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She doesn’t fight me, not yet. She wants privacy as much as I do.
I remove the chain barring access to a door I broke the lock on earlier. I shove the metal door open to the building skywalk, then drag her into the secluded bathroom. The bass of club music echos around the narrow space. My ears ring, the sounds distorted and muted as my hearing strains to adapt.
Her hand slips from mine, and I turn to face her. Under the wavering florescent lights, she’s even more beautiful. Hair wild from dancing, mascara smudged from sweat, her top clinging to her curves from the humidity.
Some emotion crosses her features but, even after all my documentation and analysis, sketching every expression, studying every nuance, I’m having difficulty deciphering it.
She wets her lips, and I’m reduced to a pathetic, envious wretch at watching her tongue travel over her mouth. “You set the fucking cabin on fire,” she says.
I blink, my thoughts leaping frantically to gauge her meaning. “I was distraught,” I answer. “The woman I loved rejected me.”
“That’s a tad bit melodramatic, don’t you think?”
I chance a step toward her. “I sacrificed my life’s work to set you free,” I challenge.
“Then you started it right back up,” she fires back, “in my backyard.”
All retort dies on my tongue. Logically, I know this argument is useless. There’s nothing I can say to convince her of my reasoning. I did abduct her. I did conduct mind-altering experiments on her against her will. I did torture her mentally, physically, and I did abandon her.
And then when she experienced a slim measure of stability, security, I stole it away by resuming the experiment. I never let her in on the inner workings, keeping her in a pitch-black chamber of unknowing.
I can empathize with this feeling of helplessness. I endured it every time I lost myself in my room of clocks. I never meant for Blakely to become trapped there. That’s why I destroyed it.
“I am the villain,” I say, daring another step closer to her. “But most villains have a good reason with good intensions for their madness. It just gets away from them.”
Like scientifically proving to myself that Blakely harbors the capability to love.
“I’m narrow-minded when it comes to my work,” I add. “I can only see the numbers, the data. I can only focus on the result…missing what’s literally right in front of me.”
She pushes her hands into her pockets, shoulders defensive. “I watched you die, Alex. I watched the cabin burn. You let me believe you burned to death in that fire.”
I tilt my head, carefully assessing her micro expressions. The way her eyebrows draw together briefly, the way her nostrils flare, the hard, achy swallow that drags along the slender slope of her neck. Less than half a second as it flits across her features, but I recognize the emotion.
Remorse.
All my walls come crashing down. She wassadI was dead. She feltsorrow. Even if she refuses to acknowledge those feelings inside her, she can’t disguise her subconscious, involuntary display.
She has no practice.
And I am an idiot. It never occurred to me how my death would affect Blakely. I was so focused on the outcome, duplicating the experiment, I failed to see the most obvious thing of all.
I reach out to her. “I didn’t realize—”
She retreats away from me. She whips the leather bag over her head and drops it to the dingy floor. “Don’t ever touch me again.”
I ball my fingers into a fist and drop my hand. This will take time, I know this. But the sheer thought of time has my heart tripping faster.
“I didn’t realize,” I try again, structuring my statement to spare both our egos, “that the treatment had been successful until it was too late. I thought approaching you in your new life would be too distressful, would discourage your…acclimation. So I opted to recreate the result on a new subject to collect my data.”
She makes a sound of contempt. “Subjects, Alex. Plural. My targets. From my client list and personal notes. People who are alldeadnow.”
Agitation borders impatience. They’re not worthy of her coveted feelings—they’re merely samples. I spear my fingers into my hair. “Yes, as always, I’m quite used to my failures.”
She shakes her head. “That’s all they are to you. That’s allIam. A result.”
“No, you’re wrong.” I want to tell her everything I feel for her, to remind her of the connection we shared at the fall, how I could try an infinite number of ways to quantify why she’s different from any other subject—why she’s different for me—how she changed the result, my purpose, and that’s why I need empirical data and evidence.
Because without rational, sound reason, I’m a slave to my feelings for her. I have no control.
