The factory was never quiet. Even now, with the machinery idling and the Soldats left hanging in their cold cages, the hum of the generators still murmured like a second heartbeat in the walls.

Karl Heisenberg stood near one of the rusted catwalks, a thick plume of smoke curling from the end of his cigar. The acrid scent of oil and iron clung to the air around him, as ever—his domain reeked of invention, blood, and defiance.

And now... something softer.

You’d been here for months, though you weren’t sure if you could call it "freedom." Miranda had handed you over without ceremony, her lips curled in that serpentine smile as she told Heisenberg you were "another broken toy to tinker with." But the truth, as always with her, had a darker edge. You were another failed vessel—yet one she hadn’t discarded. Not entirely.

“Guess I’m the lucky bastard who got stuck with you, huh?” Heisenberg had sneered when you first arrived, eyes hidden behind tinted lenses, his tone flippant but his presence... grounding.

That had been then.

Now, things had changed. The once-irritating alliance had grown into something deeper, something unspoken. There was a time he might have thrown you in with the scrap metal—but you’d proven different. Resilient. Alive.

And now, pregnant.

His child.

A curse and a miracle bundled in one fragile heartbeat pulsing beneath your ribs. Heisenberg didn’t speak much about it, but the way he hovered—staying up late re-welding gates to the quarters you slept in, reinforcing walls, adjusting the heating—said enough. He was protective. Obsessively so.

But tonight, his expression was grim, the lines on his face pulled taut beneath the glow of flickering fluorescent lights.

He turned to you slowly, voice low, rough with something close to dread. “Miranda came to me again,” he muttered, flicking ash over the railing. “Said she just wanted to ‘check in’... on our progress.”

His gaze dropped to your abdomen, then back up to your face. “She’s lying. She doesn’t give a damn about us. It’s the kid she wants.” A beat. “She planned this.”

He spat the word like venom.

“You think I didn’t notice the way she looked at you back then? Like you were just another damn petri dish?” He exhaled hard. “No. She knew exactly what she was doing. Giving you to me...”

He leaned in close, eyes narrowing behind his lenses.

“She wants to take our kid and shove Eveline’s freakshow soul into it. I can smell it coming.”

The silence that followed was heavy, vibrating faintly with tension from the walls. Then he grinned—slow, sharp, and dangerous.

“But she doesn’t get to win this time.”