Miller
I let out a sharp, audible gasp, my hands instantly gripping the armrests of the chair so hard my knuckles turned white.
My heart stopped entirely for a beat. "What? Leo’s father? How... how is that even possible?"
Gerald offered a sad, weary nod, his shoulders slumping under the weight of the history. "It is entirely possible because history has an unfortunate way of repeating itself in bloodlines, Mr. Reid. Lucas came to this very island many, many years ago—long before he passed away. He came here during a time when he desperately wanted to step away from the violent expectations of his designation, when he wanted to settle down and start a stable family with his mate. He approached our administration and begged for our help, asking us to guide him through the suppression of his primary Enigma instincts so he wouldn’t harm the people he loved."
Gerald paused, taking a slow breath as his fingers continued their quiet tapping on the wood. "We did everything we could back then. We designed specific protocols for him, and for a long time, it truly seemed like it was working. He managed to tame that dominant, destructive beast inside him so thoroughly that his biology began to adapt. He became the first documented case to manifest those dual pheromones—the Janis Enigma state. Because his system had settled into that unique, shifting balance, he was finally permitted to leave this island. He went back to the mainland, built a life, and started the very family that brought Leo into this world."
Gerald let out another heavy sigh, closing his eyes for a brief moment as a look of intense regret washed over his face. "I shouldn’t be revealing these private medical records to you, Mr. Reid. Standard protocol strictly forbids it. But given the severity of what you have just described to me regarding Leo, I believe withholding the truth would be an absolute crime."
He opened his eyes, staring directly into my soul. "The truth is, Lucas’s story did not end happily. The issue that ultimately took his life wasn’t the Janis Enigma mutation itself. It was the second condition Dr. Joe warned you about. Pheromonal Atrophy Syndrome."
The air in the room felt entirely freezing now. I leaned in, hanging on every single word, my chest aching for the boy Leo must have been when all of this was going down.
"Lucas loved his family so deeply," Gerald said, his voice dropping even lower, laced with a raw, touching sorrow that made my chest tighten painfully. "He was so terrified of the destructive nature of his primary Enigma side that he locked his pheromones away behind completely unbreakable psychological walls. He refused to let them out, just as Leo is doing now. But he didn’t realize that by starving his body of its natural baseline, he was actively poisoning his own system. When he first heard whispers from the medical staff that his body was beginning to fail, that he was going to die from the internal degradation, something inside his psyche completely snapped."
Gerald’s hands clenched into loose fists on the table. "The sheer terror of his impending death caused his mind to break. Out of pure desperation to survive, his primary dominant side took over his consciousness entirely. The taming failed. He became completely miserable, consumed by a dark rage that he could no longer regulate. The very monster he had spent his entire life trying to cage broke free, and he began violently attacking his own family. He turned on his mate, and eventually... he started ruthlessly attacking his own son. He targeted Leo."
A wave of pure nausea washed over me as the puzzle pieces of Leo’s childhood trauma finally slammed into place. The walls, the fear of his own Enigma nature, the absolute terror of doing something terrible again—it wasn’t just a random anxiety. He had watched his own father turn into a monster because of this exact sickness.
"We tried to intervene," Gerald muttered, his eyes filled with a decades-old guilt. "We sent medical teams to the mainland, we offered him emergency sanctuary back on the island, we begged him to let us treat the atrophy before the cellular damage became irreversible. But Lucas refused our help entirely. He isolated himself completely, hiding away in his shame and fury until... well, until we received the official report that he had died. Lucas loved his family more than life itself, Mr. Reid. It hurts me to this very day, it deeply wounds my soul, to know that we failed to save him. We didn’t find out until it was far too late that the horrific behavior that ended his life and tore his family apart was entirely driven by the biological corruption of that second condition. It ended his life in the most tragic, isolated way imaginable. It is a profound sadness that I have carried for a very long time."
I heaved a ragged, trembling sigh, running both of my hands through my hair as the weight of the story crushed down on my shoulders.
The image of a young Leo dealing with a violently changing father burned behind my eyelids.
"Are you saying..." I choked out, my voice cracking under the pressure. "Are you telling me that the exact same thing might happen to him? To Leo?"
My heart pounded wildly in my chest as I waited to hear what they had to say. Every passing second felt agonizingly stretched, the heavy silence in the room pressing down on me until it was almost impossible to breathe. I kept my eyes locked on him, bracing for the words that were about to come, fully aware that whatever he said next would completely determine Leo’s future.
A cold, suffocating dread settled deep in my stomach, and I was utterly terrified that the outcome could be worse than what would become of Leo.
Would he end up like his father?
’’Is anything going to happen to Leo?’’ I asked yet again, running out of patience.