"He hurt you first." Nathan turned me in his arms, hands gentle on my face. "He hurt you. What you did was justice."
"With his own training." Hysteria edged my voice. "Used what he taught me to—God, the conditioning. It's all twisted up. I can't tell what's real anymore."
"I'm real." Nathan's forehead pressed to mine. "What I feel for you is real. No Institute, no retrieval, no family business. Just me."
"He said—brothers—"
"Never met him before.." Nathan's hands stayed steady on my face. "I don't have a brother. Don't work for any Institute. I'm just a man who breaks into places I shouldn't and steals things that don't belong to me."
"Like me."
"No." Fierce correction. "You don't belong to anyone. Not to him, not to me. That's what I was trying to help you understand."
The shaking got worse. Everything hurt—body, mind, the places where conditioning pulled against choice. I was kneeling in Gabriel's blood, Nathan's blood under my nails, my own blood singing with chemicals that made every sensation too sharp.
"He'll come back."
"Maybe." Nathan's thumb brushed tears I hadn't realized were falling. "But you fought him once. You can do it again."
"I almost killed you." The memory crashed through—attacking Nathan to protect Gabriel, the sound of his nose breaking, the way he'd refused to truly fight back. "I would have killed you for him."
"But you didn't." Simple faith in those green eyes. "When it mattered, you saw through it. Saw him for what he was."
"A monster who made me monstrous."
Nathan's hands tightened slightly on my face. "You're not monstrous. You're surviving something monstrous. There's a difference."
I laughed, the sound breaking apart. "Look at me. Covered in blood, shaking from withdrawal, programmed to fuck and fight and—"
"Human." He interrupted gently. "Messy and traumatized and achingly human. That's what I see."
Something in me cracked completely. The tears came harder, ugly sobbing that shook my whole frame. Three years of careful control shattering in the circle of Nathan's arms. He held me through it, rocking slightly, making soft sounds that weren't quite words.
"I don't know who I am without the programming." The admission hurt coming out. "Don't know what's me and what's him anymore."
"Then we'll figure it out together." Nathan pulled back enough to meet my eyes. "Day by day. Choice by choice. Until you know which voices are yours."
"What if they're all his?" The fear that lived beneath everything else. "What if he carved out everything real and left only what he built?"
"Then we'll build something new." His forehead touched mine again. "Something yours. Something chosen instead of forced."
The blood was cooling on my hands. Gabriel's, Nathan's, metaphorically my own. All mixed together in ways that felt prophetic. I'd have to carry all of it forward—the violence given and received, the careful cruelties that shaped me, the moment I'd chosen to redirect the knife.
"Prove it." The words came out desperate. "Prove I'm not his."
Nathan went very still. Understanding flickered in his eyes, followed by something that might have been grief.
"Bunny..."
"Please." I pressed closer, needing something I couldn't name. "The chemicals, the conditioning, everything's tangled. Need to know something's mine. That he didn't poison everything he touched."
Nathan's hands shook slightly as they moved to cradle my face. "This won't fix—"
"I know." Because I did. Sex wouldn't erase the programming. Wouldn't clean the blood or quiet the voices or make me someone who hadn't been crafted for ownership. "But I need—I need to choose it. Choose you. Choose something he didn't build into me."
"He built you to use sex as currency." Gentle reminder. "Are you sure this is choosing?"
I thought about it, really thought about it. The difference between the performative desire Gabriel had trained into me and whatever this was—raw and desperate and edged with violence. Not seduction but collision. Not currency but claim.
