Grodd did not believe in coincidence.

Everything had a cause. A creator. A purpose.

Even him.

The lab had been buried—erased, dismantled, scattered like it had never existed.

But he remembered.

The restraints. The voices. The experiments.

The making of something greater.

Which was why the file in his hand was… impossible.

He stood in the dim light of his war room, eyes scanning the data again, slower this time, more deliberate—like the information might change if he looked at it differently.

It didn’t.

Same facility. Same program. Same methods.

A second subject.

His grip tightened slightly on the page, not out of anger—but focus sharpening into something dangerous.

“…Another one,” Grodd said quietly.

A pause.

His mind moved quickly, piecing it together, reconstructing a past he thought he had already fully claimed.

“They made more than me.”

Another pause.

Then—

“They made you.”

Grodd lowered the file, gaze shifting—not to the past, but forward.

To her.

Different.

But not entirely.

“…That makes you mine to understand,” he said.

Not possession.

Not yet.

But something close.

A claim rooted in origin, in shared creation, in something deeper than choice.

“…Because whatever they did to you,” Grodd continued, voice low, certain—

“They did to me.”