INT- MCQUIDE RESIDENCE – 12 AM
Later that night. .
The ceiling pattern of her room looked more organized than her thoughts.
Moments ago, the nation's Major General had been asleep on her lap. Vulnerable. Completely unguarded. Too much to process.
Good thing Silas had arrived when he did. He looked genuinely worried for Erion.
They must be close, Evah thought.
A memory surfaced—uninvited.
"I heard the more people you kill, the faster you rank up."
Yuka's voice echoed from a distant afternoon, one Evah hadn't thought about in a long time.
She had been working on a project then, typing away at her computer while Evah half-listened from the couch.
"Imagine how many people you'd need to kill to be a Major General,"
Yuka had added, flipping through her journal without looking up.
"Ah-uh," Evah had replied absently.
She hadn't absorbed a single word at the time. She was too busy. And Yuka knew it.
"The CGO people are terrifying," Yuka had muttered next. "Someday I'll do a full exposé on them—once I gather enough info."
Back then, Evah had brushed it off. She'd always hated Yuka's line of work—how recklessly she chased dangerous truths.
But even she couldn't deny it now: some of those truths mattered.
The memory slipped away, but it left something behind.
Erion's eyes flashed in her mind—not the drowsy, flushed ones from earlier—but the ones that had looked into death without blinking.
The same eyes that had stared down a man before killing him in that apartment.
The same fire that had burned into her when he'd pinned her down in his office.
"How many...?" she whispered, the words trembling in the quiet.
She wasn't sure she wanted to know the answer.
Then came another image—this time not from memory, but from somewhere deeper.
A vision stitched together by the words she'd tried to forget.
"Imagine how many people you need to kill to be a Major General," Yuka's voice echoed again.
And with it came a vision—dark and vivid.
Erion, but not as he was now.
This version of him stood in the middle of a battlefield she couldn't name—cloaked in blood, streaked across his face, smeared along the curve of his jaw, dripping slowly from the tips of his fingers like it had nowhere else to go.
His jacket was torn, soaked in crimson, and his gun—still in hand—gleamed wet beneath a cold, gray sky.
His eyes…
They weren't dead.
Worse—they were empty.
Emotionless. Unbothered. Just like the eyes when he changes to this persona.
Like the act of killing meant nothing. Like he'd done it too many times to feel anything at all.
His expression was unreadable, untouched by the violence around him, as if his soul had long been carved out and replaced by duty and honor.
She had only seen him fight on a rare few occasions.
But now, in this chilling vision pieced together by memory and fear, she realized:
That wasn't a soldier learning to kill.
It was a man who had done it again and again.
The fragile trust she'd been building, piece by trembling piece? It fractured.
And in its place bloomed a question—quiet, but merciless:
Can I really trust him?
Then another thought crept in—stoic, unreadable people are often the most feared.
They sever emotion like it's nothing, make decisions with cold precision, wear blank faces even when they're pulling the trigger.
Evah used to think that was the scariest kind of person.
But Erion was not like that… he wasn't just that.
He could be silent and sharp, yes.
But he could also be warm—unexpectedly warm.
Professional when needed, righteous when it mattered.
Cheerful, even disarmingly so.
Relatable in quiet moments.
He could shift from guardian angel to law driven jester, always cloaked in duty and honor.
A contradiction in motion.
A puzzle she hadn't finished solving.
And maybe, wasn't ready to.