"Good thing we have time then." Another kiss, deeper. "All the time we need."
And we did. Five more weeks of careful conditioning. A lifetime after that of choosing what we'd been shaped to want. Time to be broken and whole, controlled and free, exactly as fucked up as we needed to be.
Time to be real in all the ways that mattered.
Time to be home.
Meltdown
Four weeks left, and the careful balance we'd built was starting to crack. Not between us—that had solidified into something unbreakable the day he'd fed me from a bottle while claiming me completely. But inside me, where Lilah's ghost still rattled her chains against Bunny's soft edges.
I woke angry. Not the performative anger I'd wielded like a weapon in early weeks, but something deeper. Older. The kind of rage that had lived in my bones since childhood, when I'd learned that being good meant being invisible and being difficult meant being seen.
"Good morning, Bunny." The AI's voice scraped against raw nerves. "Dr. Mire will arrive—"
"Shut up!" I hurled Mr. Hoppy at the nearest speaker, watching the stuffed rabbit bounce harmlessly off pink walls. "Just shut up!"
The AI went quiet, probably alerting Gabriel to my mood. Good. Let him come. Let him see what happened when his perfect conditioning met the parts of me too broken to fix.
I destroyed the morning outfit—a white sundress with tiny flowers that made me look like someone's corrupted garden party. Ripped it down the middle, threw the pieces at the vanity mirror. The reflection there wasn't Bunny, sweet and compliant. It was something feral, wounded, dangerous to myself more than anyone else.
When Gabriel entered, I was standing in the middle of fabric carnage, wearing only the collar and fury.
"Bad morning?" His tone was carefully neutral, but I caught the assessment in his eyes. Cataloguing the damage, the defensive stance, the way my hands had curled into fists.
"Fuck your morning." The words came out raw. "Fuck your protocols. Fuck this room. Fuck everything about this place that makes me feel—"
"Feel what?"
"EVERYTHING!" The scream tore from somewhere deep, primal. "I can't—I can't breathe. Can't think. Can't remember who I was before you crawled inside my head and rearranged everything."
"You remember," he said calmly, not moving from the doorway. "You just don't want to. Because who you were before was miserable."
"At least she was MINE!" I grabbed the vanity chair, hefted it with strength born of rage. "At least I knew where I ended and the world began. Now I'm just—just—"
"Just what?"
Instead of answering, I threw the chair. He sidestepped easily, letting it crash into the wall behind him. The violence felt good, necessary, like lancing a wound that had been festering.
"There she is," he murmured. "The angry girl who thinks destruction equals control."
"Don't." I looked for something else to throw, settled on the books from the shelf. "Don't analyze me right now. Don't you fucking dare stand there in your perfect control and—"
A book caught him in the shoulder. He didn't flinch.
"You done?"
"No!" Another book, this one missing entirely. "I'm not done. I'm never done. There's always more anger, more hurt, more everything just waiting to explode and you—you made it worse. Made me feel it all instead of keeping it locked away where it belonged."
"Where it was poisoning you."
"Maybe I liked being poisoned!" I was out of books, moved on to pillows. "Maybe slow death was better than this—this raw nerve ending you've turned me into."
"You don't mean that."
"Don't tell me what I mean!" The scream came with tears now, hot and furious. "You don't get to decide everything. Don't get to reach inside and flip switches and then act surprised when the lights burn too bright."
I rushed him, not sure if I meant to hit him or hold him or some impossible combination. He caught my wrists easily, used my momentum to spin me, back pressed to his chest while I thrashed.
