THE BLASTED CONTRACT COIN BOOK 1

CHAPTER 23 RED DOOR

POV Mercy

Once I finally caught my breath, the words felt like jagged, unpolished stones scraping against my throat.

"I have no clear diagnostic on what just occurred," I rasped. The uncharacteristic trembling in my vocal cords fueled a sharp, sudden spike of internal irritation.

"The sensation... it was mathematically too much. It felt as though my ribcage was being crushed by a physical weight I could not visually identify."

Gideon pulled back slightly, though his massive, calloused hands remained firmly splayed over my shoulders, anchor points against my tremors.

"I think what you just had is called a panic attack, Little Bird," he said. His voice was unusually soft, completely stripped of its typical gravelly, street-bred bravado.

"Poppy had a joy weave in that bite of apple filling you took. I think you actually felt it. Even a low-grade joy-weave might have completely short-circuited your baseline if you didn't know what it was."

"I am so incredibly sorry, Mercy," Poppy added.

I glanced up. Poppy was physically inspecting me, her eyes darting across my face while her hands hovered anxiously over my arms. Her voice was thin, shaky, and entirely unsteady. She looked to be on the absolute verge of tears, her breathing shallow.

The ambient stress levels in the kitchen were rising to an inefficient degree. Alistair was already spending too much of his focus on me when he should be focused on the city's affairs; adding my biological failure to the family's current cognitive load would only decrease our overall operational success.

"Gideon is likely correct," Poppy continued, trying to stabilize her tone.

"The pure, raw contentment from my weave could have been overwhelming to a system with no native defenses. It turned an unknown sensory profile into acute fear, which manifested as a physical crisis. Your internal telemetry simply... overloaded."

"I am entirely functional now, Poppy. Gideon. Lucian," I stated, forcing my posture to straighten as I pushed away from their touch. I needed them to cease their monitoring.

"It was a temporary glitch. I am back, and I am fine. Please cease this fretting. Let us simply transport the tray of food to the cellar asset. The inventory is full; it does not require an additional item."

As I stood up, the lingering confusion in my mind hardened into something else. It was a cold, sharp, localized fury that felt like a winter storm trapped in my marrow.

"The tether," I said, my voice dropping to a freezing edge.

"It is not a passive debt. It is an active breach of privacy. The prisoner is somehow interfering with my internal telemetry, forcing my system to experience these... these unverified errors. The experience was wholly unpleasant."

I stared at the silver tray, then at my siblings. They stood in a heavy, suffocating silence, their faces wearing complex expressions I could identify but not entirely empathize with.

Then, Lucian spoke from the dark perimeter of the pantry.

"That would be anger you are feeling."

"I am losing my mind," I declared. The logical architecture of my world was fracturing, and the friction of that breaking hurt.

Without planning the action, I grabbed my head between my hands and dropped back against Gideon's shirtless chest. He did not hesitate. His massive arms instantly wrapped around me, locking me against his bulk. He began stroking my back in a slow, rhythmic motion, a calculated, grounding cadence that mimicked the steady, calming rise and fall of an ocean tide.

"I like that," I purred against his skin. "It is... nice."

The exact millisecond the word left my lips, a cold, agonizing spike of shock pierced my core.

Nice. I did not possess the vocabulary for nice. I did not like things. I turned my head violently toward Poppy, my voice cracking with a frantic desperation I did not recognize as my own.

"Make me something to return my system to normal! Right now!" I nearly shouted. I was still pinned in Gideon's lap, my body rocking back and forth as if I could physically shake a ghost out of my skin.

Then, the world tilted completely off its axis.

The kitchen blurred into a meaningless smear of copper, white tile, and flour. The scent of cinnamon and caramelized sugar intensified exponentially until it was deafening, ringing in my ears like a striking church bell. The edges of my vision turned fuzzy, dissolving into a gray mist that rapidly swallowed the room.

I felt a sudden, violent yank directly behind my navel, the gold tether pulling taut with immense kinetic force, and the floor beneath my boots fell away.

I was no longer in the laboratory.

I was standing in a world of absolute, infinite white. There was no horizon, no sun, no cast shadows. It was a sterile void of pure silence. And standing directly in front of my face was a structural anomaly that should not exist within my mental landscape.

A door.

It was towering, standing at least 20 feet high, constructed from a deep, blood-red wood that seemed to pulse with a slow, visceral heartbeat. It was heavily reinforced with thick gold trim and covered in intricate, moving black swirls that looked like liquid smoke trapped beneath glass.

With a jolt of clinical recognition, I realized what I was looking at. This was the Vault. This was the dark archive I had dimly sensed since my childhood in the slums.

This was where the "errors" went. The grief of the gutters, the terror of the knives, the blinding warmth of a brother's hug, every single piece of raw data I could not process while surviving had been filed away behind that red timber.

But the bolts were failing. The massive doors had slid open just a hair, no more than an inch, and from that narrow, dark crack, thousands of thin gold strings were escaping. They lashed out into the white void like severed nerves, striking my chest and sinking deep into my sternum.

"It's a bit messy, isn't it?"