43. DISORIENTED
alistair
Kissing Synthètes is what I was used to doing.
I’ve measured their emotional responsiveness, monitored pulse fluctuations, hormonal spikes, and neural synchronization.
I mapped desire into algorithms and replicated intimacy with clinical precision until every moaning became another rehearsed response programmed into muscle memory and synthetic nerves.
Every reaction had a reason.
Every touch had data.
Every kiss had an outcome.
But with Ariella, I can’t measure any of this. And the worst part is it feels real.
My thumb still presses against the frantic pulse fluttering beneath her throat. It refuses to stabilize, each heartbeat slamming violently against my skin as though her body is trying to escape itself.
Or maybe escape me.
A part of me wishes I could see the marks blooming beneath the black leather wrapped around her throat. Finger-shaped bruises staining pale skin. Proof that I touched her hard enough to leave something behind.
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.
This time, I shut the notification system off entirely.
The silence afterward settles heavily through the room. For the first time in years, it feels better, although I know how badly this could end for me.
“Delilah…” her voice lowers slightly. “She really can’t come back this time?”
A faint smile pulls at the corner of my mouth. “There’s still time. I can make your wish come true if—”
“No,” she cuts in immediately.
A chuckle slips free. Predictable.
The decomposition is accelerating now. Black veins continue spreading beneath the pale synthetic skin, branching outward in jagged lines.
Rolling my shoulders once, I grip Delilah’s wrist and drag the body off the couch. It hits the floor heavily with a wet sound echoing through the room.
Ariella flinches at the impact. But she doesn’t step back. Nor does she look away.
“You’re helping me clean this up,” I tell her.
“You know you can just…” she motions vaguely toward the body, her face twisting slightly at the sight of the decomposition, “carry it in your arms and bury it wherever you want to. I can stay here and guard your back.”
I stop mid-motion.
She’s right.
I don’t need her help to do what I’ve always done with Synthetic bodies so far. This is the fourth time now, for fucks sake.
Fourth time living beside a Synthète. The other three had different roles carefully tailored for integration—maid, assistant, friend. Functional identities. Controlled environments. Controlled failures.
And when the time came, I killed every single one of them and blamed it on a system malfunction.
The Dominion knew, of course. The Triarchs always know.
Which is precisely why they eventually decided to bind one to me permanently through marriage.
A perfected Synthète tied to my public image, so I’d think twice before ruining another asset in a fit of intellectual dissatisfaction. As though public appearances ever mattered more to me than disposal of these shits.
However, this is the first time I’ve destroyed a Synthète solely because of a human.
My gaze drifts toward the decaying body.
The previous ones never deteriorated this badly. Their systems shut down cleaner. Delilah’s emotional equilibrium didn’t just cross the threshold tonight.
It breached catastrophically.
Whatever. I’m not carrying this disgusting, melting puddle in my arms.
“Congratulations,” I say with a dry smile and glance at Ariella. “You’ve emotionally traumatized advanced military technology.”
To my surprise, she laughs.
The sound lands directly beneath my ribs and does something deeply unpleasant to my chest.
I hate it instantly.
Stepping over the sweatpants I discarded earlier, I walk across the room completely naked without bothering to cover myself.
Ariella’s gaze follows every movement automatically, tracking me with shameless curiosity.
My cock stiffens almost immediately beneath the attention. Annoying bastard.
I bend over to retrieve the sweatpants from the floor, dragging them back on before turning my attention back to the remains of Delilah.
I grip her wrist and drag her across the marble floor toward the containment elevator hidden behind the eastern wall.
The entrance is almost impossible to notice unless someone knows exactly where to stand—ten centimeters from the wall. Direct line of sight into the wolf’s eyes hanging within the oil painting.
Look into its eyes, and only then does the hidden mechanism recognize retinal alignment.
The shape of a door presses inward with a soft hiss. The containment door slides open after retinal verification.
Cold air rushes outward instantly, curling around me in sharp, sterile waves, clashing violently against the stench of decomposition trailing behind Delilah’s body.
Behind me, Ariella stares at the opening for a moment too long before quickly catching up. She sits on her knees beside the body, ready to hoist it up.
The thought of killing her comes too easily.
What unsettles me is that I’m only thinking of the act instead of already doing it. Just like I killed the third Synthète, the one playing the role of a friend, after he discovered this chamber.
“You want to help now?” instead I find myself asking her with a low chuckle.
“I mean…” she starts fidgeting with her nails again, avoiding my eyes for half a second. “You could use some extra hands.”
“You could leave anytime, you know.”
“I don’t want to.”
The answer comes too honestly.
I slowly turn toward her fully. What are you doing, little kitty?
Every instinct she should possess as a human being ought to be screaming at her to run. To fear me. To disappear before she ends up becoming another secret buried six feet under.
Instead, she keeps stepping closer toward me. Toward the thing that might destroy her.
Just be scared and run in the opposite direction. Give me a reason to chase you and hunt you down. To kill you before you become another liability breathing too close to my secrets.
“Stop looking at me like that.”
“How am I looking at you?”
“Like you’re trying to intimidate me.”
I almost laugh. Not only is she right, but she’s also partially wrong.
Intimidation isn’t the real problem here. The real problem is that I’m trying to figure out why I can’t bring myself to erase her like the others.
“Alright,” I huff eventually. “This one is decaying way too fast. If you want, you can help me get it inside as soon as possible.”
Without needing to be asked twice, her gloved hands wrap around Delilah’s ankles as she hoists the lower half upward with a strained grunt, clearly caught off guard by the weight of synthetic reinforcement beneath flesh.
I don’t offer to take over or ask if it’s too heavy.
She wanted this. Now she can carry part of it too.
Ariella drags harder, forcing me to move with her. Together, we pull the corpse across the marble floor while the deterioration worsens beneath our hands.
Synthetic skin begins sloughing apart near the neck. It peels backward in wet strips, exposing the mechanical structure beneath the flesh where the freshly regenerated tissue tears itself open all over again.
Ariella goes still. Her grip loosens slightly around where she’s gripping.
“There’s biological material inside,” I provide calmly, as though that somehow makes the sight less grotesque.
“And you created this?”
I nod. “And improved it.”
There’s that dangerous look in her eyes—one that she gets whenever she realizes there are still parts of me she doesn’t understand.
Curiosity tangled with caution.
Fascination fighting against common sense.
“You really are terrifying,” she murmurs.
The strange thing is, she doesn’t sound terrified at all.
We step farther inside while the overhead lights activate one by one. Clinical white illumination floods the room in cold stages, revealing steel surfaces polished clean enough to reflect distorted silhouettes at us.
Finally, Ariella lets herself properly look around the containment chamber.
Metal tables.
Surgical restraints.
Machines sitting dormant beneath shadows.
She freezes quietly, not dramatically.
The reaction hits differently for some reason. I realize what she’s seeing—not a laboratory but a graveyard.
I should explain.
Should redirect her attention.
Should lie.
Instead, I just watch her. Those reactions are becoming addictive in ways I don’t know how to regulate.
“This is what you do down here?”
There’s no accusation in the question. Only quiet disbelief.
I guide us to carry Delilah’s body toward the incineration unit. “Partially.”
“You experimented on people.”
“On Synthètes,” I correct softly.
“That’s not anything better.”
I know it’s not, but I don’t argue with her.
Together, we shove the Synthète remains into the chamber. The body collapses awkwardly against the steel interior before the incinerator seals shut automatically with a hydraulic hiss.
Seconds later, flames erupt behind the reinforced glass.
Orange light flickers violently across Ariella’s face while Delilah’s body begins collapsing inward.
Synthetic tissue melts differently from human flesh. The process is too smooth, too fast. Like wax left beneath sunlight.
Ariella swallows hard before asking the worst possible question she could ask me tonight.
“Did she love you?”
The flames roar softly ahead of us.
I stare at them longer than necessary. Then answer quietly, “She was designed to think she did.”
“Is there a difference?”
I steal a glance at her, finding her staring ahead.
Ariella sounds disturbed by that in a way she wasn’t by the corpse itself. I can hear it in the slight tension pulling in her voice.
“Yes.”
“How would you know?”
For the first time in my life, I’m starting to suspect I might.
The realization unsettles me enough that I look away from her entirely.
My watch lights up again. I’m glad it cut through whatever tension was building up between us.
There would be protocols. Meetings. Failures to report. Questions regarding Delilah’s sudden disappearance.
I’d respond only after I’m done with this.
And somewhere beyond all of that, the worst possibility is of the next Synthète they’ll eventually force into my life.
Amidst all the mess, I feel Ariella’s fingers brush lightly against my upper back, right below my nape. Exactly where the Triarch Dominion branded me.
It’s such a barely-there touch, yet my whole body reacts embarrassingly fast—I flinch.
Her thumb drags lightly over the three triangles intersecting and running over one another.
“Is it their…” she trails off.
Those hazel eyes lift toward mine slowly, warm curiosity glowing beneath them in a way that suddenly feels more dangerous than anything else inside this room.
The laboratory abruptly feels too small for the two of us.
Her lips part slightly as those eyes fall on my lips.
I step back before I can process the miscalculation happening inside my head. That alone should concern me far more than anything.
“Ariella,” I murmur, briefly shutting my eyes before forcing myself to look at her again. “You should leave.”
“But—”
Before she can finish, I’m already on her.
My hands slam against the steel table behind her hard enough to rattle the entire thing as I crowd into her space, forcing her back against the metal edge.
A small gasp escapes her lips while I lean over her.
“You destabilize my mind,” I murmur against her mouth, my voice lowering dangerously. “Do you understand how irritating that is?”
“Yet you let me kill Delilah,” a faint smile curves against her lips.
A perfectly logical response to what I just admitted.
That should’ve irritated me enough to throw her onto the floor and drag her out of this room myself.
And I never lose composure.
Instead, my gaze drops to her mouth that’s still swollen from the kiss. My eyes drift lower to where the pulse at her throat is supposed to be hidden beneath black leather.
To the rapid rise and fall of her chest from anticipation.
To the subtle shift in her thighs when I move closer.
My cock twitches inside the sweatpants.
God. This is bad.
I move my arm to brace it beside her head against the cabinet and lean close enough to feel her breathing hitch.
For one dangerous second, I almost kiss her.
Just then, my body jerks backward on instinct, putting distance between us before I can make another mistake.
“Leave, Ariella. Don’t make me repeat myself.”
“I don’t know the exit—“
“Stop pretending and leave.”
The softness disappears from her expression immediately.
She doesn’t argue anymore.
Ariella slowly steps backward first, watching me carefully like she’s trying to memorize every fracture beneath my composure, before finally turning and running toward the exit just like she did earlier tonight.
Only this time, I know she won’t stay behind to spy on me.