The answers were out there. The answers were in the encrypted files on his laptop, in the contacts I hadn't yet traced, in the network of lies and half-truths thatsurrounded my life like a cage I'd never noticed because it was painted in such beautiful colors.
Tomorrow, I'd decrypt the files. Tomorrow, I'd trace the contacts. Tomorrow, I'd keep digging until I found the truth—no matter how much it hurt.
Tonight, I just lay in the arms of the man who'd saved me, and I wondered if he'd been the one I needed saving from all along.
9
The Lullaby
The lullaby wouldn't stop.
It had been playing in my head for hours—Brahms, the distorted version Gabriel had used during my conditioning, the one the music box had resurrected and Nathan had tried to destroy. But destroying the box hadn't destroyed the melody. It lived in me now, a parasite coiled around my brainstem, humming its terrible tune every time the world went quiet.
The apartment was dark. Nathan had been asleep for hours, his breathing deep and even, his arm still draped across my waist. I'd been lying beside him since midnight, staring at the ceiling, counting the cracks in the plaster.Twenty-seven cracks. Twenty-seven imperfections in a surface that looked smooth from a distance.
Like us,I thought.Like everything.
At 2:14 AM, I gave up on sleep. I slipped out from under Nathan's arm, pulled on his discarded shirt—white cotton, still smelling faintly of his cologne—and padded barefoot to the balcony. The sliding door opened with a whisper, and then I was outside, the cold night air raising goosebumps on my bare legs.
The city sprawled beneath me, a constellation of lights and distant sirens. Somewhere out there, Gabriel was waiting. Somewhere out there, the answers to my questions were hiding. And somewhere out there—maybe—the truth about Nathan Cross was waiting to be discovered.
I didn't realize I was humming until I heard it.
The melody slipped out of me unbidden, soft and broken, my voice following the lullaby's path with an accuracy that would have made Gabriel proud. I'd been trained to reproduce it perfectly—not just the notes, but the specific imperfections, the off-key third measure that triggered the deepest layers of my conditioning. The sound of it in my own voice was terrifying. The fact that I couldn't stop was worse.
"Whenever you hear this melody, your body will remember what it's learned."
Gabriel's voice echoed in my memory, calm and clinical. I pressed my palms against my ears, but the lullaby was inside me now, reverberating through my skull like a bell that wouldn't stop ringing.
"Make it stop," I whispered. "Please, make it stop."
"Bunny?"
Nathan's voice, rough with sleep, drifted from the balcony door. I didn't turn. Couldn't face him while I was humming Gabriel's song, while my body was betraying everything I'd tried to become.
"What are you doing out here?" He stepped onto the balcony, his bare feet silent on the concrete. "It's freezing."
"I couldn't sleep." My voice came out strange—flat and distant, like someone else speaking through my mouth. "The lullaby won't stop."
"What lullaby?"
"The one from the music box." I finally turned to face him, and I saw the moment he heard it—the soft, broken melody still spilling from my lips. His expression flickered, surprise and concern and something sharper underneath. "I can't make it stop, Nathan. I've been trying all night, and I can't make it stop."
He crossed the distance between us and pulled me against his chest. His body was warm, solid, real. I pressed my face into his shoulder and tried to let his presence drive the melody away. But it didn't. It just kept playing, a broken record in the cathedral of my skull.
"It's just a song," he said, his hand stroking my hair. "It doesn't have power over you anymore. You're free."
"Then why can't I stop humming it?"
"Because Gabriel programmed you to respond to it. But the programming is old. It's rusted. It doesn't work anymore unless you let it work."
I pulled back to look at him. "What if I can't stop letting it? What if it's not a choice?"
"It is a choice." His hands framed my face, forcing me to meet his eyes. "You're stronger than him. You've always been stronger than him. He just made you think you weren't."
The words were the right words. The sentiment was the right sentiment. But as I stood there in the cold, my bare legs trembling and the lullaby still spinning through my head, I realized that I didn't believe him. Nathan had never been programmed. Nathan had never felt his body respond to triggers he couldn't control. Nathan didn't know what it was like to be a puppet whose strings were still attached, even after the puppeteer had left the stage.
"Make me forget," I said. "Please. Make me forget the song."
