"Wait." Some last vestige of self-preservation flaring. "Gabriel, wait."
He paused, belt half-undone. "Second thoughts?"
"I don't—this isn't—" Words failed. Everything failed. I was drowning in conditioning and chemicals, unable to sort want from programming. "I don't know what's real."
"This is real." He leaned down, forehead touching mine. Suddenly gentle, suddenly human instead of clinical. "Whatever else is confusion, this is real. The way your body recognizes mine. The way you fall apart so perfectly for me. Three years of careful construction that no chemical cocktail could overwrite."
"Nathan—"
"Is a lie." The name made his control slip, something darker flashing through. "A very bad man playing a role. But this? What's between us? This is truth written in your nerve endings."
I was crying again. Or still. Time had gone liquid, moments bleeding together in a haze of sensation and confusion. "I can't think."
"Then don't." He released my wrists, hands gentle now as they framed my face. "Stop thinking. Stop fighting. Just feel what's real."
"I don't know what's real anymore."
"Your body does." He kissed me then, soft and claiming and terrible. "Trust what it tells you. Trust what we built together."
I shattered again, or maybe still, waves of conditioned response making conscious thought impossible. Somewhere in the white-hot space between sensation and surrender, I heard myself begging. Ugly, desperate sounds that might have been his name or please or harder or stop. He gave me what my body asked for, even when my mind recoiled.
When I finally surfaced—minutes or hours later, impossible to tell—he was holding me. Gentle now, all command dissolved into aftercare. Another trained response, another careful association. The monster who broke you became the savior who held the pieces.
"My perfect girl." Whispered against my hair like prayer or ownership. "Finally home where you belong."
I wanted to protest. Wanted to find the fury that had carried me this far. But my body was boneless, drugged on endorphins and conditioning, every defense dissolved. Tomorrow I could hate him again. Tomorrow I could sort truth from manipulation.
Tonight, I just let him hold me while my mind tried to reconcile the careful lover with the clinical programmer. While my body hummed with satisfied conditioning. While everything I thought I knew rearranged itself around the fixed point of his presence.
The last thing I heard before sleep claimed me was his voice, reading medical notes again. Cataloging responses, documenting reactions, building new protocols from the data of my dissolution.
Clinical to the end.
But his hand shook slightly where it rested over my heart, and I wondered which of us was more lost in the maze he'd built.
24
Competing Voices
The morning came in fragments. Gabriel's voice, low and clinical, documenting observations. My body, heavy with chemical aftermath, caught between competing instructions. Nathan's careful training whispered caution, escape, survival. Gabriel's deeper conditioning demanded surrender, submission, home.
I couldn't move without betraying one of them.
"Fascinating." Gabriel sat beside the bed, tablet in hand, studying me like a particularly interesting specimen. "Your cortisol levels are spiking in waves. Classic response to conflicting behavioral imperatives. How does it feel, having two masters in your head?"
"Fuck you." But the words came out slurred, weak. Whatever he'd given me last night—beyond his hands, his mouth, his systematic dismantling—still clouded my system.
"Such language." He set the tablet aside, fingers finding my wrist. Checking pulse, always checking, always monitoring. "Nathan really did corrupt your vocabulary. You used to be so much more... articulate."
"Nathan didn't corrupt anything."
"Didn't he?" Gabriel's thumb pressed against the pulse point, feeling how it jumped. "Tell me, what do you actually know about him? Beyond what he told you, what he showed you. What do you know about Nathan Cross?"
The questions hit like cold water. What did I know? Ex-FBI. Contractor. Saved me from myself kept me safe, taught me to be human again. But under those facts lay questions I'd never asked. How he'd found me. Why he'd risked helping me. Where his resources came from.
"You're trying to confuse me."
"I'm trying to educate you." He released my wrist, moving to pour water from a pitcher on the nightstand. Same bitter taste as last night—medications I couldn't identify. "Drink. You're dehydrated, and we have difficult conversations ahead."
