The pain came before the sound.
A dull, rhythmic throb pulsing with the beat of his blood, then a sharp breath that caught in his throat. Adrian's eyes snapped open to the darkness of Giulia's house. The room returned to him in fragments, the cracked ceiling, the scent of improvised antiseptic, the faraway hum of an old refrigerator. For a second, he didn't remember who he was.
And then she arrived, not as an image, but as pressure, as a change in the air.
Clara.
He felt her before he could name her.
Not a voice, not words, sensations. The cold seeping up from the floor, the metallic taste of rust, the flicker of a dying light. And underneath, a restrained trembling. Pure, direct fear.
"Bad dream?" asked Luca from the darkness, already seated on the edge of a chair, as if he hadn't slept at all.
Adrian sat up, his muscles protesting. "It wasn't a dream. It was her."
Luca stood. "What do you feel?"
Adrian pressed a hand over his stitched side, closed his eyes, tried to order the chaos.
"Woods," he whispered. "Tall trees. Mud… a scratched door. It smells like ash. And…" he stopped, because the feeling sharpened, "… a small room. Damp. He's there."
Luca moved closer to the window, pulling the curtain aside just a little. The night was still whole.
"I know that forest," he said quietly. "Not the exact spot, but… north of the city there's a stretch of old farmhouses swallowed by the trees. Years ago, Rinaldi financed a… research facility out there." He bit his lip, the word itself like a wound. "For children. They shut it down. Left everything to rot."
Adrian breathed in, slow, as if exhaling could make it vanish. "It's his cradle," he said. "Where they broke him."
Then another wave hit. Not an image, understanding.
A presence moving closer, not with footsteps but with intention. Clara's skin recoiling. A sharp nausea. The smell of smoke and oil. The killer leaning over her shadow.
Something inside Adrian snapped.
"Don't you touch her!" he shouted before realizing he had. The sound emptied the room. His hands shook. His throat burned.
Luca was instantly there, open palms raised as if to catch him. "Adrian! Look at me."
Adrian's breathing came in short bursts.
"At least we know she's alive," Luca said, his voice quick, precise, like throwing a rope to a drowning man. "You felt her fear. That means she's still there. We're going to get her."
The words landed where they needed to. Adrian nodded once.
Luca grabbed his kit, a roll of clean bandages, and, after a long hesitation, a pistol zipped inside a nylon case. He set it on the table without meeting Adrian's eyes.
"I don't want you to use it," he said quietly. "But if you do, don't miss."
Adrian stared at it a second too long. His fingers touched it, tested its weight. The sensation sickened him. It wasn't an object, it was a verdict.
"I prefer words," he muttered.
"I prefer Clara alive," Luca replied, clipped and cold.
They drove through the dark with headlights off for long stretches, flicking them on only when the road vanished completely. Luca's hands gripped the wheel, eyes cutting between mirrors and the faint line of asphalt; Adrian sat in the passenger seat, pressing his palm against his wound, trying to keep his breathing steady.
During the drive, the connection to Clara reactivated, not clearly, not fully, one-way only.
Adrian felt her as a shift in temperature: a breath of cold, then a flare of heat, then cold again. Sometimes, a single fallen word, breathe but he couldn't tell if it came from her or from himself.
Then Clara's nausea became his own. The smoke entered his mouth like a taste.
And over it, slimy words, not complete, but intentions: to dominate, to humiliate, to break. There was no lust in those thoughts, only power. The lowest kind of power.
Adrian's fists clenched until his knuckles hurt. "Stop…" he hissed through his teeth, then louder, "Stop!"
Luca glanced over. "Hey."
"He's… " Adrian bit the sentence short. "He's on her. He's trying to destroy her."
Luca nodded once, calm and cutting. "Then he hasn't done it yet. We're still in time."
A minute later, Luca's phone buzzed: a tower ping from the northern zone, an old repeater near a wooded area. "Not precise," he murmured, "but close."
Adrian closed his eyes for a second, following the thread of her mind: thicker trees, a muddy path, a swollen wooden door scratched low, the stench of burnt ash.
He opened them again. "Turn here."
Luca didn't ask how he knew. He simply flicked the blinker out of habit and turned onto a narrow dirt road barely fit for cars. The suspension groaned; the vegetation swallowed them on both sides in a whisper of wet leaves.
When the road ended, Luca killed the engine. "From here, we walk."
The forest swallowed sound.
Branches scraped their jackets; their breath came in small white bursts. The ground was soft, sucking at their shoes. The air shifted from damp soil to stale smoke. Twice, Adrian stopped, tilting his head like a man listening for a frequency.
Three steps beyond a curve of thorns, the house appeared.
It was the one. Even without seeing it before, he recognized it the way you recognize old pain, by its shape.
The swollen door. The side window with one intact pane. The groaning veranda.
And a flash of memory that wasn't his, a child's shoe, missing its lace.
They crouched behind a tree trunk.
Luca whispered, "We split. I'll take the back. You go for that window."
Adrian nodded.
"If you can, wait for my signal. Don't be a hero."
Adrian didn't answer. His eyes already had.
They moved like blades in opposite directions.
The forest swallowed Luca within three steps. Adrian crawled toward the window. The glass reflected his own ghostly face. He pressed flat below the sill, then slowly lifted his gaze.
Inside, the light flickered, a sickly pulse from a dying neon.
He saw the small room exactly as he had felt it: a scorched table, a metal cot, a gray blanket. And then he saw Clara.
She was trying to lift herself up, and he felt the motion in his own spine, as if her back were his. The killer pushed her down on the cot, face-first, her hands gripping the metal frame.
A dry sound tore the air, fabric, not flesh. The man was ripping cloth, maybe the blanket or her sleeve, making restraints, ready to immobilize her. A violence of power, not of flesh.
Adrian's world collapsed to a single point.
Every cell in him screamed.
He didn't think. He didn't wait for a signal.
He didn't ask permission from his body.
"Clara!"
The echo of his shout shattered the night as he hurled himself through the window, once, twice, the glass exploded into a rain of shards.
He hit the floor hard, rolled on his wounded side, came up in one motion that tore a flame through his ribs. The pistol was already in his hand, as if it had grown there.
The killer turned, his eyes wide with the shock of being seen.
Clara lifted her face from the cot, and for an instant she felt him, truly felt him. The distance vanished, the thread between them ignited. Her gaze locked on his, and the link went full, a surge of warmth that burned away the static and the fear.
"Adrian…" she whispered, out loud and inside his head.
And time did what it always does when it breaks open, it stopped.
Luca burst in through the back door on the same breath, gun low, eyes forward.
The killer, trapped between two points, reached for something on the table, a knife, tape, the outline of a plan.
Adrian raised his weapon. His hand did not shake.
"Step away from her," he said, his voice dangerously calm.
"Now."
The neon flickered once, like an eye trying to stay awake.
Something, choice, fuse, fate, hung in the air.
And the chapter closed on that held breath, on the heartbeat that decides whether to explode or to break.