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Chapter Text

1927 had the kind of winter that made men honest. 

Not good. Not repentant. Just honest in the way a cold wind strips the lies off your face and leaves your bones talking. Vincent had learned early that the city liked its truths simple: a man was either starving or fed, either weak or dangerous, either useful or dead. 

He had no intention of being the last one. 

The apartment was on the third floor of a building that had once pretended to be respectable. The hallway still carried the ghost of perfume and boiled cabbage, the wallpaper still attempted a floral print, but the edges were peeling like bad manners. Vincent’s door was the only one with a new brass number and a lock that didn’t jiggle loose if you breathed on it. 

Inside, the light was always low. Not because he was hiding Vincent never hid but because bright rooms made people feel safe enough to ask questions. 

The radio in the corner hummed softly, a low, constant purr of static between stations, as if it was waiting for him to pick what he wanted the world to sound like. A glass of whiskey sat on the table, untouched, collecting a thin skin of dust and patience. The ashtray overflowed like a miniature city skyline: sharp peaks of cigarette ends, grey and crumbling, built one after another as he worked. 

Work, tonight, was paperwork with teeth. 

A ledger lay open in front of him, names and figures and times. A list of men who believed they owned sound, who believed they could monopolise air itself. Vincent traced a finger down the page, stopping at one particular name, and smiled without warmth. 

It wasn’t the kind of smile you gave friends. It was the kind you gave the future. 

He had started small. Everyone did, if they were smart. He’d started with errands carrying messages, delivering envelopes, listening in the right doorways. People underestimated him because he dressed clean and spoke sweet. He had a face that suggested you could trust him with your change and your secrets. 

They only realised their mistake after they were already bleeding. 

Now he was climbing. Not like an athlete, all sweat and scrapes, but like a man walking upstairs he’d built himself each step a phone call intercepted, each landing a rival’s “accident,” each door unlocked with either money or fear. 

He’d murdered three men this month. 

Not all at once. That was messy. Amateur. No, Vincent made murder tidy, like folding a suit jacket just so. 

The city was full of noise, and he was learning how to control it. He liked the idea of a network wires and voices and invisible influence. He liked the thought that if he owned enough of it, he could reach into any room in the country without stepping foot inside. 

He didn’t just want power. 

He wanted access. 

Vincent leaned back in his chair and looked at the radio. Static. The sound between songs. The breathing space before a broadcast began. 

He wondered if the world would ever realise how much it loved being told what to feel. 

A knock snapped through the apartment like a gunshot. 

Not loud. Not desperate. A polite knock, almost careful, as if whoever stood outside didn’t want to disturb him just wanted him to answer. Vincent sat still for one long second, whiskey dark eyes narrowing. 

Nobody knocked on his door at this hour unless they were stupid, brave, or had nothing to lose. 

He reached under the table and slid his hand around the grip of a pistol, then stood without a sound. He moved like he belonged to the silence. Every floorboard that might’ve betrayed him was avoided. He didn’t rush. 

Rushing was what victims did. 

The knock came again. Same rhythm. Same restraint. 

Vincent went to the door and leaned toward the peephole. 

Nothing. 

The hallway outside was empty, lit by a single weak bulb that made the shadows look bruised. No hat brim, no shoulder, no face lurking just out of sight. Just nothing. 

His fingers tightened around the pistol. 

Nothing made him nervous. 

Nothing meant someone wanted him to think there was nothing. 

Vincent unlatched the lock anyway. 

If someone wanted to kill him, they would learn two things in the next breath: Vincent didn’t scare easily, and Vincent didn’t die quietly. 

He opened the door. 

For half a heartbeat he saw the empty hallway again, and then his gaze dropped because there, on the stoop like a strange offering, sat a baby. 

A baby, bundled in a worn blanket the colour of old lace. Too small to be on its own, too still to be anything but real. The infant blinked up at him slowly, like it wasn’t sure what kind of world this was yet. 

Vincent’s grip on the gun loosened without him meaning to. 

The baby’s eyes were wrong in a way that made his stomach turn, not with disgust, but with recognition. 

One was blue. Pale, clear, like winter sky. The other was green. Darker, sharper, like a bottle held to the light. 

Vincent had never seen that combination anywhere else. Well apart from himself.

He crouched, the motion strange in his body, as if he’d forgotten how to lower himself to anyone’s level. The baby didn’t cry. It just watched him with the calm curiosity of something that hadn’t learned fear. 

Tucked into the blanket was an envelope. 

Clean paper. Neat handwriting. Addressed to: 

Vincent. 

Not “Mr.-” or “Sir” or any kind of fake respect. 
Just Vincent, like whoever wrote it knew exactly what he was and wasn’t afraid to say it. 

Vincent swallowed. His mouth was dry. 

He glanced down the hallway again, expecting he didn’t know what. A trap. A witness. A woman running back to reclaim what she’d left. 

Nothing. 

Only the baby, blinking. 

Vincent took the envelope. His hands, used to knives and wires and bullets, treated the paper with more care than it deserved. 

He opened it. 

The letter inside was short, and every word felt like it had been pressed into the page with shaking fingers. 

It didn’t waste time on pleasantries. 

It said there had been a night. A one night stand. A mistake, maybe, depending on who you asked. It said she hadn’t known at first, and then she did, and then she couldn’t pretend it wasn’t happening. It said she didn’t have the means, didn’t have the safety, didn’t have the kind of life that could keep a child alive. 

It said  

This is yours. 

Not in a romantic way. Not in a begging way. 

In a factual way. Like a bill. Like a receipt. Like proof. 

It said his name again, once, as if writing it hurt. 

And at the bottom, in a line that looked almost smudged, as if the writer had cried or the ink had bled: 

Please don’t come looking for me. 

Vincent reread that line twice. 

The baby made a small sound, not a cry, more like a sigh. A tiny exhale of impatience, like it was already sick of being left outside. 

Vincent stared at it. 

A child. His child. Allegedly. 

He’d slept with plenty of women. He wasn’t stupid about it, but he wasn’t careful in the way moral men pretended to be. Pleasure was currency, and he’d always paid in charm. He’d never considered what that charm might leave behind. 

He looked at the baby again. 

The eyes. 

The eyes were a signature. A brand. A cruel little joke from God or genetics. 

Vincent’s heart beat once, hard. 

He slid the pistol into his waistband like he’d forgotten he was holding it. 

Then, slowly, he reached down and lifted the baby into his arms. 

The baby was warm. He expected it to feel fragile, like holding a bird. Instead it felt solid. Alive. Heavy in a way that made his arms tense, adjusting, supporting. 

It fit against his chest like it belonged there. 

Vincent stood in the doorway for a moment too long, as if the hallway might change its mind and show him someone watching. But the hallway stayed empty, indifferent. 

So he closed the door. 

The lock clicked. 

Inside, the radio crackled softly, static slipping into the room like a whisper. 

Vincent carried the baby to the table and set it down carefully on the blanket, as if placing something valuable he didn’t know how to appraise. The baby kicked once, tiny booties bumping the edge of the ledger. 

His ledger. His plans. His list of men to kill. 

Vincent stared at that little foot and felt something in him shift, the way a radio dial catches a station and the world suddenly stops being noise. 

He didn’t know what to do. That was the shocking part. 

Vincent always knew what to do. 

He was a man built of decisions. A man who could look at a problem and solve it with a smile, a lie, and a blade. But this this was not a business deal. Not a rival. Not a threat he could remove cleanly. 

This was a small, breathing person with his eyes. 

He reached out and gently touched the baby’s cheek with one finger. 

The baby turned its head, instinctively, and pressed into the touch like it had been waiting for it. Like it recognized him the way Vincent had recognized those eyes. 

Vincent’s throat tightened. 

“What are you,” he murmured, not unkindly, and then corrected himself as if the words mattered. “Who are you.” 

The baby made another soft sound, something close to a coo. 

Vincent’s gaze flicked to the note again. 

No name. No identity beyond yours. 

He felt anger flash hot, sharp. Not at the baby. At the woman who had left it like an unwanted parcel. 

At the audacity of dropping a living thing onto his doorstep, as if he was a man you could burden and expect to carry it. 

And then, beneath the anger, something darker and stranger: 

A kind of gratitude so intense it bordered on hunger. 

Because as he looked at the baby, Vincent realised terribly, beautifully that his life had been missing something. 

He had money. Influence. A future. He had enemies who feared him and allies who needed him. He had a city that was slowly bending its ear toward his voice. 

And yet his apartment had always felt like a room designed for echo. 

All that ambition, all that blood, and nobody to share it with. Nobody who was his without question. Nobody who belonged to him in a way that wasn’t transactional. 

Vincent had never wanted to be loved. 

Love made people stupid. Love made people weak. Love put a target on your back and then handed the gun to the world. 

But holding this baby, watching it blink up at him with mismatched eyes like a glitch in the universe  

He realised he might be capable of something worse than love. 

Devotion. 

The kind of devotion that turned men into monsters. 

He laughed once, quietly, like the sound surprised him. The baby startled at the noise, then relaxed when Vincent’s hand steadied the blanket. 

“Of course,” Vincent murmured, and there was something almost amused in his voice, like the universe had finally told a joke he respected. “Of course it would be you.” 

Another him. 

But not just another him. 

Someone he could shape. Someone he could teach. Someone who could inherit every sharp edge and still be held gently, if he decided. 

A muse. 

A reason to build something bigger than himself. 

Vincent’s eyes slid to the radio again. 

Static. 

He imagined a future where a voice went out over the airwaves, commanding attention, commanding belief. He imagined people listening because they couldn’t help it. 

He imagined his child sitting beside him, older, watching him work, learning the way the world moved. 

He imagined teaching her the difference between power and spectacle. 

Between fear and awe. 

Between love and possession. 

The thought didn’t scare him. 

It should have. 

Vincent stood and carried the baby closer to the warmth of the room, away from the draft by the door. He shrugged off his suit jacket and draped it around the blanket like an improvised shield. 

He looked down at the baby again. 

“What do I call you,” he asked, softer now, almost like he was asking permission. 

The baby stared back, unbothered. 

Vincent’s mouth twitched at the corner. 

“Something that fits,” he decided. “Something that sounds like home.” 

His eyes flicked to the radio dial, the little marked numbers, the promise of stations waiting to be owned. 

Then he looked back at the baby. 

The mismatched eyes blinked slowly. 

Vincent’s chest felt too full, like he’d swallowed lightning and it had nowhere to go. 

He lifted the baby slightly, cradling it closer, and for the first time in years, his voice Vincent’s voice, the one he used to charm and threaten and sell lies as truth came out honest. 

“I’ve got you,” he said. 

The baby made a tiny, content sound, as if it believed him. 

And that was the moment Vincent realised the most dangerous thing of all: 

He meant it. 

Not because it was right. Not because he was good. 

But because it was his. 

Outside, the city kept breathing smoke and secrets. Somewhere, another man would die because Vincent needed his job. Somewhere, a station would change hands. Somewhere, the world would keep spinning toward the future Vincent intended to own. 

But in the dim apartment on the third floor, with the radio whispering static like a lullaby, Vincent held the missing piece of his life and felt something new take shape behind his ribs. 

Not guilt. 

Not salvation. 

Purpose. 

He looked down at the baby again, and the baby stared back with those impossible eyes, like two different channels playing at once. 

Vincent smiled this time, warm enough to be terrifying. 

“Well,” he said, as if speaking to an audience only he could see. “Aren’t you a little miracle.” 

The radio crackled. 

Somewhere in the static, a station tried to come through. 

And Vincent, for the first time, didn’t reach to control it. 

He just held his child and listened. 

They never happened all at once. 

That was the trick of it. If you looked too closely, if you tried to line the moments up into a clean story, you’d miss how carefully Vincent spaced them out how he learned to live two lives in the same room without letting the seams show. 

Audrey grew up thinking her father worked late. 

Sometimes that was even true. 

 There were nights when Vincent came home with blood under his cuffs and a smile already practiced into something softer. He would wash his hands in the sink until the water ran pink, then clear, then colder than necessary. He’d smooth his hair, loosen his tie, and step into the living room like a man who had never done anything worse than miss dinner. 

Audrey would look up from the floor, toys spread around her like a constellation. 

“Daddy,” she’d say. 

And the word would cut cleaner than any blade. 

Vincent learned to kill efficiently. He learned to love deliberately. 

He hid bodies the way other fathers hid cigarettes. 

He memorised alibis while memorising bedtime routines. He learned which doors creaked and which floorboards betrayed him, not just for escape but so he wouldn’t wake her when he came home too late. 

Audrey never saw the ledger. 

She never saw the wires. Never heard the screams. 

What she saw was a man who knelt to her level, who brushed her hair back with fingers that had learned restraint, who spoke to her like she was the most important audience he’d ever had. 

Which, quietly, she was. 

He read to her every night he could. 

Books about inventors. About cities. About voices travelling across impossible distances. Stories where clever people bent the world by understanding it better than everyone else. 

Audrey liked to interrupt. 

“Why do they listen to him?” she’d ask, tapping the page. 

Vincent would smile, turning it into a lesson instead of a confession. 

“Because he makes it easy,” he’d say. “People don’t like to think. They like to feel guided.” 

She’d hum, considering that, eyes sharp even as a child. 

“Could anyone do that?” 

“No,” Vincent said, honestly. “Only people who understand how sound works.” 

“How does it work?” 

Vincent would glance at the radio, humming softly in the corner. 

“Like trust,” he’d say. “Once it’s inside you, you don’t question where it came from.” 

Audrey liked that answer too much. 

The cult didn’t start as a cult. 

Vincent never thought of it that way. 

It was a network. A community. A collective of believers who understood that the world was changing and that someone needed to decide what it would sound like when it did. 

Audrey grew up around them. 

She called them Dad’s friends when she was small. She called them listeners when she was older. By the time she was a teenager, she called them what they were: useful. 

Vincent noticed the shift and didn’t correct it. 

He watched her learn the rhythm of a room. Watched her stand just behind him during gatherings, absorbing the way people leaned in when he spoke. Watched her learn when to smile and when silence did more damage. 

She was brilliant. 

She was terrifying. 

She was his. 

By the time Audrey was twenty six, there were no lies left between them. 

She knew what he did. She knew how many men had vanished so the network could grow. She knew the cult wasn’t faith it was structure. 

And she didn’t flinch. 

If anything, she seemed amused by it all, like she’d finally been handed the answer key to a test she’d already aced. 

“You know,” she said once, watching him tune a broadcast, “people would follow you into Hell.” 

Vincent smiled, pride flickering before he could stop it. 

“I already have,” he said. 

She laughed. 

It sounded like static breaking cleanly into signal. 

The night it happened was supposed to be perfect. 

The cult gathered, packed tight around the stage, eyes shining with belief and electricity. Vincent stood elevated, bathed in light, voice smooth as ever. Audrey sat nearby, legs crossed, watching him like a critic instead of a daughter. 

He spoke about the future. About clarity. About unity. 

About how the world needed someone willing to hold the remote. About the world being brighter.. 

Applause roared. 

And then  

The chair. 

The timing was wrong. Just wrong enough. 

Vincent stepped back, turning to sit, already mid sentence, already thinking three moves ahead. 

He didn’t get there in time. 

The television a massive, humming monument to everything he’d built toppled. 

Glass shattered. Metal screamed. Electricity surged like a living thing. 

It fell. 

The lights exploded. 

The cult screamed once, in perfect unison, and then  

Silence. 

Bodies dropped. Voices cut off mid worship. Faith short circuited. 

Everyone died. 

Everyone except Audrey. When it was meant to be two survivors. Her dad was meant to sit on the chair before the fall. Before electricity hit water. 

She ran. 

Not from fear never that. From instinct. 

She didn’t look back until she was far enough away that the smoke blurred the truth into something survivable. When she finally stopped, breath tearing at her ribs, she laughed. 

It was hysterical. It was hollow. It was inherited. 

They would call it an accident. 

She wouldn’t let them. 

Audrey straightened, wiped blood and soot from her hands, and did what she’d been raised to do. 

She told the world there had been a mistake. That someone had sabotaged the equipment. That her father had been murdered. 

She stood in front of microphones with his posture, his cadence, his eyes burning with the same impossible mix of grief and ambition. 

She promised continuity. She promised vengeance. She promised legacy. 

And when they asked her why she would take on such a burden, why she would continue the work of a man so dangerous  

She smiled. 

“Because he believed in something,” she said. “And so do I.” 

Later, alone, she whispered the truth to the static humming from an unoccupied screen. 

“I’ll fix this,” she said softly. “I’ll help you one more time, Dad.” 

The screen flickered. 

And somewhere between the noise and the silence, Audrey realized what she’d always known: 

She wasn’t just carrying his legacy. 

She was becoming it. 

Chapter Text

The performance was never meant for her. 

That was the lie Vox told himself as the city prepared. 

This was supposed to be a declaration. A reminder. A calculated flex of authority broadcast across Hell’s veins. He had framed it as spectacle light, sound, devotion sharpened into something undeniable. Another step toward Heaven. Another statement that Vox was not just a ruler of Hell’s noise, but its interpreter. 

The voice of the people. 

The voice of God. 

Vox populi, vox Dei. 

He liked the translation too much. 

It made his circuits hum. 

Pentagram City transformed itself for the night. Towers dimmed their usual neon in deference to the central broadcast platform. Screens aligned, syncing frequencies until the skyline itself felt like it was holding its breath. 

At the centre of it all stood Vox. 

Tall. Immaculate. Haloed in artificial light. Electricity crawled lazily along the edges of his form, threading through the stage like veins. His presence alone bent the crowd sinners gathering not because they were commanded to, but because they wanted to listen. 

Sound systems thrummed with anticipation. 

Somewhere beneath the stage, Alastor was tied to a chair. 

The bindings were deliberate. Not crude rope, not symbolic chains no, Vox had chosen insulated restraints, humming faintly with power. The chair was bolted into the floor, angled just enough that Alastor could see everything without being able to turn away. 

A private audience. 

Alastor looked bored. 

His smile was fixed, sharp as ever, but his eyes flicked across the setup with calculated interest. Vox hadn’t bothered to gag him. Silence, when imposed on Alastor, was never effective. He preferred to let him talk into the void. 

“Big night,” Alastor drawled, voice echoing faintly in the chamber. “You’ve gone to such trouble. Should I feel honoured?” 

Vox didn’t look at him. 

“Quiet,” he said mildly, adjusting a dial. “This is history.” 

“Oh, I’m sure,” Alastor replied cheerfully. “Do tell me am I here as witness or warning?” 

Vox smiled. 

“You’re here to listen.” 

The broadcast began with silence. 

True silence. 

Not static. Not ambient noise. The kind of absence that crawled under skin and made people lean closer without realizing why. Screens across the city flickered black, then white, then settled into a single symbol pulsing slowly like a heartbeat. 

Vox’s sigil. 

The crowd hushed. 

And then Vox spoke. 

---- 

She hadn’t meant to be there. 

She never did. 

Crowds irritated her. Too much overlapping sound. Too many frequencies colliding without intention. She preferred smaller spaces, controlled environments where her voice could do real work. 

But Vox was impossible to ignore. 

Her audio receptors buzzed the moment the broadcast began. Not painfully - familiar. Like a tuning fork struck against her ribs. The city’s soundscape shifted, aligning itself around a central frequency that made her skin prickle. 

She stopped walking. 

Blue fingers curled slowly at her sides, claws flexing. 

She told herself it was nothing. Just another overlord flexing his power. Just another ego dressed up as art. 

And then she heard him speak. 

The first word hit her like a memory she didn’t have language for. 

His voice. 

Not just the sound but the shape of it. The rise and fall, the controlled warmth masking something sharper underneath. The way it invited trust while never quite offering it in return. 

Her breath caught. 

Her vision blurred at the edges, static creeping into her peripheral sight. 

No, she thought, instinctively. No. 

The cadence shifted, and something inside her broke open. 

Memories don’t always return gently. 

Sometimes they detonate. 

Her mind flooded, images crashing into one another without order or mercy. A man kneeling in front of her, adjusting a radio dial. Fingers steadying hers. A laugh, quiet and rare, meant only for her. 

Books. Towers. Screens humming softly through the night. 

“You listen first,” a voice whispered from the past. “Then you speak.” 

She staggered, clutching a nearby railing as the broadcast continued, Vox’s words threading themselves through the chaos like a spine. 

She remembered obsession; not as cruelty, but as focus. A man who built empires not because he was empty, but because he wanted to share them. 

She remembered affection disguised as ambition. 

Protection framed as control. 

Love buried so deep under ego that it took death to unearth it. 

Her father. 

On stage, Vox spoke of unity, of clarity, of purpose but something in his systems faltered. A glitch. A half-second delay between thought and output. 

He felt it before he understood it. 

A shift in the signal. 

A feedback loop opening somewhere it shouldn’t have. 

His voice caught for a fraction of a second, barely perceptible to the crowd 

Vox steadied himself. 

Outwardly, nothing changed. 

The broadcast held. The cadence remained flawless. His voice continued to roll across the city with measured authority, every syllable calibrated to command belief. The crowd was still his. The signal was still clean. 

But something inside him slipped out of alignment. 

He felt her. 

Not through cameras. Not through surveillance feeds or layered audio analysis or any of the thousand ways he monitored Hell. 

This was older. 

Analog. 

A presence cutting cleanly through the noise like a needle dropping onto a familiar groove. 

For a heartbeat, Vox thought it was wishful distortion grief misfiring, pattern recognition desperate enough to hallucinate. He had done that before. Let static turn into ghosts. 

But this wasn’t that. 

This was her. 

And the terror didn’t come from recognition. 

It came from the certainty that she hadn’t come for him. 

She was already moving. 

Not toward the stage never that. Not openly. Not recklessly. 

She pushed through the crowd sideways, slipping between bodies with the ease of someone who understood how people moved when they weren’t thinking. Her claws brushed fabric, not tearing, just guiding. Her voice rippled outward in barely audible harmonics, subtle enough to pass as instinct. 

People stepped aside without realizing they’d decided to. 

Eyes unfocused. Shoulders turning. Space opening. 

Her power didn’t clash with Vox’s broadcast. 

It resonated. 

Two signals sharing a frequency without touching. 

And Vox felt it like feedback under his skin. 

She was close. 

Close enough to hear him without filters. 

Close enough to leave again. 

The thought hollowed him out. 

She’s avoiding me, he thought, the realization cold and immediate. 

She had been doing it since the beginning rerouting, leaving rooms before he entered, never once letting her gaze linger. Vox had been so sure that one day he’d see her again. But time past and his daughter never showed herself. So, she must hate him. A cruel bitter truth. 

Now, standing on a stage worshipped by thousands, he felt the truth settle heavier than any chain. 

She knew he was here. 

And she didn’t want him. 

The idea lodged somewhere deep and painful: that she remembered enough to hate him. That Hell had given her clarity without forgiveness. That the man who had been the centre of her world was now something she instinctively fled. 

Vox didn’t falter. 

He finished the performance. 

“Listen,” he said, voice dropping, warmth threading through authority like a promise. “And be heard.” 

Applause thundered. 

The city roared back its devotion. 

Vox smiled. 

It was perfect. 

It was practiced. 

It was a lie. 

He lifted a hand, and the sound softened not cut, never abrupt. He let it taper into anticipation, into hunger. 

“Tonight,” Vox continued smoothly, “is not about immediacy. It’s about patience.” 

The crowd leaned in. 

“Good things,” he said, tone intimate now, reassuring, “are worth waiting for.” 

Screens flared with soft visuals. Music shifted into something calm, expansive. 

“Go,” Vox told them gently. “When the time is right, I’ll call you back.” 

They dispersed willingly. 

Laughing. Talking. Satisfied. 

Idiots, every one of them. 

The moment the last frequency cleared, Vox killed the broadcast. 

Silence slammed into the space. 

For a long second, he didn’t move. 

Didn’t turn. 

Didn’t allow himself to look. 

Fear was not something Vox entertained often. He understood it too well, used it too effectively. 

But this... 

This was different. 

Slowly, he turned. 

And saw her. 

Not rushing. Not dramatic. 

Just standing there, half-shadowed near the edge of the cleared space, blue skin catching residual light like electricity trapped under water. Her claws were relaxed. Her posture wary but not defensive. 

Watching him. 

Vox saw her clearly for the first time since Hell had taken him. 

Not as a shadow. 

Not as a gap in his systems. 

As his daughter. 

Alive. 

Real. 

And looking at him like she wasn’t sure he wanted her there. 

Something in Vox broke loose. 

Not loudly. 

Quietly. 

Catastrophically. 

He didn’t step toward her at first. Didn’t reach. Didn’t speak. For once in his existence, Vox didn’t know what the right move was because every instinct screamed that one wrong frequency would send her retreating again. 

He swallowed. 

“You don’t have to stay,” he said finally, voice stripped of theatrics, stripped of command. Just… honest. “I won’t-” 

His voice caught. Just barely. 

“I thought you hated me.” 

Her eyes widened. 

Not in fear. 

In shock. 

And in that moment before either of them moved, before Hell intruded again the space between them hummed with something fragile and unbroadcastable. A frequency Vox had never learned how to weaponize. 

Not control. 

Not power. 

Just the terrifying possibility that he might be wrong. 

And that maybe 

Just maybe 

She was still listening. 

“Dad.” 

The word was small. 

Unsteady. 

It didn’t echo. It didn’t distort. It didn’t bend the air the way her voice usually did. It landed between them like a dropped glass whole, for half a second, before the cracks began to spread. 

Vox didn’t answer. 

He watched her instead. 

Really watched her. 

As if committing her to memory all over again in case Hell decided to steal her twice. 

She looked like him in ways that hurt. 

Her skin was blue, not flat or artificial but alive; deep, saturated, shifting subtly with the light like water under voltage. Faint luminous lines traced along her arms and throat, pulsing softly with her breath, bioluminescent patterns reminiscent of an electric eel’s current just beneath the surface. Power slept in her muscles, coiled and patient. 

Her claws were sharp, blackened at the tips, precise rather than feral. They flexed once at her sides, an unconscious reaction, as if part of her still expected to need them. 

Her hair clung slightly to her shoulders, charged, lifting in places where static gathered. Even standing still, she hummed not audibly, but perceptibly, a low vibration that made nearby screens flicker uncertainly, like they weren’t sure who they belonged to. 

And her eyes, 

God. 

Her eyes were bright, focused, searching his face with an intensity that bordered on desperate. There was no recognition of shared memories there. No childhood reflections. No warmth of familiarity earned over years. 

But there was something. 

Instinct. 

A pull she didn’t understand. 

A truth her mind hadn’t caught up to yet. 

She’d said Dad. 

Vox’s throat tightened painfully. 

He needed to hear her again. 

To confirm she wasn’t a glitch. 

To confirm she wasn’t already slipping away. 

“Why are you here, princess?” 

The word escaped him before caution could intercept it. 

Princess. 

It carried too much. Affection, pride, habit. A name he’d never spoken to anyone else. A name tied to a life she didn’t remember living. 

She stiffened not in fear, but recognition. 

Her spine straightened. Her shoulders squared. Something in her posture aligned, as if the word had tuned her to the correct frequency, bypassing thought entirely. Like her body remembered before her mind could. 

Her claws stilled. 

Her breathing steadied. 

She looked at him differently now, more sharply, more intently, like she was trying to reconcile what she felt with what she knew. 

Vox saw it happen in real time. 

And it terrified him. 

“What did you do?” he asked quietly. 

Not accusatory. 

Not angry. 

Just Vox standing in the aftermath of a lie he’d told himself for months, afraid of the answer and desperate for it all the same. 

She turned to face him. 

Up close, there was no denying it. 

Not just the shared sharpness of features or the familiar angles though those were there, unmistakable but the expression. The way her gaze didn’t simply look at him but measured him. Like he was a variable in an equation she was already solving. The way her mouth twitched, almost imperceptibly, when she reached the conclusion that honesty would be faster than evasion. 

Vox felt it like a diagnostic spike. 

Recognition, reflected at him. 

He braced himself. 

Prepared for anger. Accusation. Distance finally made verbal. He had already rehearsed responses to every version of rejection he could imagine. He had built contingencies for hatred. 

What he hadn’t prepared for 

Was how much he wanted her approval. 

And then 

He softened. 

It wasn’t strategy. It wasn’t weakness. It was reflex, buried so deep it bypassed his usual control entirely. His shoulders eased. His voice dropped, tension bleeding out of it like a power surge grounding itself before it could burn everything down. 

“No,” he said quietly, shaking his head once. “That came out wrong.” 

He closed the distance between them in two long steps, stopped himself halfway through the third. His hands lifted instinctively, palms open, like he meant to steady her or himself, and then hovered there, uncertain. 

Careful. 

He had never needed to be careful with anyone else. 

“You were such a good kid,” he said, the words slipping out unguarded, unpolished. “So much like me.” 

The admission hit him as hard as it hit the air. 

A laugh tore itself out of his chest before he could stop it—short, sharp, startled. It wasn’t cruel. It wasn’t mocking. 

It was disbelief. 

“Oh HAHAHAHA.” He pressed a hand to his face, fingers digging into the edge of his screen as if grounding himself again. His shoulders shook once. “Maybe too much like me.” 

She smiled. 

Not shy. 

Not apologetic. 

Not softened by his emotion. 

Proud. 

It suited her in a way that made something in Vox’s chest ache. 

“Pretty much,” she said casually, like she was confessing to borrowing his jacket or rearranging his desk. “I killed and started your cult back up.” 

The words hit the room wrong. 

Too blunt. Too clean. 

Like a plate slipping from numb fingers and shattering on tile. 

Vox froze. 

Just for half a second but that was enough. Enough for the weight of it to land. Enough for a dozen overlapping thoughts to spike at once. 

Then he leaned in sharply, voice dropping to a hiss as his gaze flicked to the walls, the corners, the places sound liked to linger. 

“Shh,” he said reflexively. “It was a commune.” 

The correction was automatic. Defensive. Habitual. 

She stared at him. 

Flat. Unamused. Entirely unimpressed. 

“Dad.” 

The word carried weight now. 

Expectation. 

Vox sighed, long and theatrical, shoulders slumping just a fraction. 

“Okay, fine,” he conceded. “A cult.” 

And in the quiet that followed absurd, intimate, dangerous it became undeniable: 

The apple hadn’t just fallen from the tree. 

It had learned exactly how to grow back. 

They stood there in the quiet, the absurdity of it hanging between them like shared static. He studied her face, searching for guilt, regret, hesitation. 

He found none. 

Only familiarity. 

Understanding. 

The horrifying comfort of seeing his own reflection sharpened into something new. 

Apple didn’t just fall from the tree. 

It hit every branch on the way down. 

Vox exhaled slowly, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck. 

“I never hated you, Dad.” 

Her voice wavered on the word, like it had to push past something lodged in her chest to get out. 

“I never could.” She swallowed, claws curling inward for the first time since he’d seen her. “I love you-” 

The admission cracked. 

“When I got here,” she continued, breath uneven now, “I was a blank slate. I knew nothing. No past. No context. Just… noise.” Her eyes burned, bright with frustration and grief she hadn’t had language for until now. “I couldn’t remember you. My own dad.” 

The words finally broke her. 

Not loudly. Not dramatically. 

She just stood there, shoulders tightening, voice thinning as if holding herself together suddenly took too much effort. 

Vox didn’t think. 

He didn’t calculate distance or consequence or whether this would overwhelm her. 

He moved. 

His arms came around her; firm, sure, immediate, pulling her against his chest like he’d done a thousand times in another life she couldn’t remember. One hand settled between her shoulder blades, grounding. The other curved protectively around her back, fingers flexing once like he was anchoring something precious in place. 

She froze for half a heartbeat. 

Then she melted into him. 

Her forehead pressed against his chest, the faint hum of her power syncing unconsciously with his, static smoothing into something almost quiet. Her claws hooked lightly into the fabric at his sides, not tearing, just holding on. 

It felt right. 

Terrifyingly, devastatingly right. 

Vox rested his chin gently against the top of her head, eyes closing for the first time since Hell. The world narrowed to the weight of her, the sound of her breathing, the undeniable truth that she was here and not pulling away. 

“You don’t have to remember,” he said softly, voice stripped of all broadcast polish. “You don’t owe me memory. Or forgiveness.” 

His grip tightened just a fraction. 

“You’re here now,” he continued. “That’s enough.” 

She nodded against him, a small, broken sound leaving her throat as she clung tighter. 

And in that moment surrounded by the wreckage of lies, power, and everything Hell had taken from them Vox knew one thing with absolute clarity: 

He hadn’t lost her. 

Not then. 

Not now. 

And never again.