"It's over," he said again, as if repeating the words would make them true. "Let's go home."
"Home." I let the word hang between us, testing its weight.
"Our apartment. Our bed. Our life." His thumb traced my cheekbone, wiping away a smear of Gabriel's blood. "We need to get you cleaned up. Get you warm. Then we'll figure out how to handle the body, how to explain this, how to move forward."
"The body."
"I'll take care of it." His voice was steady, confident, the voice of a man who'd disposed of bodies before and knew exactly how to make them disappear. "There's a place I know. An old incinerator in the basement. No one will ever find him."
I thought about Monika, buried in an unmarked grave outside Miami. I thought about all the other girls—the ones who'd been "terminated" when they stopped being compliant, the ones who'd been disposed of like broken inventory. Nathan had done this before. He'd killed before. He'd buried his own sister in the ground and never looked back.
"You've done this before," I said quietly. "Disposed of bodies. More than the ones that we did together. Differently than them."
His expression flickered—surprise, then a careful neutrality. "In my line of work, sometimes it's necessary. The people we hunt, the traffickers we eliminate—they can't always be left for the authorities to find."
"And Gabriel? Is he just another trafficker to you?"
"He was a threat." Nathan's jaw tightened. "A threat to you. A threat to us. I did what I had to do to protect our future."
"Our future." I let the words roll off my tongue, tasting their hollowness. "The wedding. The house. The children."
"Yes." He pulled me closer, his arms wrapping around me, his lips pressing against my hair. "Everything we've been planning. Everything we've been working toward. It's all going to happen now. We're going to have the life we deserve."
I stood in his embrace, my body limp and compliant, my face pressed against his chest. I could hear his heartbeat, steady and strong. I could smell his cologne, the familiar scent that had once meant safety and now meant nothing at all. I could feel the blood drying on my skin, tightening like a mask.
"What if I'm not the person you think I am?" The question came out soft, almost dreamy. "What if the woman you've been planning this life with doesn't exist?"
He pulled back to look at me, confusion flickering in his eyes. "What are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about the pills." I met his gaze steadily. "The ones you've been putting in my vitamins since the day we met. The compliance drugs. The memory suppressants. The chemicals designed to keep me foggy and dependent and unable to see what you really are."
The silence that followed was absolute. I watched Nathan's face cycle through emotions—shock, then denial, then a cold, calculating assessment that told me he was trying to figure out how much I knew, how long I'd known it, what it meant for his plans.
"Bunny—"
"I know about the retrieval protocol." My voice was calm, steady, the voice of someone who'd been planning this moment for weeks. "I know you tracked me from the Institute. I know you staged our meeting at the bar. I know you've been managing me like an asset, dosing me like a patient, manipulating me like a puppet." I tilted my head, studying his face with the clinical detachment Gabriel had taught me. "I know about Monika. I know about the network. I know about the server in the bank vault and the files I copied and the evidence I've alreadysent to journalists and law enforcement agencies across three countries."
"This isn't—you don't understand—"
"I understand perfectly." I stepped back, putting distance between us. The blood on my dress was drying, stiffening the fabric into something that felt almost like armor. "You never loved me, Nathan. You never even saw me. You saw an asset. A weapon. A proof of concept that your brother had perfected and you wanted to claim."
"That's not true." His voice cracked, and for a moment he almost sounded sincere. "I love you. Everything I've done—the pills, the protocol, the lies—it was all to protect you. To keep you safe. To keep you with me."
"You love what you built." I let my voice go cold. "You love the obedient fiancée who cooked your meals and warmed your bed and ran your missions without asking questions. You love the broken doll you collected from the wreckage of Gabriel's Institute, the one who was too damaged to see the cage you were building around her." I met his eyes, and I let him see the truth I'd been hiding for months. "But that doll doesn't exist anymore. She never existed. She was just another performance, another mask, another role I played while I gathered the evidence I needed to destroy you."
Nathan's face went pale. "Bunny—"
"No." The word was a blade. "You don't get to call me that. You don't get to pretend this was love. You don'tget to stand there with your brother's blood on your hands and tell me you did it for us."
"I did do it for us." His voice was desperate now, the mask cracking, the monster showing through. "Everything I did was for us. The network, the missions, the lies—it was all to build a life for us. A future. A family."
"A family built on the bones of the women you trafficked." I laughed, and the sound was hollow. "A future paid for with the lives of girls like Monika. Girls like me. Girls you broke and sold and discarded when they stopped being useful."
"It wasn't like that—"
"It was exactly like that." I stepped closer to him, my bare feet silent on the cold floor, my bloody dress rustling in the silence. "You're a monster, Nathan. You're worse than Gabriel ever was. He broke me because he thought he was making me stronger. You broke me because you wanted to own me. There's a difference."
"I love you." The words came out broken, desperate, the plea of a man who was watching everything he'd built crumble around him. "I love you, Bunny. I've always loved you."
