"Open,"he'd said, and I'd opened, because by then I'd learned that obedience was the only currency that mattered. His thumb had pressed down on my tongue, and I'd tasted salt and skin and the faint chemical residue of the soap he used."Good girl. You're learning to trust me."
"Bunny? You still with me?"
Nathan's voice shattered the memory. I was back at the dinner table, my fork suspended halfway to my mouth, my pasta growing cold on my plate. The jazz was still playing. The candles were still flickering. Everything was exactly as it had been, except that my hands were shaking and my throat was tight with something between grief and arousal.
"Sorry," I managed. "Just... drifted off for a second."
"Flashback?" He set down his fork, his expression shifting to that careful concern I'd catalogued so many times. "Want to talk about it?"
"No." The word came out sharper than I'd intended. I softened it with a smile. "It was nothing. Just... old memories."
"Gabriel?"
The name hit the air like a stone dropped into still water. I nodded, not trusting my voice.
"He still has power over you," Nathan said quietly. "Even now. Even after everything. That's not your fault."
"I know." But knowing didn't stop the trembling. Didn't stop the phantom sensation of Gabriel's thumb against my lips, the memory so vivid I could almost taste him. "I just need a minute."
I excused myself to the bathroom and stood at the sink, gripping the porcelain edges until my knuckles went white. The mirror showed a woman I was still learning to recognize—sharp cheekbones, hollow eyes, a mouth that had learned too many ways to lie.
You're safe,I told my reflection.He can't touch you anymore. He's gone.
But Gabriel wasn't gone. Not really. He lived in my bones, in my muscle memory, in the conditioned responses that surfaced when I least expected them. He'd built me too well, carved his lessons too deep, and even Nathan's careful reconstruction couldn't erase the architecture underneath.
I took a breath. Another. Forced my hands to uncurl from the sink. When I returned to the table, my smile was perfectly in place, my voice steady as a metronome.
"Better?" Nathan asked.
"Much better. I'm sorry. Tell me about the rest of your day."
He picked up the thread of his story, and I nodded along at the appropriate moments, but my mind was still in the conditioning room. Still feeling the weight ofGabriel's thumb on my tongue. Still wondering why the memory had surfaced now, after months of silence.
And underneath that, a darker question:Why does it still make me feel something?
Later, in bed, I asked Nathan to touch me the way Gabriel had.
The request came out before I could stop it. We were tangled together in the aftermath of sex—good sex, intense sex, the kind we usually had after missions—but something was missing. Something I couldn't name. Something I kept reaching for and failing to find.
"Touch me," I whispered. "My lips. The way he used to."
Nathan went still. "Bunny..."
"Please." I didn't know why I needed this. Didn't know why it felt so urgent. "I need to overwrite it. Need to replace the memory with something else. Something yours."
He studied my face for a long moment, and I saw something flicker in his eyes—uncertainty, maybe, or calculation. Then he nodded, shifting to kneel beside me on the bed.
"Open your mouth," he said.
I obeyed. His thumb traced my lower lip, the same path Gabriel's had taken a hundred times. The touch was gentle—gentler than Gabriel's, more hesitant—and when he pressed down on my tongue, I closed my eyes and triedto feel something. Tried to overwrite the old memory with this new one.
But it felt like a performance.
Nathan's touch was technically correct—the pressure, the angle, the slow withdrawal that made my lips cling to his skin. But it lacked the clinical precision that had made Gabriel's touch so devastating. Lacked the certainty, the ownership, the absolute confidence that I would accept whatever he chose to give me.
He's trying too hard,I realized.He's performing, just like I'm performing. Neither of us is really here.
The thought should have been reassuring—proof that Nathan wasn't Gabriel, that he didn't have the same power over me. Instead, it filled me with a cold, creeping dread.
