Page 61 of Veil of Ashes

“You’d better come in,” he says.

The bunker is colder than the desert outside. Concrete walls, exposed beams. A backup generator hums from somewhere behind the far door. It smells like metal, dust, and old memory.

Shelves line the walls—military rations, plastic drums of water, surveillance gear, weapon kits. Nothing personal. Not a single photograph. Just the kind of curated apocalypse one man makes when he plans to outlive everything.

Enzo gestures toward a small metal table with three battered chairs and a dented thermos.

“Water?” he offers calmly.

I nod. “Sure.”

He pours two glasses. Hands me one.

Sylvara stands across the room, arms crossed, eyes scanning everything. Her fingers rest on her belt, never far from the pistol. She doesn’t look at him.

He turns to her with the second glass. “Sylvara.”

“No,” she says coldly.

She walks to the far wall, keeps her back to him. The tension in her frame is wired so tight it hums.

Enzo doesn’t force it. He sets her cup down on the table and sits.

“I stayed away to keep her alive,” he says evenly.

I stare across the table at him. “You let her rot.”

He doesn’t flinch. Just stands there, looking older than I remembered—tired, not ashamed.

“If they had known she was my daughter,” he says quietly, “they would’ve killed her without hesitation. Claiming her would’ve signed her death sentence.”

The words hit, but not the way he thinks.

“And by leaving her unclaimed,” I snap, stepping forward, “you made her invisible. Alone. They didn’t kill her—they used her. Played her. Broke her.”

His mouth opens, but no defense comes.

“You didn’t protect her,” I say, voice sharp and shaking. “You abandoned her to survive your silence.”

Sylvara turns from the wall. Her arms drop to her sides.

“She begged you not to run,” she says, her voice low and brittle. “She stood in the alley and screamed.”

Enzo’s jaw flexes. “She told me to go.”

“She screamed your name,” Sylvara says. “And you vanished.”

“I had to disappear to kill the ones behind it,” Enzo says, trying to steady his voice. “That was the deal.”

“She died buying you five minutes,” she replies, voice like sand over glass.

“I used those minutes to burn their shipment, kill three of their collectors,” he says. “That night.”

Sylvara walks to the table. She doesn’t sit. “Then what? Did you spend the next ten years playing ghost while they hunted me like bait?”

Enzo opens his mouth, then closes it. He exhales through his nose.

“I sent warnings,” he says finally. “Signals. Quiet things.”

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