[BL]Hunted by the God of Destruction

Victor didn't move for a full minute after the door clicked shut.

Then, as if the tension in the room had only been waiting for Elias to leave, he exhaled and reached for the intercom.

"Send Ashwin up. Now," he said, and disconnected without waiting for a reply.

The phone on his desk still sat like a curse, inert but humming with implication. Voicemails. Maybe a corrupted file. Her voice. He didn't believe in ghosts, but he'd seen too many people rise from the dead in the last decade to dismiss the possibility of deliberate misdirection.

Victor tapped the screen again, this time with a gloved fingertip, then turned it face down.

He hated being surprised.

He loathed being blindsided.

And most of all, he despised knowing this piece of evidence had been out there—unnoticed, unflagged, unexamined—until now. Weeks. Months. A tracking system with more funding than some governments and still it had slipped through.

Unacceptable.

The door opened, and Ashwin stepped inside, young, wiry, and hawk-eyed. Loyal. Deadly. And, most importantly, not prone to incompetence.

"You called."

Victor gestured to the phone. "It was Ruo's. But not. Serial mismatch, custom case, modified OS, and one file left behind that our guest didn't dare open."

Ashwin's gaze sharpened. "Do you want it cracked?"

"I want it dissected," Victor said coldly. "Run it through the isolation vault. No remote access. I want a full teardown, hardware and software. I want to know if it's clean, if it's listening, and if it's ever been somewhere our systems should've flagged. And I want it done yesterday."

Ashwin took the phone without a word, already pulling on the protective case.

Victor continued, standing now, crossing to the window but not seeing the skyline.

"Also," he said quietly, "I want a team sent to the apartment. Ruo's. Top floor. Sector 9. You know the one."

Ashwin nodded. "Sweep and secure?"

Victor's jaw flexed. "No. Erase it. I want every surface scanned, every trace lifted. If there's dust on a screw under the sink, I want to know which year it fell there. Elias thinks he's clever, but someone went to a lot of trouble to make that place look untouched while leaving a poisoned breadcrumb behind."

He turned back to face Ashwin, his eyes blood-bright now, focused and lethal. "And pull the security logs from the past six months. Cross-reference every deviation, every maintenance record, and every visitor entry. No ghosts. No shadows. Not in my network."

"Yes, sir."

"If the file is real, if she did say 'Don't trust the Gods,' then we need to find out which one she meant. Start digging into Numen-affiliated contracts. And bring me the information about dissidents."

Ashwin didn't blink. His posture shifted subtly, the kind of stillness that meant 'yes, sir' but also 'this is going to be bad.' His hand hovered over the encrypted tablet clipped to his belt.

"The dissidents?" he asked, tone careful. Not hesitant, he wasn't stupid enough to second-guess an order, but cautious, because that word hadn't passed Victor's lips in over a year. Not since the last time a Numen asset went missing and they'd been forced to pretend it was internal embezzlement, not a targeted breach.

Victor's gaze sharpened like a scalpel.

"Yes," he said. "The old lists. And the dead ones too."

Ashwin gave a single nod.

"Understood."

"And Ashwin," Victor added, before the man could turn.

Ashwin paused mid-step, one hand already on the doorframe. He turned his head slightly, just enough to show he was listening.

Victor's tone dropped to something more precise. Colder.

"Watch Elias Clarke. Bring me his file. Full: birth, education, affiliations, medical, even what brand of cigarettes his exes preferred."

Ashwin didn't flinch.

"And…" Victor's fingers tapped once against the edge of the window, "finance his professor bullshit."

Ashwin's hand hovered briefly over his tablet, already compiling the mental list. But Victor wasn't finished.

"I want him buried in so much institutional legitimacy," Victor said, enunciating the words like a sentence being carved in marble, "he won't have time to ask why it's working. Grants, fellowships, invitations to closed-door lectures, access to restricted archives if we have to… whatever it takes."

He turned from the window finally, walking back toward the desk, the phone still dark and ominous on its surface.

"Keep the leash academic. Keep it tight. And make sure the projects are just complicated enough to keep him buried in work."

Ashwin tapped a quick command into his device, but Victor's voice cut through again, sharper now:

"And put a special clause in the funding contract: if Professor Stone wants the money, Elias has to be part of the research teams. No exceptions."

Ashwin blinked. "You want them tied together?"

"I want Stone to depend on him," Victor said flatly. "If someone tries to pull Elias out, they risk collapsing half a million in grants. Academic loyalty is cheap, but desperation buys silence."

"You like the man," Ashwin said.

Victor's fingers stilled over the edge of the desk. The soft hum of the city outside barely registered as he angled his chair slightly, the quiet motor responding to his touch with clinical precision.

"No," he said, cool and unhurried. "I understand him."

Ashwin didn't look away. He was one of the few who could meet Victor's gaze without blinking but even he didn't miss the faint whir of the reinforced wheels repositioning or the slight shift of the chair like a predator coiling instead of pacing.

"He's stubborn. Exhausted. He burns through his own hope because he thinks it's the only thing he has that's worth anything. He doesn't lie well, and he doesn't like games but he'll play if it means protecting someone else."

Victor leaned back slightly, his posture impeccable despite the physical limitations that would've crushed most men decades ago. He never asked for pity. And no one had ever dared offer it.

"That makes him dangerous," he said. "Because when people like him snap, they don't crack, they explode. And someone's trying to light the fuse."

He tapped the desk again, this time deliberately. Once.

"I don't like that he found this before we did. I don't like that he walked into this building without flinching. And I hate that whoever left that phone behind thinks Elias is expendable."

Ashwin's stance shifted, alert now. "You think he was used?"

Victor's smile was thin. Crooked. Entirely without warmth.

"I think someone wants to see if I'll chase a ghost," he said. "And they picked the one person in this city reckless enough to hand it to me honestly."

He maneuvered the chair back toward the window, spine straight, the silent command in his movement louder than any raised voice.

"Get it done. And Ashwin—"

Ashwin paused at the threshold, waiting.

"If anyone tries to pull Elias into a different orbit, academic or otherwise…" Victor's voice sharpened, polished like glass, "…cut the offer off at the throat."

Ashwin's nod was crisp. "Understood."

He vanished down the corridor.

And Victor, alone now, let the silence settle like ash.

He didn't believe in gods.

But the people who thought they were gods?

He had plenty of those on file.

And Ruo's name had just been moved back to the top.