Page 146 of Damsel in Disguise

The thought feels strangely satisfying.

The room remains deathly quiet except for the low, corrosive hiss coming from Delilah’s body behind us. It cuts through the silence in uneven intervals, keeping reality from slipping too far away.

Synthetic decomposition has already begun.

Ariella’s lips stay parted from the kiss, breathing unevenly against my mouth. Her pupils are blown wide enough to swallow the hazel completely.

She’s staring at me as I’ve personally rewritten the laws of her universe.

One kiss, and she already looks ruined for me. Or worse, I’m the one being ruined by her.

The realization hits too fast, too deep.

I shove her away from me almost instinctively, the same way someone recoils after touching an open flame.

Ariella stumbles half a step, clearly thrown off by the abruptness of it, but she recovers quickly.

No anger. No embarrassment. She simply watches me, trying to read the fracture I let slip for half a second.

I force my gaze toward the couch.

Delilah’s body twitches beneath the blood-soaked leather. No regeneration this time. Residual electrical discharge fires through dead synthetic nerves while the internal systems cannibalize themselves from the inside out.

The smell changes first.

Burning synthetic. Rotting flesh. Chemical decay.

It thickens in the air until I can practically taste it at the back of my throat.

Her attention drifts toward the couch too.

“Oh my God,” she whispers.

Not horrified. Fascinated. That alone nearly makes me smile.

Most humans recoil after violence. Ariella gravitates toward it like something in her was built to recognize the shape of destruction and feel at home beside it.

And still her attention keeps returning back to me instead of the corpse decomposing only a few feet away.

Wrong priorities.

Mine too, apparently.

The Dominion watch vibrates sharply against my wrist. Three consecutive pulses. Priority alerts.

I ignore them even though Triarch Dominion doesn’t tolerate silence. Especially not from me.

She notices immediately. “You’re not answering that?”

I shake my head once.

“What if it’s important?”

“It usually is.”

Something shifts across her expression then. Confusion maybe. Or curiosity over the fact I’d dismiss something this urgent so casually after everything she just witnessed.

Another vibration follows almost immediately. It’s more persistent this time.