Villain's Breeding System: Evolving 999+ Harem into an SSS-Rank Legion-Chapter 208 - Avriana’s Search for Her Sister Finally Ends

Chapter 208: Chapter 208 - Avriana’s Search for Her Sister Finally Ends

"’He just—’" She pointed at the space. "’He was right there. He was holding her wrist. And then—’"

"’Yes,’" Nara said.

"’He vanished,’" Gia said.

"’Yes,’" Nara said.

"’In front of us,’" Gia said. "’That is not — that is not a thing that—’"

"’Gia,’" Meijin said. Quietly. The specific, quiet interruption of someone who has been running the calculation on this man for four days and has arrived at conclusions she is not yet ready to share out loud but is also not going to spend additional time being surprised.

Gia closed her mouth.

Aisha looked at the space where he’d been. Then at Preet. Then at Nara.

"’Is he—’" She stopped. "’Who is he,’" she said instead.

"’I don’t know,’" Preet said.

She said it with the specific, honest quality of someone who means it and has been meaning it since the beginning. She did not say it with fear. She said it the way you say something about a country you’ve traveled to extensively and have still not fully mapped — not ignorance, but the ongoing, genuine admission of something larger than your current understanding.

"’We need to get you all up,’" the rescue officer said. Her voice had recovered its professional quality. She was going to file a report. The report was going to be interesting.

They climbed.

The helicopter smelled like fuel and industrial cleaning product and the specific, institutional smell of rescue equipment that had been stored and deployed and stored again. They were wrapped in thermal foil immediately — the specific, crinkly silver of emergency blankets that made everyone look like leftovers.

Nara, wrapped in silver, looked at the island below as the helicopter banked east.

The clearing. The waterfall. The signal fire, still smoking.

Then the treeline. Then the ocean.

Then nothing.

She pressed her lips together.

"’We have to find him,’" Gia said. To the officer. To the helicopter. To whoever was in charge of things. "’He’s still there. We can’t just—’"

"’We have search teams en route,’" the officer said. Her voice carried the specific, measured calm of someone who provides this information to distressed survivors regularly. "’As soon as we confirm everyone accounted for and treated, teams will return for—’"

"’He wasn’t there,’" Preet said.

Everyone looked at her.

"’He left,’" she said. The specific, certain quality of someone who had understood this before anyone else. "’He had already left. He won’t be found on that island.’"

The helicopter.

The ocean below.

Nara looked at her hands.

The specific, marked quality of them — the places at her wrists where his grip had been, the specific, faint impressions of a night that her body had catalogued and was still cataloguing in the specific, ongoing way bodies did when they’d received something and hadn’t finished processing it.

She pressed them together in her lap.

"’He was—’" Gia started.

"’I know,’" Nara said.

"’I just meant—’"

"’I know,’" Nara said again. The same sentence. The specific, quiet repetition of someone who is saying it for herself as much as anyone else.

The ocean moved beneath them. The island, smaller now.

Preet looked out the window.

She was not going to cry in a helicopter wrapped in emergency foil.

She was not going to cry.

She looked at the water.

’Meanwhile.’

The highway outside the airport was the specific, gridlocked variety of an airport highway at a time of day when everyone had a flight to catch or a person to retrieve. The black car moved in the specific, inch-by-inch progress of expensive vehicles in traffic — the quality of the vehicle obvious, the driver’s posture visible, the way the car occupied its lane with the particular authority of something that was used to going where it needed to go.

In the back seat, Evriana.

She sat with the specific, compressed energy of someone who had been in motion for hours and whose motion had been externally constrained and was not handling the constraint well. Her leg — the left one, the prosthetic, the dark metal-and-carbon architecture of it visible below the hem of her skirt — was angled against the car door with the specific, unconscious positioning of someone who has long since stopped managing its placement self-consciously and lets it settle where it settles.

Her jaw was set.

Her hands were on the leather armrest with a grip that was slightly above what the armrest required.

"’Drive faster,’" she said.

"’Ma’am, the traffic—’"

"’I am aware of the traffic,’" she said. "’Drive faster.’"

The driver made a sound that was not quite a response.

She looked at her phone.

The missing person status. The rescue coordination. The dispatch number she’d called four times in the last six hours and had received four variations of the same information from — ’we have teams deployed, we have no confirmed—’

"’Is my sister on the island?’" she had asked.

"’We have no confirmed—’"

"’She was on the ship,’" Evriana had said, her voice going to the specific register she used when she needed information to arrive without further delay. "’The ship that went down two days ago. My sister was on it. Is she on the island.’"

"’We have not yet confirmed—’"

She had ended the call.

She looked at the phone.

She looked at the traffic.

"’To the manor,’" she said. "’I’ll search the island myself if they can’t—’"

"’Ma’am,’" the driver said.

A different kind of ’ma’am’. Not the hedge before bad news. The specific, other-register ’ma’am’ of someone who has just seen something they don’t have language for.

Evriana looked up.

There were two people in her car.

Not in the front — in the back seat. To her left, where the seat had been empty eight seconds ago when she’d looked at it last. A woman in a salt-crusted bikini top and a ruined skirt that had started its life as something else entirely. Short hair with things in it. Eyes wide, looking at her hands, looking at the door, looking at the seat she was in — the specific, disoriented expression of someone who has just arrived somewhere without the intermediate steps.

And to the woman’s right: a man in underwear.

Her guards — both in the front passenger and the escort vehicle behind — had drawn simultaneously. The specific, synchronized click and raise of weapons from people who had been trained to respond to threats and had just registered one.

"’Who—’"

"’I know him,’" Evriana said.

She said it before she’d decided to say it. The specific, automatic response of something she’d known before she’d looked, the way you know a voice before you turn around.

Her hand came up. The gesture that meant ’weapons down’. The guards read it without hesitation.

She looked at him.

He was sitting in her car in his underwear looking at her with the specific, unhurried quality of someone who has arrived somewhere and finds the arrival unremarkable.

Purple eyes.

She absorbed this.

"’Celia,’" she said.

Her sister’s name. Not a question. A confirmation. Because the woman to her left was — her sister. Her sister with sand in her hair and salt on her skin and the specific, shell-shocked expression of someone who has been through something and is still running the inventory of what that was.

"’AVRIANA—’"