Chapter 15: Grant

His dorm room was exactly the way he'd left it: half-unpacked books stacked on the desk, a coffee mug with a broken handle balanced on the radiator, and three plants that deserved to be euthanized rather than watered. He dropped his bag just inside the door and stood still for a moment, letting the quiet settle around him like a second skin.

The room hadn't changed in his absence, same loose socket near the outlet, same sliver of light cutting across the faded carpet, same chipped mug on the window ledge.

But something had shifted.

Not in the world, maybe. Not yet.

But in him.

Victor had taken the phone. No promises, no comfort. But he'd taken it, and with it, the unbearable silence that had hung over Ruo's disappearance cracked just slightly. Just enough to lift some weight from his shoulders.

Something was moving now.

Elias still didn't know what Victor wanted. Hell, they hadn't even spoken more than fifteen minutes. But the man had listened. Issued a command. And that was more than anyone else had done.

Still… the air around it all reeked of inevitability. And when Elias turned on the shower, he couldn't tell if the chill running down his spine was from the water or from the feeling that he'd just been put into play.

The water steamed fast, fogging up the mirror while he scrubbed off the weight of the morning, the waiting room, the eyes, and Victor's voice.

He hadn't expected anything from Professor Stone, barely tolerated the man on a good day, but now, now it all felt too aligned. Too clean. A script he hadn't realized he was reading until he reached the final act and found himself holding a poisoned pen.

He stepped out, toweling off his hair when his phone buzzed across the bedspread.

Prof. Stone

Elias stared at the screen for a beat, then answered.

"Elias! Just the person I wanted to talk to," Stone said brightly, like he hadn't thrown him under a high-speed bus just a day ago. "You won't believe the news I just got. That little proposal of ours? Fully funded."

Elias sat down on the edge of the bed, hair still dripping onto his collarbone.

"I thought you said that was just to fill the quota," he said carefully. "That we were never expecting it to get picked up."

"Well, I wasn't expecting it," Stone said, chuckling, "but you… you clearly made an impression. It seems some private foundation snatched it up. The whole thing. Budget line approved, project priority stamped, and oh, you're listed as the lead researcher."

Elias didn't move.

He had rewritten the entire report in a panic before the meeting, half out of survival, half out of spite. Stone had handed him trash. And now that same trash had been picked up, plated in gold, and served back to him as an obligation.

"And you?" he asked slowly.

"Oh, I'll be co-author, naturally. But the project's all yours now. Hands-off for me, of course. Too much administrative clutter to deal with, and besides," Stone continued breezily, "this is a great opportunity for you. Get your name out there. Get busy."

'Get buried,' Elias thought. 'The asshole only wants the money…' 

His free hand gripped the towel a little tighter.

"There's a clause," Stone added. "Well, not so much a clause, more like a… preference. The foundation specified that you're to be involved in all key decisions. No substitutes. You're essential to the proposal now, apparently."

'Of course I am,' Elias thought. 'This is a trap. God damn you, Victor.'

"They also invited you to some high-profile symposium in October. Closed doors, very hush-hush. I'll forward the details. You'll go, obviously."

Elias closed his eyes.

He couldn't say this is a trap. Couldn't say I never pitched this project in good faith. Because if he did, the blowback wouldn't hit Stone. It would hit him. His name was already on it. His hands were already stained with Victor's invisible ink.

Stone sounded like he was smiling. "I knew sending you was the right call. Sharp kid like you? You landed us the best outcome. Honestly, I'm impressed."

Elias didn't answer.

He sat there in the cooling air, hair damp, phone pressed to his ear like it might bite him. Trapped in a project he never believed in, built on data that was never real, under a name that didn't belong to the man smiling over the funding report.

Stone hadn't expected him to survive the meeting.

He'd expected Elias to take the fall.

And now that the opposite had happened, now that Victor had funded the lie and tied it to Elias's wrists, Stone was ecstatic.

And Elias?

He was alone in a room that suddenly felt like a cell.

"Send me the files," he said quietly.

"Oh, already did," Stone chirped. "Check your inbox. And, Elias?"

He waited.

"Well done."

The call ended, but the words stayed, echoing in the quiet like a bad taste in the back of his throat. Elias stared at his phone screen until it went dark, reflecting a blurred version of his face: wet hair, tight jaw, and a tiredness that went bone-deep. He didn't feel well done. He felt cooked alive.

Stone had no idea what he'd walked into. Or maybe he did. Maybe that was the worst part, that the man hadn't just sent him in blind but planned for him to bleed out if things went sideways.

Except they hadn't. Not yet.

Instead, someone, Victor, had turned a last-minute, patched-together lie into a fully funded academic weapon and done it in less than a day. Hours, maybe, if he planned for it only after their discussion.

Elias stood, towel falling to the floor unnoticed, and walked to his desk.

Laptop open. Inbox loading.

Sure enough, there it was: four new emails flagged urgent. One from the university's funding office, another from the lab administrator, one with a personal invitation to the October symposium… and the last, from the foundation itself, is an encrypted .pdf contract with an auto-signature block already pre-approved.

Elias didn't click it. Not yet.

He opened the proposal instead.

It wasn't his draft.

Not entirely.

Someone, Victor's team, it had to be Victor's team, had taken his rewrite and cleaned it. Sanded down the edges, updated citations, corrected the formatting, and made it look like it had been peer-reviewed twice over. The language had been smoothed, the figures refined. The data still smelled like marketing fluff dressed in lab coat jargon, but now it was convincing.

And more than that, it looked like something he'd written on purpose.

Elias leaned back in his chair and ran both hands through his hair, water still clinging to his fingers. His brain tried to catch up, to chase the timeline.

Victor had read the proposal.

Not just read it. Signed off on it. Secured funding. Routed it through university channels. Manipulated an academic pipeline that should've taken weeks in hours.

And now the project was a cage with his name carved in gold above the door.

'Why? Why me? What the hell did Victor want?'

He knew the answer; Victor wanted him controlled and under his supervision. 

Elias shut the laptop gently, like he was afraid it might keep watching him.

The phone buzzed again.

He flinched, more reflex than fear, and looked down.

Matteo.