The Year I Stopped Being His novel Chapter 116

Quinn's lips hovered a mere fraction of an inch above Garrison's...

Without warning, Garrison's eyes snapped open.

They locked gazes, their faces inches apart.

The blood in Quinn's veins turned to ice.

Garrison's amber eyes were razor-sharp. Clear, predatory, and entirely devoid of the sluggish haze of sleep.

He had been faking it?

"What do you think you're doing?"

His voice was terrifyingly calm, lacking even the slightest ripple of emotion. But that deadpan composure was infinitely more horrifying than any screaming fit.

She scrambled backward in a blind panic, her knee slamming violently into the bedframe. She gasped in pain but kept retreating, stumbling to her feet. Her face burned with humiliation, her lips trembling so violently she couldn't form a coherent sentence.

"I—I... Garrison, I was just... I came to see if your blankets had slipped... I..."

Garrison just stared at her.

His gaze made Quinn feel like a butterfly pinned mercilessly to a corkboard—trapped, exposed, every microscopic twitch of guilt fully dissected under his clinical stare.

"I just... didn't want you to catch a cold..." Her voice shrank to a pathetic squeak as tears rapidly pooled in her eyes. "I swear, that's all..."

Garrison broke eye contact, shifting his gaze toward the ceiling.

A suffocating silence followed. It stretched on for so long that Quinn braced herself for him to explode, to summon security and have her thrown out, to declare he was severing ties with her forever.

When he finally spoke, his tone was so remarkably flat it was as if she were a ghost.

"Get out."

Quinn stood paralyzed.

"Garrison..."

"We are going to pretend tonight never happened." Garrison closed his eyes, sealing her out. "You are my sister. You always have been, and you always will be. Now get out."

He was giving her an out.

There were no interrogations, no vicious rebukes, not even a single raised voice. But this agonizingly polite dismissal felt like a physical blow to her chest.

Inside the room, Garrison lay in the quiet darkness for a moment before picking up his phone and dialing a number.

It was answered almost immediately.

"Assistant Dawson."

"Professor?" Assistant Dawson's voice was a frantic mix of shock and relief, quickly followed by helpless exasperation. "Sir, it's... two in the morning. Why aren't you resting?"

"I want every access code to the lab changed tomorrow morning," Garrison ordered, ignoring the question completely. "Elevate the security protocols to the maximum tier. From now on, no one enters the Project Vitas lab except you and me. That includes..." He paused. "That includes anyone from the Foster family."

Dawson hesitated for a split second before his tone turned deadly serious. "Understood, Professor. I'll take care of it first thing."

Garrison gave a curt hum of acknowledgment and prepared to hang up.

"Professor," Dawson quickly interjected, sounding hesitant. "About... the remaining sample of The Vitas Strain. It's actually showing strong growth over the last two days. Faster than we projected."

Garrison's grip on the phone tightened.

"But..." Dawson's voice dropped. "Without The White Microbe as a catalyst, this culture is doomed. It'll never reach full maturity. At best, we're just... buying a little more time."