* * * *
Elise's POV
There's a sound that comes before war.
It isn't screaming. It isn't gunfire. It's the sound of silence being sliced open by panic—the breath caught between knowing and not knowing. The throb of stillness before it becomes thunder.
That's what I felt when the lights flickered. Not just in the hotel, but in my chest.
Like the walls were breathing.
Like something was watching.
Like the game had begun.
I didn't scream.
I stood.
The room had been warm just moments ago, scented with the remnants of a candle I didn't remember lighting, my legs tangled with Carson's under the covers, my fingers still brushing the chain he left on my nightstand like a promise he couldn't say out loud.
Now, all I could feel was the cold tile beneath my bare feet and the buzz of surveillance reawakening. Everything inside me shrieked with certainty:
They were here.
Not just the enemies. The ghosts. The fears. The sins we carried like crucifixes sharpened into blades.
"Elise." Leona's voice was a whisper, urgent and raw. She was on the other side of the door, but I could already feel her panic curling like smoke under the wood. "Something's wrong."
Of course something was wrong. My hands were already shaking. My jaw locked. I opened the door.
She stood , in sleep shorts and an oversized hoodie she'd stolen from Ryder, clutching a knife so tight her knuckles looked frostbitten. But not in I'm scared way but an-I'll fucking kill Ryder for leaving me alone-way
"What's going on?" I asked, even though the question felt stupid as it left my mouth.
"Alex is gone. Ryder's gone. The cameras glitched. Tony's offline. Makoto's trying to get us back into the system but—" she swallowed hard. " I think they're coming."
We stood in that breath between collapse and control. One last second of stillness before the storm.
Then the crash came.
Not near. But not far enough. I took one of my heels as a weapon.
Leona looked me in the eye. "We need to move."
I nodded.
And the silence died.
Leona's POV
Fear's always been a trickster in my blood. Some people get butterflies. I get bonfires. Some people get cold. I burn.
And tonight?
I was pure combustion.
Someone was trying to take what I did not know I needed to survive. Ryder, I promise you death after this. They thought they could breach this place, distract Ryder when I am asleep and live?
No.
They'd have to kill me first. And I don't die easily.
Elise followed as I led us through the corridor, the hotel's luxury muting every footstep, every breath. Even war felt expensive here.
But every hallway was a question. Every corner dares.
From above, I heard Diego's laugh cut through the chaos like an axe. Dante's voice was snarling curses. Marco was barking orders into the intercom like he could punch people through it. We weren't alone.
But I wasn't looking for them.
I was looking for Ryder.
Three floors down, I found him.
Bleeding. Cornered. Beautifully reckless. Like the sickness was knocked right out of him.
He leaned against a wall, blood dripping from his temple, facing a man built like a concrete wall with eyes that didn't blink and a blade that glinted like it had been forged from nightmares.
I didn't ask questions.
I ran.
So did Elise. She struck from behind—her heel slamming into the back of the man's knee, her elbow driving into his throat like she'd been training for this moment her entire life.
I followed with fists. With fury. With every bruise I'd ever earned and every memory I wanted to keep safe.
The man dropped what seemed like a bad idea.
Ryder collapsed next.
"Hey, Leo," he coughed, blood on his teeth, still grinning like a dumbass. "Miss me?"
"Shut up Romeo," I snapped. My voice cracked. My eyes didn't as I crouched to help him handing over his meds.
" But I'm your Romeo." he spoke, trying to contradict my earlier words.
"Shut. Up."
We dragged him to cover. He groaned but didn't resist. He knew better.
I'd kill him if he moved.
Elise's POV
Adrenaline is a lie. It doesn't make you strong. It just makes you fast enough to crash.
Every step felt wrong. Every breath is too loud. I was moving—I knew I was—but my thoughts were already spiraling somewhere else.
Carson.
Where was he?
A gunshot split the air.
I flinched.
Not far.
And then… music.
A piano.
No. No no no. Not now.
Not that song.
Not him.
Pierce.
I knew that melody. I knew what it meant.
And I knew Carson well enough to feel it in my bones:
This wasn't just Pierce's death.
It was a reckoning.
"ELISE—" Leona shouted, but I was already gone.
Leona's POV
I watched her run.
And for half a second, I panicked.
Then I remembered who she was now.
Not weak. Not broken. Not afraid.
She wasn't running away.
She was running to him.
Because this wasn't about survival anymore.
This was about love. About war. About Carson.
And whatever he was doing in that ballroom—
She had to witness it.
Ballroom — Distant POV
The chandeliers quivered like ghosts.
Carson stood beneath them, coat flaring behind him like a shadow ripped from a dream.
Pierce played the grand piano like he was summoning the dead. Notes like knives. Crescendos like confessions.
And Carson?
He brought a violin.
Weathered. Crimson. Sacred.
He didn't play it to perform.
He played it to destroy it.
Their duel wasn't sound.
It was pain made audible.
Elise sat on a chair near the doorway, breath caught in her chest like a prayer.
And when Carson's eyes met Pierce's, the music became violence.
He twisted the bow in his hand and hurled it.
Crack.
Pierce reeled.
Carson didn't stop.
He pulled out a shitting revolver, shooting at Pierce shot after shot.
Bullets. Fury. Finality.
Elise didn't blink, just waited with a grin.
And in that ballroom,
surrounded by broken chandeliers, dying echoes, and the ghosts of music,
Carson did hell and killed a few people in the front, the rest with just his warning scattered like flies ensuring not to touch Elise.
A glorious blood bath and those who entered did not reach the door before dying.
CARSON – HOTEL BALLROOM (EXTENDED)
The music wasn't supposed to play again.
Not here.
Not now.
Not after everything.
It started low—so low it might've been my own breath hitching.
A single violin string dragged through static, trembling through the speakers like a ghost exhaling.
And then—the melody.
That lullaby.
The one my father wrote.
The one they played before the burnings.
The one they drilled into our bones so deep it stitched our nightmares shut.
Only three people alive ever knew what that song meant.
Alex.
Tony.
And Pierce.
And Pierce was dead.
So this was his last letter.
His funeral dirge.
His final fuck you, giftwrapped in melody and memory.
I dropped before I even felt it—
Knees to marble like I'd been executed.
But it wasn't the song that broke me.
It was what rode in on its back.
The heat.
Jungle-thick, meat-sick, sticking to my ribs.
The crack of a whip slicing skin off someone else's back, and I swear—I tasted it.
Sweat and salt and something iron that wasn't mine.
Khalid laughed from the trees like a jackal in prayer.
Enock humming low and holy, hymns for a god I never believed in but prayed to anyway.
Before we were ghosts, we were just boys.
I remember Enock's voice—low and dramatic—reading scripture like he was casting spells. His laugh used to rattle the tents. He said he wanted to be a pastor if this nightmare ever ended. Said he'd preach with a Glock under his robe. Said he'd save the world one verse and bullet at a time.
Khalid called him "Holy Gangsta."
They used to bicker like siblings. Enock is always nagging about the rules, Khalid always breaking them for fun. There was Aiden, he loved fun but never lived one. He was like our boss, always controlling. The so called boss baby. Khalid's work.
I was the youngest. The runt. The one they called "Baby Brother" or "little guy."
Khalid gave me his blanket when I got sick.
Enock let me sleep on his chest when the rain poured through the tents. Aiden gave me stories when I was sad.
We weren't just surviving.
We were alive—even if just barely.
I remember—
Khalid stealing a radio and dancing barefoot in the mud.
Enock clapped offbeat and cursed him out between laughs. Aiden singing off key like the song owed him answers.
I remember Khalid whistling that goddamn lullaby once—not knowing what it was—and Enock tackling him, yelling, "Don't you dare, fool, you'll break him."
I remember the day they made me laugh so hard I pissed myself.
They didn't shame me.
They hugged me.
They said I was still a person.
That I wasn't born to bleed.
I never wanted to remember Morocco.
I never wanted to remember the way Khalid's laugh echoed down narrow alleyways while we looked for food.
How he called me "Habibi" like I was precious, like I wasn't born for war.
How he threw rocks at guards just to make me laugh.
How he taught me how to tie my boots and said—
"One day, you'll leave all this. Be better than this."
"Promise me, little guy. Be better."
But when the mission came... there was no "better."
They told us to sacrifice.
Said it would make us holy.
But all I saw were kids.
Some of them were younger than I was.
And I saw their faces.
One girl was missing two front teeth.
One boy held a slingshot in his hand and didn't understand why it wasn't enough to protect him.
We were supposed to be gods to them.
We became demons.
And then—the song.
My father's lullaby.
That slow, sugar-sick melody.
It spun in my ears like a curse written in my bones.
My mouth foamed.
My fingers twitched.
I wasn't a boy anymore—I was nothing.
I tore through everything.
Everyone.
I don't know how much I hurt.
How many I killed.
But I remember Enock.
His bloodied hands.
His cracked glasses.
His rosary—shining silver in the dust as he whispered:
"Don't let go, Carson. Please… hold on."
I didn't.
I couldn't.
He was dead before I stopped.
And then Khalid—
Oh God, Khalid—
He didn't fight me.
He didn't scream.
He ran straight into my madness with open arms and whispered like I was still that boy in the jungle:
"Hey. Hey… it's me."
"I got you."
"You're safe now, Habibi."
And I—
I stabbed him.
I didn't know.
I swear I didn't know.
Blood everywhere.
His breath was shallow.
Me—sobbing into his chest, begging him not to die, not to leave, not to go, please, please—
"I didn't mean to—!"
He smiled.
He smiled.
Even with blood in his teeth.
"You're good, little guy."
"Even now. Even like this."
"You're still good."
"Habibi always lives."
And then he closed his eyes and never opened them again.
Aiden was controlled by his father -Gareth Bjon, he watched the murder and he, just like me was forced the only difference I killed. He played the lullaby.
And Alex—sweet Alex—sixteen and soft, whispering from a dream:
"Stay alive, Carson. You hear me? Stay alive. For them."
But we didn't.
We never made it out.
We left our bodies behind and carried only the screams.
I dropped my gun.
Let it clatter.
Marble bit into my knees like teeth.
The music played on.
And then—I saw her.
Elise.
Her face—
God, her face.
I wanted her to run.
I wanted her to scream.
I wanted her to look at me like the monster I was becoming.
Instead—
She watched me.
Like I was still someone.
My throat split when I said it, all raw and too soft:
"Run… please… just run far away from me…"
And I cried.
Ugly. Quiet. Shaking.
And she didn't move.
Why the fuck didn't she move?
The ballroom warped.
Not the lights—me.
My mind tilted sideways, split open like a bad egg.
It was Morocco again.
Fourteen.
Fear in my lungs, orders inked in blood.
We were told:
"No survivors. Not this time."
A sacrifice, they called it.
To purify the land.
To please God.
A boy stood in front of me.
Eyes like Khalid.
Smile like Khalid.
Voice like Khalid.
And when I hesitated—they played the song.
That same fucking lullaby.
I lost it.
I broke.
Not with grace. Not like a hero.
Like a goddamn curse.
A howl through teeth.
A thing without soul or shape.
They said I tore through everyone.
Ours. Theirs. God's children.
Like fire wearing skin.
That's what I am.
Not Carson.
Not a soldier.
Not a man.
I'm what's left when the light dies.
When the prayers rot.
When love is boiled down to orders and screams.
I stood.
Didn't reach for my weapon.
I didn't need it.
I was furious.
I had a memory.
I had grief so sharp it could slice heaven in half.
Theo's men came at me.
Poor bastards.
I laughed.
Hollow. Shaking.
A sound that made the walls curl.
I pulled Enock's rosary from under my shirt—
Still sharp. Still silver.
Blessed in blood. Baptized in sin.
I strangled one man with it.
Choked him quiet like a bedtime story.
Ended another with a twist so fast his bones cracked like candy canes.
Marco was yelling something from across the ballroom.
Didn't hear it.
Didn't care.
Everything was red.
Everything was divine.
And still—the song played.
Tony's voice over the comm, panicked, choked:
"Everyone—hide. Stay the fuck away from Carson."
But Elise—
Goddamn her.
She moved.
She came closer.
Like I wasn't dripping in sin.
Like I wasn't the plague.
She wrapped her arms around me.
Held me like I was human.
And I froze.
I didn't kill her.
Didn't flinch.
Didn't even breathe.
I just whispered, a graveyard in my voice:
"Leave. Please… I'm not… I'm not safe."
And for a second—she stayed.
Then—thank Christ—she left.
And then I spoke.
To the ghosts.
To God.
To no one.
To him.
"Have you ever hated yourself so deep your blood refused to clot?
Like every breath you take is a reminder you lost?
Have you ever begged for death, but stayed alive just to spite the ones who broke you?"
I laughed.
And something inside me cracked.
"They said I'd be fine.
That it was normal.
That it was just training."
They didn't see what I saw.
Didn't wake up screaming.
Didn't have Khalid's voice in their veins.
Didn't kill their best friend just to stay alive.
I looked at the blood.
My hands. My work. My gospel.
"I never had a favorite color.
Then Elise said mine was blue.
And suddenly it was everywhere.
The sky. Her dress. The bruises on my knuckles.
Blue made me feel like a person again."
Another laugh.
Quieter.
Almost a prayer.
"I'm not a person anymore.
I'm the punishment.
I'm what happens when you break a child and give the wreckage a gun."
I stood.
Tore my shirt off like skin.
Let them see the tiger inked across my back—
Eyes lit. Mouth open. Ready to swallow God whole.
And I screamed.
"COME ON THEN!
YOON SUK!
ANY OF YOU COWARDS!
COME TAKE WHAT'S LEFT!
I'M FUCKING READY!"
"COME GET ME, HABIBI ALWAYS LIVES,"
The lights shattered.
The floor cracked like it wanted to weep.
The chandelier groaned above like it was praying.
I didn't stop.
Fists.
Blood.
Bones crushed like communion wafers.
Snipers didn't shoot.
They watched.
Not out of mercy.
Not out of fear.
But because they saw it—
Death had a face.
And it was mine.
When it was done—
When silence settled like ash—
I sat.
Among the corpses.
Blood beneath me is like a throne.
I held Enock's rosary.
Shaking.
Praying.
Weeping.
"Forgive them," I whispered.
"They thought they could save me…"
The ballroom was quiet again.
But the music—
It still played.
Inside me.
And I knew—
I'd never escape it.
Not until I finished this.
Not until I found the man who made the lullaby.
Not until I killed them.
Carson's POV – Hotel Ballroom (Post-Battle Massacre)
They say silence is peace, but all I ever heard in silence was the echo of graves unfilled.
I don't remember when the music stopped. I only remember my breath. Shallow. Daggered. Like something was eating me from the inside. And the sound—the lullaby—the cursed lullaby still haunted the air like a bloodstain that wouldn't fade.
"Guten Abend, gute Nacht…"
In his voice. My father's voice. Not the monster from my youth. No. The one from the fragments—those shards of memory before the camp, before the knives and the dark and the basement locked from the outside. The voice that made me believe for half a second that there was love in this world, that lullabies weren't just funeral hymns dressed in lull.
My knees were wet. Slippery. Red. I blinked.
Bodies.
I had made a church of the ballroom. A chapel of corpses. Broken hands reaching for mercy, eyes rolled back like they were pleading to some god who didn't answer anymore.
"Carson," someone whispered.
Not Elise.
Not Alex.
No, this voice crawled through the marrow.
"Habibi... ma biki..." (Don't cry.)
Khalid?
My head snapped. Nothing. Just torn drapes, shattered chandeliers, a gun bent into something obscene. I could smell copper. Burnt hair. Gunpowder. My own breath.
Then—him.
Enock.
Barefoot. Grinning. That scar across his chest like a mocking smile.
"You did it again," he said, walking through the blood like it was water. "You danced. Just like in Morocco. Remember the desert? The boy with no eyes? Remember how you laughed?"
I blinked. "You're dead."
He tilted his head. "So is your brother."
Pierce.
That name cut something in me I didn't even know was still intact. I had killed him. I had wanted to kill him.
And yet—I had cried like a child.
He was still there. Crumpled like a broken marionette under the balcony. His violin bow snapped in half. Eyes wide. Dead.
I should have celebrated. I should've spit on him.
But all I felt was unfinished.
"Carson—please—look at me!" Elise was screaming somewhere behind me. Her hands—soft, always trembling—were on my face. Trying to ground me.
But the lullaby didn't stop.
"Mit Näglein besteckt…"
The exact phrasing.
That's how my father sang it the night he left. The night I was sold off to the camp like a sick dog.
He never looked back. But I remembered how he paused at the door.
He knew what they'd do to me.
He let them.
And now the ghosts were back.
Khalid. Enock. Even the trainer with the dog chain whose name I never learned.
They stood around me. Not shadows. Not figments. Real. In that moment, more real than the warm bodies I just slaughtered.
"You said you were done," Enock whispered. "You said you'd never become him."
"Shut up."
"You are him."
"Shut—"
"You killed Pierce the same way your father would've. Precise. Cruel. Slow."
"I SAID SHUT UP!"
I screamed so hard my voice snapped. I lunged forward and punched the ground until the tiles cracked, my knuckles splintering into white bone and torn skin.
Blood. So much blood. Was it theirs or mine?
I kept seeing the camp. Fourteen. The belt. The needles. The drills. Khalid tied beside me, trying to breathe through his own vomit, whispering prayers I never learned.
"Yaa Allah, arhamna…" (God, have mercy on us.)
I couldn't save him.
I couldn't save anyone.
And now—Pierce was dead, but it wasn't justice. It was hollow. I had ripped his soul out like it meant nothing. And I hated him. God, I hated him—but he was still mine. My twin. My other half, even if it was the rotting half.
And I broke him like a toy.
I didn't stop when he was down. I kept going until his voice stopped echoing in my head.
Elise was holding me, sobbing now. "Carson, please—it's over—you're safe—you're not there anymore—"
But she was wrong.
I never left.
The massacre wasn't just in the ballroom. It was in me. It always has been. A storm I tried to bottle. But I was glass.
And now?
Now I am shattered.
"Guten Abend, gute Nacht…" The voice came again. My father.
Only this time—he was there.
On the stage. Dressed in black. Applauding.
"You've become my finest creation, mein Sohn."
I fell to my knees again, convulsing, clawing at my head, screaming until the breath was gone.
I begged them to kill me.
I begged them all.
But all that came was a needle. Sharp. Cold. The sedative.
I didn't resist.
Because maybe sleep—maybe sleep was better than this living nightmare I kept waking up to.
I watched people act like they are broken, like they are hurt, angry, vengeful. Well I would love to see their reactions now, to someone truly broken.
Carson (sedated, hallucinating)
There was no body.
No skin, no muscle—just blood with memory. Just marrow unraveling in slow collapse.
He tried to breathe, but lungs are for the living, and whatever he was didn't qualify anymore.
He wasn't on the ballroom floor.
He wasn't in the Amazon.
He was under it all—beneath the soil, beneath the weight of every soul he couldn't carry. And they were clawing down through memory to find him.
"Guten Abend, gute Nacht..."
The voice wasn't real—but it had breath. Cold, methodical breath.
His father's breath. A ghost trapped in Carson's bones, speaking in lullabies and murder.
He'd only heard it once—before the camp. A doorway left ajar on a winter night. The man never touched him, but his silence was a scream Carson had spent years trying to answer with violence.
Now that scream became a song.
And it twisted.
Khalid was kneeling before him, drenched in rain and blood. "La tanam, habibi. Not yet."
Don't sleep.
Don't die.
But Carson had already done both.
He saw the camp.
God—the camp.
Boys with ribs sharp as weapons.
Enock pacing, jaw clenched, fingers curled around a crucifix that dripped from every execution. "They don't teach you how to come back from this," Enock had said, voice a thunderstorm in chains. "They just teach you how to survive it."
But they didn't survive.
Khalid died first.
Not in war. Not in sacrifice.
But by Carson's hand.
Because he had to.
Because Pierce had sent the order.
Because if he didn't, Enock would've been next.
Because—because—
"If you have to become a monster to end the nightmare, then be a beautiful one." Khalid had smiled when he said that. Blood in his teeth. Hands still warm. Still trusting.
Carson sobbed in the dream, but it echoed in his real chest—silent, heaving sobs that made his whole body jolt on the ballroom floor like a marionette in a fire.
Elise (watching him seize)
He was making sounds no person should make.
No syllables. Just agony with a mouth.
"Is he—?"
"He's trapped," Alex said, kneeling beside him, eyes shadowed. "In every trauma he ever ran from."
Leona clutched Ryder's arm, her nails breaking his skin, but he didn't flinch.
Marco was praying.
Dante's cigarette was burning down to his fingers.
"Shouldn't we wake him up?" Diego asked.
"No," Alex said flatly. "We wake him now, he dies."
Carson (inner POV, deeper hallucination)
The massacre was his fault.
Not just tonight.
Always.
He remembered what Enock screamed when the fire took the compound—"What have you DONE, Car—!"
But the flames swallowed his name.
The guilt stitched it back.
He remembered the pile of bodies at thirteen.
He remembered the eye of a boy whose name he never learned.
He remembered Pierce watching, glass in hand, saying, "You're ready now."
No. He wasn't.
He never was.
The ballroom tonight had become that same image:
Glass. Blood. Teeth in shoes.
Children screaming.
He was the child. He was the monster. He was the one holding the knife.
And Pierce was dead now. Dead because of him.
His blade. His brother.
He should feel relief.
Instead, he felt nothing.
No—he felt him.
Pierce still stood in the corners of Carson's mind, face dripping into a thousand mirrors, voice warped by the lullaby:
"You break everything you love, little brother. Including me."
Elise (barely breathing)
"He's crying," she said. "He's still crying even sedated."
She took a step closer.
Blood soaked his shirt, but it wasn't from tonight alone. It was old—memory bleeding through.
She touched his wrist.
His fingers twitched. His lips moved. A name.
"Enock."
Then:
"Elise... run. Run—please—RUN."
Carson (final descent into the hallucination)
The ground opened.
He saw Elise surrounded by the jungle.
He tried to reach her, but his arms were missing.
He tried to scream, but Khalid was holding his face gently, singing into his mouth like a mother might:
"Habibi... habibi... let it burn. Let it all burn. There's no saving you now."
He looked over.
Enock was crucified in barbed wire.
Pierce's head was in his lap, eyes open.
The children were laughing.
And God, somewhere above it all, was still silent.
So Carson screamed at the sky:
"If you're watching—fucking LOOK at me! This is what you made! Are you proud of your son now?!"
The lullaby played one last time.
"Guten Abend... gute Nacht…"
And the world folded in on itself.
Elise (just before blackout)
He stopped shaking.
Still.
Not peace—just the absence of fight.
Like the death that comes after too much living.
I collapsed to her knees beside him and whispered:
"Please come back."
But Carson was already gone somewhere no one could follow.
And outside, the city burned.
And the lullaby echoed—softly, through the cracks in his mind.
"It's not over."
* * * *