39. CATALYST
ariella
Nothing about the name, Halcyon Institute for Neurocognitive Rehabilitation (HINR), reflects what it truly is.
It isn’t a place for healing. It’s a place designed to observe what doesn’t fit into the fragile definitions of sanity.
Everything about it—the white walls, the staff, the doctors—felt eerily reminiscent of Hawkins National Laboratory. They watched me constantly. It almost made me feel like Eleven.
Twenty-three hours. That’s how long they kept me here.
Twenty-three hours of questions disguised as concern.
Twenty-three hours of conversations carefully constructed to sound humane while they quietly dissected every word I offered in return.
Doctors with soft voices and practiced empathy sat across me, trying to extract something that would sit comfortably inside their reports.
“Do you feel remorse, Miss Keinston?”
“Do you understand the severity of your actions?”
“Do you believe you’re a danger to others?”
When Alistair walked into that room, everything shifted.
He stood like someone who had never been contained by anything—not systems, not people, not rules.
And when he looked at me, there was no curiosity in his eyes. Only understanding.
He didn’t ask unnecessary questions.
He simply gave me two options.
I chose the latter—to be his. After all, that’s what I always wanted.
Halcyon didn’t release me. They simply handed me over to Alistair Benette Hertley.
The transition was seamless to the point of being unsettling—signatures exchanged, doors opened, protocols overridden without so much as a ripple of resistance.
The ease with which it happened made one thing painfully clear—Halcyon Institute for Neurocognitive Rehabilitation also works under the Triarch Dominion.
My phone started vibrating the second I crossed the threshold of the psychiatric institution.
Calls. Messages. Notifications stack over each other in relentless waves. The screen lit up again and again until it felt less like communication and more like pressure.
The Keinstons.
I didn’t bother checking in then—didn’t have the energy in me to brace for their inquiry.
Alistair drove me to my apartment. I sat in the passenger side of his Aston Martin for the first time in my life. Instead of feeling butterflies and giddy, the normality of it felt too jarring.
Like the entire ordeal at Halcyon was nothing more than a brief interruption in a much larger plan, neither of us had fully spoken out loud yet.
Right now, I’m kicking the door shut and dropping my bag onto the couch.
Next, I’m heading to the kitchen to get myself a glass—no, jar—of water before finally picking up the phone.
I gulp down the water straight from the jar. Suddenly, I’m as thirsty as I was when I first woke up at Alistair’s place.
Once I’m done quenching my thirst, I select the only name that’s bugging me the most right now. Asher.
He answers on the first ring. “What the hell did you do?”
No greeting. Not “Are you okay?” Not “Where are you?” Straight to the point.
I lean against the kitchen counter, letting my weight settle onto it.
I exhale slowly. “That’s a very loaded question.”
“Ariella,” his tone tells me he’s already running through scenarios in his head. “You got yourself dragged into a situation that’s already escalating beyond what we can control.”
“You were supposed to take care of it.”
“I did, but when whispers about some shady organization are being involved, your secrets are bound to come out in the light,” he exhales. “Fucking Triarch Dominion? Seriously? The fuck were you even thinking?”
A pause. Did Adrian tell him anything? But I don’t ask him how he knew. Sometimes ignorance is bliss. Learned by lesson the hard way.
“I didn’t know—”
“Do you know some creepy fucker is feeding me encrypted information about this Triarch Dominion ever since you were being detained?”
That’s weird.
“The worst part is that neither Adrian nor I can track the IP address. Our guess is it’s someone inside the organization, but I don’t trust their motive.”
My first thought is Alistair. But I push it aside.
“Whatever Adrian and I are working nonstop to clean this up before it sticks to the family name, and now I’m hearing me—what? That you just walked out? From HINR?!”
“I was let out, Asher,” I correct lightly.
A sharp exhale tears through the line. “Fucking Jesus, you’ve got to be kidding me. By who?”
I push myself off the counter. “My professor.”
“Your… what now?”
“Alistair Hertley,” the name easily rolls off my tongue.
Another silence follows, heavier this time, like Asher is still processing the weight of the information.
Meanwhile, I’m pacing slowly across the apartment, watching my reflection catch briefly in the darkened glass of the floor-to-ceiling windows.
Just when I think I pissed him off to the point of hanging up, his voice bleeds through the line. “Now who the fuck is this Alistair Hertley? How on earth does this dude hold such influence to free you from HINR?”
I don’t tell him he’s the head researcher of Triarch Dominion. What if Asher suspects him of being the anonymous information provider? Hell, now I am having doubts about him.
A soft giggle breaks me, almost amused by the sharp edge creeping into his timbre. “Relax. You’ll like him.”
My eyes fall on my nails, then my toes. Jeez, they turned me into a filthy monster within twenty-three hours. I need to book a slot in the salon.
“It’s not the right time to joke, Ariella,” he warns. “You were detained for homicide, and now you’re casually telling me your professor walks in and just… what? Signs you out?!”
“He likes me,” the words slip out too easily. I’m really being delusional at this point.
“What have you become?” he mutters, more to himself than to me, though the question still lands exactly where it’s meant to.
I tilt my head slightly, watching my own static reflection, studying the subtle shift in my silhouette. What have I become?
“That’s an interesting question coming from you.”
“Ariella—”
“What’s more interesting is that you’re surprised,” I cut in softly.
He goes quiet.
“Where’s Adrian?” I ask abruptly, leading the conversation elsewhere.
“At work,” he replies automatically, thrown off to answer without thinking. “Why?”
“Just wondering.”
“Ariella,” there’s that warning again. “You don’t get to pretend this isn’t serious. You’ve put yourself in a position where people are paying attention to you.”
“Alistair will save me,” I say, pouting at my reflection.
My heart is fluttering at the possibility of being the damsel in distress just so my prince charming can arrive on a white horse to save me.
“That’s not how this works,” he scoffs
I know it doesn’t. Maybe I love being delusional.
“You’ve always done this,” Asher says finally. “You make a mess, and then you insist you can handle it on your own like the rest of us are just… irrelevant.”
My jaw clenches slightly, though my voice remains perfectly even.
“No one needs to be here to fix anything,” I say instead, my tone settling into something final. “I’ve got it handled. Just you and Dad… don’t try to come for my rescue, or I’ll personally hand myself over to the Triarch Dominion and sign up to be a Synthète.”
“Ari—”
I’m done being the sheltered princess.
I end the call before he can speak any further and switch my phone to airplane mode without a second thought.
No interruptions. No interference.
With that in mind, I move toward my room.
The closet slides open, revealing rows of civilian clothing. I reach for the black full bodysuit among them.
Leather that hugs instead of draping, and moves with me instead of against me. Something that erases softness and replaces it with intention.
The material slides over my skin like a second layer, tight in all the right places, restrictive in a way that only sharpens awareness rather than limiting movement.
I tie my hair back, securing it into a high and clean ponytail. Pulling on the cat ear disguising mask, I secure my platform boots.
When I finally stand in front of the floor-length mirror to look at myself, the girl from HINR is gone. What stands in her place is someone who’s precisely reckless.
There’s only one thought settling into place with an unshakable certainty.
Delilah Hertley. Or Delilah Crosswave.
I’ve seen her before.
Spoken to her, briefly, meaningless conversations that never lingered long enough to matter.
I’ve also seen her as the perfect housewife.
Seen the way her body moved under him.
She looks human. Moves and sounds like one.
But she isn’t entirely one.
I had noticed brief abnormalities in her. But I never paid much attention to it till now.
I know that now. But knowing has never been enough for me. I need to understand how she operates.
That being decided, I leave my phone behind and take my helmet and keys only to step outside at two in the morning.
If I die doing what I wanted to do, at least I’ll die of my free will.