Page 40 of Damsel in Disguise

I can’t tell if I succeeded.

Disjointed images flicker through the black in my head—Dad’s reluctance when I first asked about Oxford. Asher, letting me crash his cars without complaint, but never letting me ride a bike. Then Alistair, each time he accidentally smiled with dimples.

The memories feel absurdly uninvited. Then the light swallows everything. I let go.

15: UNRAVEL

alistair

Be at the operation desk within 10 minutes.

I don’t like the notification flashing across my Dominion watch.

Be at the operation desk within 10 minutes? What the fuck does that even mean?

A colorful string of curses tears out of me as I slam the coffee mug down, sloshing dark liquid and staining the scattered papers, soaking ink and data alike.

With a non-verbal cue to my assistant to clean up the mess on my table, I made my way to the operations desk.

The only reason I left campus earlier than usual today—forced Ariella to handle the paperwork I should’ve supervised myself—was because of this. Triarch Dominion decided to remind me who owns my leash. They wanted me to be present earlier than usual.

Fortunately, I didn’t have the biker after me this evening.

If Traich Dominion didn’t send the spy after me, their systems should’ve flagged her long ago. The ignorance is what unsettles me—the hesitation that shouldn’t exist in an organization that functions like a guillotine.

Someone was trailing my routines, hovering at the edges of my life like a shadow I never acknowledged. To them, it should be a breach. And breaches get erased.

A year ago, I wouldn’t have cared who this stalker was. A fresh biological body is always useful here. There’s always a chance one might survive the conversion and might become another perfect Synthète.

But this isn’t a year ago. And the coincidences shouldn’t align so well.

The doors slide open for the gurney to roll into the operating room.

For a second, I don’t process the body, only the designation tag clipped to the rail, the data stream hovering on the screen beside it.

Ariella Keinston.

The face lands in my skull like a controlled detonation.

My stalker.

She lies restrained beneath translucent medical film and low-dose sedation, her lashes fluttering beneath half-closed lids. Oxygen tubing arcs over her cheekbones. Her shoulder sits wrong—subtle to an untrained eye yet screaming to mine.

Bruises bloom along her face and arms, mottled purples and sick yellows beneath scraped skin. Her lips are parted, faintly bloodied, breath uneven. It looks like an accident. A bike accident, to be more precise, since she’s a biker.

This is how they initiated phase one of her erasure. They engineered it as a reckless late-night motorcycle accident, a young heiress riding too fast and losing control on a poorly lit stretch of road.

What the public will see is skid marks and shattered metal.

What I see is calculated impact angles and an untreated shoulder dislocation that no emergency responder would’ve missed.

Triarch Dominion finally showed that they had marked the suspect a long time ago. Just because she was a Keinston, they were waiting for a better time.

Now she will be either dead or suspended somewhere between life and disposal. Consequently, she will be routed to research before any official declaration is made. They will catalog the damage, measure survivability thresholds, and determine whether conversion is viable.

If she is deemed useless, they won’t announce it. They will simply erase her.

Documentation will be scrubbed, biometric traces dissolved, registry entries amended until it appears the said individual never existed at all.