Chapter 512: Subtle Itch
The sky had torn open, and Arzhen Vasiliev had thought only of her.
Not the company or the lawsuit. Not the father who had returned from the dead to destroy him, or the mother he had crippled, her vocal cords severed, locked in the basement of a mansion, wailing a sound that was more like a cow than a woman.
When the vortex had spread across the heavens, when the black clouds had swallowed the moon and the sirens had begun their yelling, his mind had gone blank of everything except a single, burning image.
Cecilia, heavily pregnant, somewhere in this dying city. Alone. Carrying a child that should have been his.
He had tried to call her. His phone had rung once, twice, then gone to voicemail. He had tried again. And again. And again. Each failed connection was a blade between his ribs.
She had only unblocked his number as a transaction and she was still out there somewhere, facing the end of the world.
She had not thought to reach for him. Why would she?
So he had gone looking.
The evacuation routes were choked with people. Families clutching each other, children crying, elders being half-carried by strangers who had stopped to help because stopping to help was what people did when the sky was falling.
Hunters in mixed form directed the flow of bodies toward the underground shelters, their voices hoarse from shouting, their eyes fixed on the vortex above. The city was dying in slow motion, and Arzhen Vasiliev moved through it like a ghost.
He wandered. That was the only word for it.
He had no destination, no plan, no strategy, only desperately trying to do whatever he could to soothe the animal need to find her.
He pushed through crowds of evacuees, his tiger ears swiveling, his dark eyes scanning every face, every figure, every flash of blonde hair that might have been hers.
He was barely holding his humanoid form together. His claws kept extending and retracting without his permission, and his fangs pressed against his lower lip.
A low, constant growl rumbled in his chest, a sound that was half her name and half a prayer to gods he had never believed in.
Nobody noticed, that was the terrible thing.
The world was ending, and everyone was too busy surviving to notice the billionaire tiger beastman who was slowly, quietly falling apart in their midst.
A woman with a baby in her arms, was that her? No. A figure in a navy dress, blonde hair, the curve of a pregnant belly—he lunged toward her, his heart hammering, only to find a stranger’s terrified face staring back at him.
He didn’t apologize, but he grunted. He didn’t recognize his own voice.
He kept walking.
The vortex pulsed above him. The black lightning flickered.
Somewhere in the distance, something was roaring. And Arzhen Vasiliev kept searching for a woman who had already left him in every way that mattered.
His hands outstretched, his chest heaving, his eyes burning with a desperation that would have been pathetic if anyone had been looking.
Nobody was looking.
The crowd surged around him, and he was just another body in the stream, just another desperate creature trying to find someone before the world ended.
He didn’t find her. Of course he didn’t.
He wandered the streets towards shelters, calling her name into a chaos that didn’t care.
By the time the blue light erupted and the vortex collapsed, he had walked for miles. His feet were bleeding through his shoes, and he had stopped pretending he was anything other than what he was. A man who had lost everything.
Until—
"Ar...zhen...?"
He blinked. The voice... how familiar. It was soft, pitched with just the right amount of breathless concern.
"Is that... you...?"
He turned. Ruby stood a few paces away, naturally and elegantly disentangling herself from the arm of... some man?
Who...?
Arzhen... didn’t care to identify him.
She moved toward him, her white priestess robes still streaked with marks of mud and dried ichor from the certification trial.
Wasn’t she supposed to still be at the camp? He had pulled her support, told Igor to ignore her calls. And yet here she was, emerging from the chaos of the de-evacuation like a flower pushing through cracked concrete.
"Arzhen... what... what had happened to you...?" She grasped his arm with both hands, her fingers pressing into the fabric of his suit.
Her pink eyes, those famous, captivating eyes, were wide with worry. Vivid worry. She furrowed her brow in just the right place, made her lower lip tremble with just the right frequency, and filled her voice with just the right amount of tender anguish.
Arzhen felt something itch at the corner of his eyes.
Not tears. Irritation.
This sudden, inexplicable prickle of watching... an act.
Her natural act, the one he had adored for years, the one he had held up as proof that Ruby was genuine and good and everything Cecilia was not, now felt just a little bit exaggerated. Subtly. Here and there.
The way her eyebrows drew together was animated with the most appropriate punctuation to entice him. The way her voice caught on his name was a beat too perfectly timed.
The way her fingers tightened on his arm was calibrated to suggest desperation without being clingy, fear without being hysterical, love without being demanding.
Ruby suddenly looked irritating now.
She looked... fake.
Strange.
Why?
She had never felt like this before. For years, he had watched her perform these exact gestures and believed every one of them. He had built his life around the conviction that Ruby’s love was pure and Cecilia’s love was... ha—
But now, he saw it.
How curious.
"Arzhen, do you hear me? C-come on, we go to the medic tent, alright? Everything’s over now..." She tugged gently at his arm, voice dripping with tender concern.
She turned her back to him as she pulled him along, and sighed with worry. "How did it come to this? I’ve only left for a couple of months and you... you had become so thin and... haggard..."
She glanced back at him over her shoulder, her eyes glistening. "You know you should take care of yourself even without me around, right?"
She smiled sadly. It was a beautiful smile, the smile of a woman who had been wronged and was choosing to be gracious. "I’ve tried to contact you for a while now... and they said you don’t want to meet me anymore. I was... I thought... Arzhen, you scared me..."
"But now, seeing you like this... did something happen...?" She turned to face him again, her expression arranged into perfect, tender worry.
But Arzhen, with his hand still clutched in hers, wasn’t focusing on her.
His gaze had drifted past her, past the crowd of de-evacuating civilians, past the medic tents that had been hastily erected in the shadow of the skyscrapers.
His golden eyes had locked onto a figure emerging from one of those tents. Blonde hair. Blue-green-grey eyes. The beautiful curve of a pregnant belly.
Cecilia.