38. WARD
alistair
Ariella has been transferred from the jail to Halcyon Institute for Neurocognitive Rehabilitation. It’s one of the most restricted psychiatric wards in the UK.
They’ve concluded her homicidal tendencies took root far too early—sixteen to be specific—and are a liability to society. Another influence of the Triarch Dominion.
Getting Ariella arrested has already unsettled the Keinston family. Agitation ripples beneath their polished exterior, though they’ll never allow it to surface publicly.
They’re doing what they do best—scrubbing, rewriting, erasing. Their name remains spotless to the point of suspicion.
I’ve heard enough over the years to know the current heads—Adrian Keinston and Asher Keinston—have ties that stretch far beyond corporate boardrooms. Russian Bratva currently residing in Australia. Early allegiance under Mafia Prince Nico Vangelus Trivosky.
Men like them don’t simply transition into legitimate power. They carry their past with them, buried beneath tailored suits and controlled smiles.
Now Ariella Keinston is no different. And that’s exactly what the Triarch Dominion has been wanting to find out about her ever since she was flagged on their radar.
It’s been two days since she’s been locked away.
I scoff with disdain.
Her naivety is too offensive. If she had agreed to work with me from the beginning, she could’ve avoided this entire drama.
No arrest. No exposure. No unnecessary involvement from her family.
But of course she didn’t.
Which leaves her where she is now—with very limited options. Two, to be precise.
And if she possesses even a fraction of the intelligence she pretends to wield, she’ll choose the second.
A doctor escorts me down the corridor, his voice a constant drone of precautionary instructions. Safety protocols spill from his mouth one after another, as though he’s briefing me for proximity to something volatile, much too dangerous, and entirely unpredictable.
‘A borderline psychopath,’ according to them. I almost laugh. If that’s their conclusion, I almost wonder what diagnosis they would assign to me.
We stop in front of a set of stark white doors. He turns to me, repeating himself for what must be the third time, his tone firm but laced with unease.
“Remember to maintain at least one foot distance from her,” he presses a small stun-gun into my palm. “Use this if she becomes aggressive.”
I have to physically restrain myself from rolling my eyes.
The door unlocks, and I quietly step inside. The sterile air brushes cold against my skin.
She notices my presence immediately.
I can tell by the subtle shift in her posture, the way her body stills for a fraction of a second.
But she doesn’t acknowledge me.
A pop melody—Boy is Mine by Ariana Grande—bleeds through the room, soft at first, then invades the silence.
My head turns toward the TV, then back to Ariella.
She’s replaying it again.
And again.
And again.
Not watching—studying.
There’s something disturbingly intimate about the way her attention clings to every frame, not consuming the story but reliving it.
It’s almost poetic in a grotesque way. A condensed dark romance—girl breaks into a politician’s glass-walled sanctuary, watches him in his most unguarded moments.
When he notices her and makes an attempt to flee, she catches him and tries to feed him a love potion.
He removes her mask and throws away the potion. The screen goes dark.
The epilogue shows they’re living a happily ever after.
“Seems like my situation, doesn’t it?” she murmurs without turning around, her voice quiet but threaded with something dark.
Ariella keeps staring at the screen, her back to me like I’m an afterthought.
“Probably,” I reply, unimpressed. Or at least, I make it sound that way.
A beat passes.
“My friends pranked me with your picture when I was sixteen,” she says, almost absently, as if she’s narrating someone else’s story. “They thought it’d be funny. A little social experiment.”
A pause follows while the song plays in the background.
Meanwhile, I start calculating, something I should’ve done earlier.
First-year student now—around twenty.
The presence I felt for a year—she had to be transferred here when she was nineteen. My brows mentally shoot up.
As far as I’ve looked up, she’s been maintaining the top-fan batch on my socials constantly for three years before that—sixteen.
The root goes a bit deeper than I initially gave it credit for.
“You’re everything I ever wanted in a man. My man.”
That’s… new. I’ve been called many things. None of them sounded like ownership.
I’m surprised a fucked-up psycho like me can be someone’s type. That someone can be obsessed with me.
Well, you’ve got to be mentally deranged yourself to choose another one who’s on the same wavelength as you.
Back then, she didn’t know me. Not really. Just the curated version, I allowed the world or the internet to see.
“And after I found out…” she continues slowly. “After one of them finally confessed… after letting me fall for you for over an entire year,” she turns her head.
Her eyes look so unsettling and alive in a way that should make any other man have fear crawl up his spine. However, I feel something dangerously close to intrigue.
“I fed them to piranhas,” she says lightly, as if she’s talking about disposing of spoiled food. “Then I cooked those fish and served them at their funeral.”
A beat of silence stretches.
Ah. That explains the maximum-security protocol.
“How many?” my tone flat, uninterested on the surface.
She gasps—dramatic, exaggerated—hand flying to her chest as I’ve offended her.
“Oh wow,” she breathes, blinking at me. “That’s what you’re curious about? Not the part where I ki—” she cuts herself off mid-word, lips curling into something playful “sent my besties to hell?”
“The fact that you killed them tells me nothing. The reason you believed it was necessary is far more interesting,” I say evenly, ignoring the theatrics. “People like me kill for far less convincing reasons.”
“O. M. G,” she pivots sharply toward me, eyes widening with mock revelation. “No wonder I fell for a man like you,” her tone dips, slow and deliberate. “Obsessed, I mean.”
She blushes just by confessing her innocent little crime. Or pretends to.
Suddenly, it’s impossible to tell what’s going on with her.
“How many did you send to hell, Ariella?” I repeat, emphasizing her choice of phrase.
She holds up two fingers. “Two.”
No guilt or weight behind it. Just a fact.
“Left the other one alive,” she adds with a careless shrug. “Memories are important. Someone has to carry the story, right?” a small smile tugs at her lips. “Besides, she told me the truth. I’m not completely heartless,” she blinks with feigned innocence.
A genuine laugh tears out of my heart—one that I believed was dead and mechanical—before I can tamp it.
I lean back into the wall, letting my full weight rest against it as the sound rips through my chest. My body doubles over, hand slapping my thigh once, twice—breath hitching, vision blurring.
The deep, unrestrained, almost feral laughter claws its way out of me like it’s been waiting for an excuse to let out all these years. It’s been a long time since something—someone—has amused me like this.
Tears prick at the corners of my eyes, blurring the sterile white of the room into something distorted.
I always have a smile on my face, but I never laugh like this. The unknown feeling settles in my lifeless heart, bringing it back to life.
I drag a hand down my face, trying to steady my breathing, but the laughter doesn’t leave. This girl…
I clear my throat, the sound cutting clean through the lingering echo of my laughter. “Fifteen.”
She blinks, tilting her head slightly. “What?”
My hands slide into my pockets, fingers closing around the small device I came prepared with.
A press. The jammer hums to life—silent, efficient, sealing the room in a bubble of isolation.
No ears. No interruptions.
Timer starts now.
At best, they’ll need two minutes to realize something’s wrong. Two minutes before security storms in under the pretense of “my safety.”
That’s all I need.
“My body count,” I say calmly, watching the confusion flicker across her face. “According to what they counted, I’ve killed fifteen pathetic, oxygen-wasting excuses of humanity when I was twelve.”
A flicker of something feral passes through my gaze.
Every failed iteration of creating the perfect Synthète out of the deadliest criminals, every broken thing that shouldn’t have been allowed a second chance—I made sure they didn’t.
The world is already rotting under the weight of creatures like them on the loose.
I’m simply accelerating the process as much as I can.
Well, the majority of them who survive? Like Delilah Crosswave? Sometimes you need to prove your loyalty by doing the worst shit.
Besides, they make excellent regenerative spies or assassins, each sold over fifty million, some exceeding a billion.
“And that’s only the count that mattered. The rest?” a soft exhale. “Let’s just say I learned early how to turn failure into waste management.”
I don’t tell her that my actual name is only Alistair Benette—the last name Hertley is not mine. It’s something the Triarch Dominion decided for me. Just like Delilah Crosswave.
The name flashes through my mind like a stain I can’t scrub out. Loyalty sometimes demands proof. Even if that proof comes with a ring and a contract, I despise it.
“Then why aren’t you locked in but—” Ariella’s voice cuts in with disbelief. “But you’re a professor at the Oxford—”
I let out a low chuckle, watching it sink in. “Triarch Dominion.”
Her brows knit, confusion turning into curiosity. “What do you mean Triarch Dominion?”
For a moment, I don’t answer.
I let the silence stretch while contemplating for a second. Then I close my eyes briefly, inhaling slowly and deeply. The memory comes whether I want it to or not.
“When I was twelve,” I begin. “I came home with a scholarship.”
A flicker of something almost human brushes past the words—almost.
“I thought she’d be proud,” another pause. “My mother.”
I swallow down on nothing. “But when I got there… she was on the kitchen floor. Blood everywhere. Too much of that thick red liquid for a body that small.”
Ariella doesn’t interrupt or look at me with that nauseating sympathy people mistake for understanding.
“The bastard didn’t even notice me at first. Was too busy with what he’d done,” my fingers flex inside my pocket, remembering the weight of the grip. “So I fixed that by grabbing an axe to cut his spine clean in one swing. Afterwards, it became practice.”
There’s still no flicker of remorse in me.
“I don’t remember all of it,” I admit, almost casually. “Just pieces. Sound. Texture.”
I let that settle.
“I stayed there with the two corpses,” I add, softer, almost absent. “Didn’t move. Didn’t eat. Didn’t think.”
“Days passed. Maybe more. The smell got worse before it stopped meaning anything. That’s when I realized something important.
Rotting alongside the dead felt inefficient.
So I decided to be productive instead. Turns out, people are surprisingly easy to discontinue when you stop seeing them as people,” a chilling smile falls on my lips.
“Slowly, I started to get bored with the repetition. I got sloppy. Or maybe I just didn’t care enough to hide it anymore.”
I lean back slightly, the memory settling into something almost comfortable.
“They gave me a choice. Work under them, be useful, and live among the elite class. Or spend the rest of my life rotting in a psychiatric institution. Like you,” my index mockingly points at her.
Ariella’s lips part. “And you chose…”
She doesn’t need to finish because I nod.
“In the same way, you have two options,” I take a step closer—not enough to break the doctor’s pathetic rule, but enough to shift the air between us.
“To qualify as a Synthète, you need to be more than just unstable. You need to be irredeemable,” my gaze doesn’t leave hers.
“Deadly. Unfixable. The kind of mind society prays to die. They find people like that. Approach them when they’re desperate enough to listen.
Offer a reset. A second life. All they have to do is to survive the process. ”
“And they always agree,” a faint, humorless smile touches my lips. “Around seventy to eighty percent of the time, they don’t make it out. Now here’s where it gets interesting.”
I glance away for a fraction of a second, as if the thought itself irritates me.
“For reasons I was never given, I didn’t meet their criteria.
Didn’t qualify as a subject. But you,” I tilt my head slightly, studying the flicker of confusion in her hazel eyes.
“You check every. Single. Box, Ariella,” I say, emphasizing separately on each word.
I gesture lazily around the ward. “This is just the confirmation. The final stamp they needed.”
Her chin lifts instantly, pride snapping back into place. “I’m a Keinston,” she says, weaponizing the name.
I huff out an unimpressed breath.
“They tagged you the moment you took your stalking little scheme too far. The head researcher,” I point toward me. “Until I stepped in and decided to keep you human.”
The jammer vibrates once in my pocket. Ten seconds left.
I don’t react outwardly, but my tone sharpens, time tightening around every word.
“Anyway, the options… One, you sign the Experimental Subject Induction Accord. Hand yourself over. Become their next attempt at perfection,” I straighten fully. “Two, you come with me. Help me dismantle the very organization that took the only human I ever gave a damn about.”
The door beeps right on time. It bursts open.
White coats flood in—five of them, maybe more—tasers already drawn, bodies tense with rehearsed authority.
“On your knees, Ari—” The one in front doesn’t even get to finish.
My fist connects with his jaw before the command leaves his mouth. The crack echoes. He goes down hard, body thrown sideways like he weighs nothing.
Only I get to say that exact phrase to Ariella. Nobody else.
I flex my hand once, irritation simmering just beneath the surface as I look at the rest of them. “Do I not look alright?”
They back off slowly, pulling their leader up on his feet and backing off.
All of them exit, but leave the door open.
I adjust my cuffs, smoothing them down with practiced precision, as if nothing just happened.
“You don’t have much time,” I say without looking at her. “They’ll come for your answer soon.”
I turn to leave, but one step is all I get.
“Option two.”
It stops me dead on track.
A slow grin breaks across my face before I can suppress it—wide, unrestrained, dangerous.
“I’ll be whatever you want me to be.”