. Filthy. Hiding behind cracked walls of a foster home no one checked twice.

Sabrina had walked in like she didn’t belong in the rot. In the gray. She had light in her eyes and dirt on her boots. And when he tried to snarl, to bite—she handed him a sandwich and said, “You can act like a dog if you want, but you’re not one.”

She didn’t look at him like he was a monster.

She looked at him like he was a choice.

That was the day everything changed.

Zephyre’s parents were nightmares stitched into skin—brilliant, sadistic minds obsessed with control. They used him as proof of their genius. Treated him like a failed experiment instead of a son. When they were arrested, he was the one the media turned into a freak.

No one looked at him without flinching.

Except her.

Sabrina never pitied him. Never patronized.

She gave him a purpose: protection. Loyalty. A name he wasn’t afraid to wear.

Now, as she stood in front of the conspiracy board, eyes narrowed, lips tight with determination—

He didn’t just admire her. He followed her.

Not because she asked. But because she never had to.

“You think he’s our guy?” he asked finally.

Sabrina looked at the photo of Valen, pinned in the center of the web.

“I think if he’s not,” she said, “then he’s still hiding something. And I’m going to find out what.”

Zephyre nodded once. “Then we find out together.”

And he meant every word.

Even if it meant killing a man who looked at her like a prayer he didn’t believe in.

Zephyre clicked through the encrypted files on his laptop, the screen’s glow casting sharp shadows on his face.

Sabrina leaned over his shoulder, scanning the endless documents he’d pulled from buried archives, court records, and psychological evaluations.

“Valen Antonov,” Zephyre murmured, voice low. “Real name: Valentin Mikhail Antonov. Born into an elite Orthodox Russian family. Father—a weapons engineer. Grandmother—diplomat. Younger brother—died at seven.”

He opened the next file. And everything shifted.

A crime scene photo. Blood soaked through carpet. A shattered cross on the floor.

“Jesus,” Sabrina whispered, hand covering her mouth.

Zephyre’s eyes hardened. “No. That’s the problem. His mother thought she heard Jesus.”

According to the official report, Elena Antonova—Valen’s mother—had a psychotic break. She believed God was speaking to her. She claimed He told her, her family had been corrupted by evil... that she needed to cleanse them to save their souls.

So she did.

His father. His brother. His grandmother. One by one.

Valen was the only one who survived. Hidden in a closet.

Nine years old.

He’d watched her bathe in blood and call it salvation.

Zephyre looked up at Sabrina. “He doesn’t hate God because he’s arrogant. He hates Him because he believes God betrayed him first.”

Sabrina was silent for a long moment.

And then, quietly: “That’s why he looked at me like that.”

Zephyre nodded. “You’re a mirror he never wanted to face.”

And in that moment, something shifted between them. Not just the mission.

The stakes.

Because now she wasn’t just hunting a suspect.

She was stepping into the mind of a boy who’d buried faith with his family—and became a man who trusted nothing but control.

Absolutely—this ending will land like a punch, tying the emotional weight of Valen’s trauma directly to the new presence of Sabrina in his life.

Valen

The room was dark. Quiet. Too quiet.

Valen lay on his back, eyes closed, chest rising and falling in steady rhythm.

But beneath the calm—chaos stirred.

It started with the sound of dripping. Slow. Sticky. Echoing in an endless hallway.

Then the scent—iron and incense. The smell of blood and burning candles.

He was nine again. Trapped in a linen closet, too small to breathe, too scared to scream.

The door was cracked open just enough for him to see her.

His mother.

Elena Antonova stood in a white silk nightgown, soaked red from the waist down. Her hands were painted in crimson. Her lips moved in silent prayer, eyes wild with rapture.

She knelt beside his baby brother’s body—small, broken, unmoving—placing a cross on his chest.

“I saved them, Valentin,” she whispered, as if he could hear her. “They’re clean now. They're free.”

She turned slowly.

Looked right at him.

And smiled.

Valen shot up in bed with a strangled gasp, sweat pouring down his back. The sheets were twisted around his legs like vines. His heart pounded like a war drum in his chest.

He hadn’t had that nightmare in ten years.

Ten. Years.

He sat in the dark, breathing hard, staring at the wall like it might blink first.

And somewhere, buried beneath logic and fury, a whisper crawled its way back into his thoughts:

She walked in wearing a cross.

And now the nightmares are back.

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