COLD

Chapter 8

12:10 PM.

Stephan stood rigid before the reinforced glass partition. His calloused fingers moved with practiced precision across the security keypad, sealing the heavy steel door of her chamber. His face remained an unreadable mask—neither twisted in a frown nor softened by a smile. Instead, a cold, quiet satisfaction settled deep within him as he watched her. At the very least, she had used her brief window of freedom to glimpse the world outside her confinement, looking beyond the suffocating perimeter of her books.

“Thank you, Stephan,” Hildegard said, her voice carrying softly through the intercom.

She stood on the other side of the bulletproof polymer, her face radiating a warmth that seemed entirely out of place in the bleak laboratory. A genuine, gentle smile illuminated her features, striking a sharp contrast against her bleak surroundings.

Stephan stared back at her. Towering over her slight frame, a sudden, unfamiliar ache flared in his chest. He wanted to smile back. He desperately wished he could let down his guard, even for a fleeting second.

But he couldn’t.

Experience had taught him a brutal lesson: innocence was fragile, and in his world, a smile was a harbinger of ruin. He had already witnessed an entire world turn to ash because of that exact brand of genuine, trusting vulnerability. It was the destruction of his native home—the catastrophic betrayal that had dragged him from the light and discarded him into this cold, dark purgatory. That never-ending nightmare had fractured his soul beyond repair. Now, looking at Hildegard, he chose the safety of his emotional armor, completely unwilling to reciprocate the radiant light on her face.

He offered a single, abrupt nod of acknowledgement. Before she could speak again, he cut the audio feed, plunging her side of the glass into silence. Turning on his heel, he melted into the shadows of the sterile, fluorescent-lit hallways.

Left alone, Hildegard remained pressed against the reinforced glass, her gaze lingering on the empty corridor where he had just stood. She contemplated the invisible mask he refused to remove.

It was heartbreaking to witness. Looking past his hardened exterior and straight into his eyes, she saw the truth: he was an innocent soul broken by the very chains someone mysterious had forged. Everything about his muted agony told her that he was a prisoner of circumstance, acting neither by choice nor by free will. His hidden past, the story behind his eyes had twisted a gentle man into a fractured soul, reshaping him into something hazardous to everyone around him—including himself.

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He sat alone in the hollow silence of the security room. Shadows stretched across the concrete walls, illuminated only by the sterile glare of the surveillance monitors. His eyes tracked the flickering feeds mechanically. Boredom had long since claimed him, yet it held no authority over his focus. He was intimately familiar with monotony—it was the defining feature of a life he felt he had no right to, shaped by decisions that were never his own.

Sinking under the weight of deep contemplation, he leaned back into the worn cushion of his chair. He closed his eyes, letting his head fall back against the headrest. In the dark behind his eyelids, the exhaustion was heavy. Then, a sudden spark of intuition flared from the subterranean depths of his mind.

He snapped upright. His fingers flew across the keyboard, moving with an almost desperate urgency. He was hunting for something hidden, buried deep within the facility's encrypted mainframe. He couldn't afford to take chances.

Hours bled into one another as he scrolled through lines of code and archived logs, his eyes narrowing protectively against the blinding brightness of the screen. But the search yielded nothing. Not a single clue.

Frustration nipped at his nerves. It felt baseless, like chasing a ghost. The security systems had been thoroughly scrubbed; the previous supervisors had systematically exterminated any digital footprint that could point back to the source. Caught in a labyrinth of unanswered questions, he stared blankly ahead. Then, another flash of instinct struck. His right hand seized the mouse, moving with a fluid certainty, as if it possessed a will of its own.

Within seconds, the monitor clicked over to a restricted directory. He had found something.

It was a digital copy of the exact document Rheinhard Linchsteyn had handed him. Squinting with renewed hope, he scrolled through the pages, but his excitement quickly soured into bitter disappointment. It was an identical match. No hidden notes, no altered clauses. Just the same corporate facade.

With a low curse, he threw himself back against the cushion, pinching the bridge of his nose to dull a rising headache. He closed his eyes, trying to solve the core riddle that plagued him: why would a man lock his own child away in a subterranean facility in the middle of nowhere? The cruelty of it sank into the very depths of his soul, chilling him.

Seeking a physical connection to the mystery, he reached for the hard copy of the dossier on the desk. He carefully turned the heavy pages until his fingers brushed against a photograph. He pulled it free as if handling fragile glass, holding it up to the light.

He found himself staring into the face of Hildegard’s mother. Even trapped in the glossy print, her radiant smile felt alive, and her light blue eyes sparkled with a piercing vitality. He looked down to the bundle cradled in her arms.

An infant. Hildegard.

The child was a breathtaking, miniature reflection of her mother. The uncanny resemblance between their features and those striking blue eyes was beautiful, yet it carried an ghostly weight that haunted him. Still, he couldn't look away. Looking at the photograph, he recognized a phantom emotion—the same fierce, unconditional joy he remembered seeing on the face of his own mother.

Then his gaze drifted to the edge of the frame. Standing tall just behind the woman was a man. It was emphatically not Rheinhard Linchsteyn.

He studied the stranger's face. The man wore a warm, deeply fatherly smile. For a fleeting second, he tried to rationalize it. Perhaps this was the woman's brother—an uncle sharing a proud family moment. But his instincts fiercely rejected the excuse. The intimacy in the photo was undeniable. The man’s left hand rested firmly over her shoulder, pulling her close against his side with the protective tenderness of a husband.

A cold certainty settled in his chest. He had known something was deeply wrong with Rheinhard’s motives from the start, but this picture was concrete proof of a lie.

He reached back into the folder and drew out a second photograph. It featured the same woman, but this time, Hildegard was seventeen years old. Her face was an exact match to the painted portrait hanging on the grand gallery wall back at the Linchsteyn residence.

He laid both pictures side by side on the desk, contrasting the timelines. A sudden, chilling realization made his breath catch. The mother looked eerily unchanged. Despite the passage of nearly two decades between the infant portrait and the teenage photo, the woman had not aged a single day. Her youth was frozen, terrifyingly precise, and flawless.

He leaned over the table, his brow furrowing as curiosity warped into acute suspicion. There was a profound anomaly hidden in plain sight within these images, a truth screaming to be understood. Yet the silent glossy paper offered no answers to the questions racing through his mind.

He needed an ally who understood how to dig up buried secrets. He needed someone who could see past the illusion.

That was when he remembered Xander.