I didn't know how to finish. Need to get him out of my head. Need to feel something besides rage. Need to remember I owned my body now, even if my mind was still partially his.
I lay back on the bed, one hand sliding between my thighs. My eyes closed automatically, and there he was. Not a memory but a fantasy. Gabriel watching me work. Watching me hunt. Seeing what his conditioning had become when twisted into something new.
"Such a good girl," the fantasy whispered. "Look what you've learned. Look how perfectly you've evolved."
My fingers moved in familiar patterns, chasing sensation and shame in equal measure. I bit back a whimper, caught between arousal and self-loathing. This was wrong. Sick. But my body didn't care about morality, only the programming carved into my nervous system.
The bed dipped. I opened my eyes to find Nathan stretched out beside me, not touching but present. Witnessing without judgment.
"Don't stop," he said quietly when I hesitated. "If this is what you need, don't stop."
Fresh tears leaked from the corners of my eyes as I continued. The fantasy shifted, became confused. Gabriel's voice praising my violence. Nathan's hands steady on my shoulders.The warehouse victims begging for mercy I couldn't give. All of it tangled together in my breaking mind.
"I'm here," Nathan murmured. "Right here. Not him. Me."
His voice became an anchor, something real to hold onto as I chased release. When I came, it was with a broken sob, body arching off the bed. No satisfaction in it, just a momentary pause in the endless cycle of rage and need.
Nathan's hand found my hair, stroking gently as I shook apart. "There you go. Just breathe. I've got you."
"I hate him," I whispered when I could speak again.
"I know."
"I hate that he's still in my head. In my body. In every response." I turned my face into the pillow, ashamed. "I hate that part of me still wants his approval. Still needs to be his good girl."
"That's not weakness," Nathan said. "That's survival. You did what you had to do to survive, and those patterns kept you alive. They don't define you now."
"Don't they?" I pulled my jeans back up with shaking hands. "I'm hunting him using the skills he taught me. Torturing information out of people because he showed me how bodies break. Getting off on violence because he programmed me to associate pain with pleasure. How is any of this not him?"
Nathan was quiet for a long moment. Then: "Because you choose differently now. Every day, you choose. He made you a victim. You made yourself a weapon. There's a difference."
I wanted to believe him. Wanted to think there was some version of me that existed separate from Gabriel's influence. But lying there in the dim hotel room, coming down from mania and orgasm and forty-eight hours without sleep, I couldn't find her.
"Eight hours," I said finally. "I'll sleep for eight hours."
"Thank you."
He stayed beside me as exhaustion finally won. His presence was complicated—not quite comfort but something adjacent to it. Another broken person who understood that sometimes healing looked like hunting. Sometimes love looked like letting someone spiral. Sometimes the only way forward was through.
I dreamed of Boston. Of warehouses and breadcrumbs and Gabriel's face when he realized his pet had learned to bite. But underneath the violence, something else. Nathan's voice saying "I've got you." The weight of choice. The possibility that I could be more than the sum of my programming.
When I woke eight hours later, the mania had faded to something manageable. Still there, still pushing me forward, but tempered by rest and the strange intimacy of being seen at my worst and not abandoned.
Nathan was at the desk, laptop open, planning our route to Boston. He'd showered, changed, ordered food that sat cooling on the nightstand. Taking care of the practical things while I'd been falling apart.
"Better?" he asked without looking up.
"Functional," I admitted.
"That'll do."
I sat up, muscles protesting. Everything hurt these days—too much violence, too little care. My body keeping score even when my mind refused to.
"Find anything new?" I asked, nodding at the laptop.
"Maybe." He turned the screen toward me. "Cross-referenced the Boston coordinates with Gabriel's known aliases. Found three properties purchased in the last six months under variations of names he's used before."
My heart kicked into overdrive, but I forced myself to breathe. To think. "He's getting sloppy."
