9. The Lullaby
The Lullaby
The lullaby wouldn't stop.
It had been playing in my head for hours—Brahms, the distorted version Gabriel had used during my conditioning, the one the music box had resurrected and Nathan had tried to destroy.
But destroying the box hadn't destroyed the melody.
It lived in me now, a parasite coiled around my brainstem, humming its terrible tune every time the world went quiet.
The apartment was dark. Nathan had been asleep for hours, his breathing deep and even, his arm still draped across my waist. I'd been lying beside him since midnight, staring at the ceiling, counting the cracks in the plaster.
Twenty-seven cracks. Twenty-seven imperfections in a surface that looked smooth from a distance.
Like us, I thought. Like everything.
At 2:14 AM, I gave up on sleep. I slipped out from under Nathan's arm, pulled on his discarded shirt—white cotton, still smelling faintly of his cologne—and padded barefoot to the balcony.
The sliding door opened with a whisper, and then I was outside, the cold night air raising goosebumps on my bare legs.
The city sprawled beneath me, a constellation of lights and distant sirens. Somewhere out there, Gabriel was waiting. Somewhere out there, the answers to my questions were hiding. And somewhere out there—maybe—the truth about Nathan Cross was waiting to be discovered.
I didn't realize I was humming until I heard it.
The melody slipped out of me unbidden, soft and broken, my voice following the lullaby's path with an accuracy that would have made Gabriel proud.
I'd been trained to reproduce it perfectly—not just the notes, but the specific imperfections, the off-key third measure that triggered the deepest layers of my conditioning.
The sound of it in my own voice was terrifying.
The fact that I couldn't stop was worse.
"Whenever you hear this melody, your body will remember what it's learned."
Gabriel's voice echoed in my memory, calm and clinical. I pressed my palms against my ears, but the lullaby was inside me now, reverberating through my skull like a bell that wouldn't stop ringing.
"Make it stop," I whispered. "Please, make it stop."
"Bunny?"
Nathan's voice, rough with sleep, drifted from the balcony door. I didn't turn. Couldn't face him while I was humming Gabriel's song, while my body was betraying everything I'd tried to become.
"What are you doing out here?" He stepped onto the balcony, his bare feet silent on the concrete. "It's freezing."
"I couldn't sleep." My voice came out strange—flat and distant, like someone else speaking through my mouth. "The lullaby won't stop."
"What lullaby?"
"The one from the music box." I finally turned to face him, and I saw the moment he heard it—the soft, broken melody still spilling from my lips.
His expression flickered, surprise and concern and something sharper underneath.
"I can't make it stop, Nathan. I've been trying all night, and I can't make it stop. "
He crossed the distance between us and pulled me against his chest. His body was warm, solid, real. I pressed my face into his shoulder and tried to let his presence drive the melody away. But it didn't. It just kept playing, a broken record in the cathedral of my skull.
"It's just a song," he said, his hand stroking my hair. "It doesn't have power over you anymore. You're free."
"Then why can't I stop humming it?"
"Because Gabriel programmed you to respond to it. But the programming is old. It's rusted. It doesn't work anymore unless you let it work."
I pulled back to look at him. "What if I can't stop letting it? What if it's not a choice?"
"It is a choice." His hands framed my face, forcing me to meet his eyes. "You're stronger than him. You've always been stronger than him. He just made you think you weren't."
The words were the right words. The sentiment was the right sentiment.
But as I stood there in the cold, my bare legs trembling and the lullaby still spinning through my head, I realized that I didn't believe him.
Nathan had never been programmed. Nathan had never felt his body respond to triggers he couldn't control.
Nathan didn't know what it was like to be a puppet whose strings were still attached, even after the puppeteer had left the stage.
"Make me forget," I said. "Please. Make me forget the song."
"Bunny..."
"I need you to fuck it out of me." The words came out raw, desperate. "I need to feel something besides him. Please, Nathan. Please."
For a long moment, he studied my face. Then something shifted in his expression—that dark hunger I'd seen before, the one that surfaced when I begged, when I was desperate, when I gave him complete control over my body and my pleasure.
"Turn around," he said.
I obeyed. Faced the railing, my hands gripping the cold metal, the city sprawling beneath me like a promise. Behind me, I heard the soft sound of his sleep pants sliding down, felt his hands on my hips, his body pressing against my back.
"You want me to make you forget?" His voice was rough against my ear. "I'll make you forget."
He pushed the shirt up around my waist, exposing me to the cold night air.
His hand slid between my thighs, finding me already wet—my body responding to his dominance the way it had been trained to respond, the way Gabriel had programmed it and Nathan had reinforced.
I hated that I was wet. Hated that my body wanted this even when my mind was spinning apart.
"Please," I whispered. "Just do it. Just fuck me."
He didn't make me wait. He entered me with a single hard thrust, and I gasped at the sudden fullness, the stretch of him, the way he filled every empty space inside me.
His hands gripped my hips hard enough to leave marks, and I welcomed the pain.
Pain was grounding. Pain was real. Pain was something Gabriel had never been able to fully control, no matter how many sessions he'd put me through.
"Look at the city," Nathan commanded, his breath hot against my neck. "Look at all those lights. All those people. They can't see us, but we're here. We're right here."
I looked. The city sprawled beneath us, indifferent and eternal, a million lives being lived in the darkness.
Anyone could look up and see us—a woman bent over a railing, a man fucking her from behind, two silhouettes against the night sky.
The thought should have been humiliating.
Instead, it felt like liberation. Like proof that I existed, that I was real, that I was more than just the sum of Gabriel's programming.
"Harder," I demanded. "I need to feel it."
He gave me harder. The railing bit into my palms, the cold metal a counterpoint to the heat building inside me.
His rhythm was relentless, driving into me with a force that bordered on punishment.
I closed my eyes and let myself fall into the sensation, let the physical overwhelm the mental, let the pleasure drown out the lullaby that still echoed in the back of my mind.
"There," he gasped. "Right there. You're so fucking tight—"
"Don't stop. Please don't stop."
He didn't stop. His hand found the small of my back, pressing me down against the railing, changing the angle until I cried out. The city lights blurred beneath me. The cold air burned in my lungs. The lullaby faded to a whisper, then to nothing.
When I came, it was with a scream that might have been his name or might have been wordless release.
My body convulsed around him, waves of pleasure crashing through me, and for a moment—just a moment—I felt nothing but sensation.
No fear. No doubt. No Gabriel. Just the primal, physical reality of being alive.
Nathan finished seconds later, his groan muffled against my shoulder, his body shuddering against mine.
We stayed there, tangled together on the balcony, breathing hard.
The city went about its business below us, indifferent to our drama, our passion, our small, desperate attempts to feel something real.
Afterward, he carried me inside. Wrapped me in a blanket. Made me tea with honey and held me on the couch while I sipped it, my hands still trembling from the cold and the adrenaline and the fading echoes of pleasure.
"Better?" he asked.
"Better," I said, and the word was almost true.
But when he fell asleep again—his head resting on my shoulder, his breathing slow and even—I realized the lullaby hadn't stopped. It was still there, buried beneath the silence, a whisper instead of a scream. Waiting.
And I realized something else, something more terrible than the lullaby or the cold or the fear that was becoming my constant companion:
I felt nothing.
The sex had been intense. The orgasm had been real.
But the emptiness that followed—the vast, echoing emptiness that should have been filled with warmth or love or at least the satisfaction of release—was absolute.
I'd used Nathan's body to chase away Gabriel's ghost, and it had worked for a few minutes, but now the ghost was back and the emptiness was back and I was sitting on a couch in the dark with a man I wasn't sure I loved anymore, humming a song I couldn't stop.
The performance was over. The mask had slipped. And underneath, there was nothing but ash.
I've been pretending to be happy, I realized. Pretending to be healed. Pretending to be his good girl, his equal partner, the woman he saved.
But I wasn't any of those things. I was a construct, a collection of conditioned responses and learned behaviors, a doll that had been passed from one handler to another without ever learning to hold her own strings.
The tea grew cold in my hands. The lullaby played on. And somewhere in the darkness, Gabriel was waiting, patient as stone, knowing that sooner or later I'd realize what he'd always known:
You can't escape what you are.
You can only learn to perform something different.
I set down the tea and stared at the sleeping man beside me. Nathan Cross, my savior, my fiancé, the man who might be Gabriel's brother. The man whose files were full of payments I couldn't explain. The man who'd found me when I was disappearing and rebuilt me into something he could use.
I'm going to find out the truth, I promised myself. No matter how much it hurts. No matter what it costs me. I'm going to find out who you really are.
The decision settled into my bones like cold steel. The hunt was changing again. The prey was closer than I'd ever imagined.
And the lullaby kept playing, a soundtrack for the war to come.