"He taught me to seduce." My hands found Nathan's shirt, fisting in the fabric. "Not to need. Never to need. That was too much like caring."
Understanding dawned in those green eyes, followed by something infinite and sad. His hands stayed gentle on my face even as his expression broke.
"Okay." Soft agreement. "Okay."
What followed wasn't beautiful.
We didn't move from the floor, blood cooling beneath us. Clothes pushed aside rather than removed, both of us too desperate for skin to care about grace. Nathan's hands shook as they touched me—gentle still, always gentle, but threaded with something raw.
"I'm sorry," he kept saying, pressing the words into my skin. "I'm so sorry for all of it."
I pulled him closer, nails digging in, marking him with something other than violence. This wasn't the choreographed pleasure of training or the desperate transaction of survival. This was war made flesh—ugly and necessary and mine.
When he entered me, we both made sounds like breaking. Not beautiful, not performative. Just two damaged people trying to find something real in the wreckage.
Nathan cried. Silent tears that fell onto my face as he moved in me, careful even in desperation. I'd never seen a man cry during sex—it wasn't something clients wanted, wasn't something Gabriel had modeled. The honesty of it destroyed me.
"I love you," he said, and it sounded like confession. Like apology. Like promise written in salt water and blood.
I couldn't say it back. Didn't know if I understood the word anymore, after having it twisted into ownership. But I held him closer, legs wrapping around him, trying to communicate with flesh what I couldn't with words.
The orgasm, when it came, wasn't the practiced thing I'd been taught to perform. It tore through me violent and graceless, my scream raw in the empty room. Nathan followed, his whole body shuddering, my name on his lips like prayer.
After, we lay in the mess of ourselves. Blood and tears and other fluids marking the floor like a crime scene. Maybe it was. The murder of who I'd been, birth of something I didn't have words for yet.
"That was..." Nathan's voice came wrecked.
"War," I finished. Because that's what it had felt like. A battle against everything Gabriel had built into me, won not through beauty but through choosing the ugly truth over the pretty lie.
"Are you..." He pulled back to look at me, concern written in every line.
"No." Honest answer. "But I'm mine. For this moment, in this mess, I'm mine."
His arms tightened around me. We should move. Should clean up. Should deal with the blood and the trauma and the fact that Gabriel was out there somewhere, wounded but not finished.
Instead, we stayed. Two broken people on a bloodstained floor, holding each other like shipwreck survivors. Tomorrow would bring its own battles. The programming would resurface, try to pull me back to my creator. The chemistry would clear, leaving me to face what I'd done with a cleaner mind.
But for now, I was here. Choosing to be here. With a man who cried while making love to me because the world had made us both too damaged for anything clean.
It wasn't healing. Wasn't freedom. Wasn't any of the pretty lies people tell about breaking free from abuse.
It was just a choice. Small and ugly and mine.
For now, that was enough.
27
Metamorphosis
Morning light filtered through Nathan's apartment windows, catching dust motes that danced like memories I couldn't quite grasp. Three days since Gabriel's blood had cooled on the floor. Three days since I'd redirected violence at its source. Three days of sleeping fitfully in Nathan's bed while my body processed the last of the chemicals and my mind processed... everything else.
Nathan lay beside me, eyes closed but not sleeping. I'd learned his patterns—the way his breathing hitched when nightmares found him, how his hands clenched and released like he was fighting battles in dreams. The tears had dried on his face, but fresh ones always seemed ready to fall.
I studied him in the pale light, this man who'd stolen me without understanding what he was taking. Who'd tried to save something already too broken for simple rescue. His face bore new lines, aged by the weight of what we'd survived together.
Moving slow, careful not to wake him fully, I shifted down his body. My lips found the sharp edge of his hip, pressing kisses like benedictions along skin that trembled beneath my touch. He made a sound—half-wake, half-dream—as I took him into my mouth.
This wasn't performance. Wasn't the calculated pleasure I'd been taught to deliver with mathematical precision. This was worship of a different kind—gratitude given flesh, claiming made tender.
