The Target

Silas knew that to beat Julian, he had to understand the "why" behind the "how." Julian didn’t just destroy people for fun; he did it to remove obstacles.

While Julian was downstairs hosting a private tasting for the city’s elite, Silas slipped into Julian’s study. He had spent the last week tracking Julian’s encrypted outgoing mail. He finally bypassed the firewall on Julian’s secondary laptop—the one Julian thought was invisible.

What he found wasn't a financial file. It was a dossier on Evelyn Vance.

Evelyn was the daughter of the District Attorney and, more importantly, a childhood friend Silas had recently reconnected with. She was the only person who had ever looked at Silas and asked, "Are you okay? You look like you're being hunted."

Silas scrolled through the file, his blood running cold.

There were recordings of his private phone calls with her.

There was a detailed plan to stage a "scandal" that would ruin her father’s career, forced by a "drug possession" charge that Julian was clearly planning to plant in her car.

But it was the note at the bottom of the digital file that made Silas’s stomach turn:

"She’s getting too close. She touches his arm when they speak. She looks at him as if she understands him. Silas belongs in the dark with me. If she tries to pull him into the light, I’ll extinguish her."

"She’s a lovely girl, isn't she?"

Silas nearly dropped the laptop. Julian was standing in the doorway, a glass of dark red wine in his hand. He looked relaxed, but his eyes were like lasers, fixed on the screen.

"Leave her out of this, Julian," Silas said, his voice trembling with a rage he could no longer mask. "This is between us. She has nothing to do with your sick obsession."

Julian walked into the room, the smell of expensive grapes and cold intent following him. He set the wine glass down on the desk next to the laptop.

"She has everything to do with it," Julian whispered, leaning over the desk until he was face-to-face with Silas. "She’s a distraction. She makes you think there’s a version of your life where I don't exist. I told you, Silas—I don't share."

Silas realized then that his "game" had just hit a deadly peak. He couldn't just outsmart Julian anymore; he had to protect someone else.

"What do you want?" Silas asked, his voice a low, broken rasp.

Julian reached out, his fingers tracing the line of Silas’s jaw, moving with a terrifying tenderness. "I want you to tell her yourself. I want you to break her heart. I want you to tell her that you’re staying here, with me, because you want to. If you do that, her father keeps his job, and she stays safe."

Julian leaned in, his lips brushing Silas’s ear. "Choose, Silas. Her heart, or her life?"

Silas looked at the screen…at the photo of Evelyn laughing--and then at the monster standing over him. He realized that to save the light, he was going to have to dive headfirst into Julian’s darkness.

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