“Never again?” he mused. “Then should I presume this is the last I’ll see of my daughter?”
Her brows drew together in consternation, and her heart skipped a beat at the knowing look he gave her. No, he couldn’t…
“I… no, of course not.”
His fingers curled around hers, his thumb brushing over her knuckles as a wry smile tugged at his mouth.
“You were always an easy child, you know that? Even as a baby. You slept through the night. Hardly cried.” He huffed a laugh as his eyes went distant. “Oh, but your mother did enough of that for the both of you. Wheedling and whining for this or that.”
Her stomach clenched. However flawed her mother was, she was still her mother, and Ophelia didn’t like to hear her being disparaged.
“She can’t help it,” she said, shifting uncomfortably. “Mom, she… She needs help.”
Her father hummed, releasing her hand. “Help she’ll never agree to get. She’s a stubborn woman, your mother. A trait you got from us both, I suppose.”
He sat back, his leather seat creaking beneath him. The look on his face was strange—wistful rather than furious. “Alright, Ophelia. I’ll wire the money over this evening. Will that suffice?”
“Yes,” she said, stunned that he had capitulated so easily. “I’ll pay you?—”
“No, you won’t,” he said firmly. “Consider it an advance on your inheritance.”
She stared at him, at a loss for words. He shifted his sleeve to check his watch, then gave her a somber look.
“I have a ten o’clock meeting. Is there anything else?”
She blinked. “Um… no.”
He nodded. “Then I’ll speak to you later. You still owe me lunch.”
“I… yes, of course.”
“Later, then.” He turned away, typing fast on his phone.
Dismissed, she clutched her purse and rose woodenly to her feet. At the door, she hesitated, looking back at her father.
“Thank you,” she said softly.
Another nod was all the acknowledgment he offered.
CHAPTER 37
Sam pacedhis glass cell in the Automata lab, muttering to himself under his breath. The restless itch beneath his skin worsened every minute he and Ophelia were separated.
She’d become part of his hard-wiring in the short time they’d been together. It was all he could do not to break the hinges off every door between the two of them and storm back to her side. Once this was over, he would never permit them to be parted again.
A fist knocked hard on the glass, startling him. He glared at Logan, who glanced over his shoulder and ducked into the cell.
“Knock it off,” he hissed, flicking his eyes pointedly toward the camera in the corner of the cell.
“It’s off,” Sam grated, flipping it his middle finger in demonstration. “They don’t leave them on when we’re powered down. What would be the point? It’s only there to observe how I jerk off and fuck other dolls.”
His lip curled with disgust at the prospect. There had to be hundreds of hours of footage of him doing just that. Not that he cared, particularly. The past was the past. It was the notion of being paired with another partner in the present that made him feel unwell.
He was made for Ophelia, and it was her alone he would touch.
Logan had argued that point with him relentlessly on their way over, but he refused to cede ground. No matter that it would have made things seem more typical for him to carry on with the ‘fine-tuning’ they were performing on the other units. Logan had been forced to smile and lie through his teeth about having perfected his algorithms at home and not wanting to introduce new bugs.
“Anyone could walk by and see you pacing,” Logan said, still glancing toward the hall, “and we’re going to have a shit storm on our hands that I cannot bullshit our way out of,”
