Page 137 of Damsel in Disguise

“Yes.”

“Why not just kill her before? If you could simply do this all along?”

A faint smile touches my lips hearing the right question.

“You don’t destroy an asset until you’ve extracted everything it can give you. And you…” I murmur, “you were the perfect trigger.”

“Did I always trigger you to kiss her?” she asks, her fingers fidgeting against the leather of her gloves—pulling, tugging, rubbing, needing something to ground herself.

“Always,” I answer, without hesitation.

No point softening it. Not when she’s already seen and known too much.

It started the night I first felt her presence in my bedroom, not the day when I felt her presence for the very first in the bushes of the Oxford University over a year ago.

That faint shift in the air while I stood under the shower, water running down my skin, steam fogging the glass. Most people would’ve dismissed it, saying it’s just a trick of their mind. I didn’t.

“I always knew it was you… a girl with a very poor sense of self-preservation.”

Her fingers still.

“But you kept coming back,” I add. “Same distance. Same restraint. Watching me like you thought you were invisible,” a small pause. “I wanted to see how long you’d last without reacting. How much you’d take in silence until curiosity compelled you to act on impulse.”

Her throat works, swallowing a lump.

“So I gave you something to look at. To trigger you in return because you were triggering me. And every time I fucked her afterwards…”

I let the sentence hang for a beat, just long enough to let her fill in the rest before I do. “You were intruding on my mind.”

Those hazel eyes grow wider as they slowly blink once, then stare right into mine.

“So yes. You didn’t just trigger it. You were the reason I started it,” my gaze locks onto hers with quiet certainty.

Ariella blinks and looks down. Something shifts in her demeanor—shyness.

“But you never kissed me,” she murmurs.

That catches me off guard more than it should.

“You always kissed a Synthète,” she continues hesitantly. “And I’m human.”

Her toes are curling inside those platform boots. I can tell by the way she’s shifting weight from one foot to another.

For a heartbeat, she doesn’t look like the girl who’d stab someone without blinking.

She looks dangerously soft.

Suddenly, Ariella looks more like an innocent girl confessing to her crush.

“Would kissing you prove that I’m human?” the edge in my voice dulls just enough to pass as curiosity.

Her head snaps up instantly, eyes lighting—bright, eager, unguarded. She nods too enthusiastically.

An amused chuckle slips out of me. There’s something almost disarming about her naivety.

My hand moves before she can think too much about it—one hand takes off my glasses, throwing them aside, the other wraps around her throat to pull her into me.

Then I kiss her. Hard.