A single rainy date at The Mercury diner shatters Til’s guarded heart, then a frantic alley tryst and an intimate, hours-long session in the locked gym strip him raw—while Morfeo’s neural dampener malfunctions, leaving him shaken by a feeling he was never meant to have. Now, with a stronger leash promised by his corporate handler, the Extractor faces an agonizing truth: he isn’t just harvesting heartbreak—he’s falling in love with the man he’s slated to erase.
Til
The diner was called The Mercury, a chrome and neon relic wedged between a payday loan office and a shuttered pawnshop on a street that flooded every time it rained. Which was always. Cracked red vinyl covered the booths, and the black-and-white tile floor showed the concrete in high-traffic paths. Frying oil and the faintly sweet chemical tang of the city’s atmospheric scrubbers cycling overhead filled the air.
I’d never been taken anywhere like it.
Not that it was fancy. It wasn’t. But Morfeo had picked it, had texted me the address with a pin drop and a single line, Trust me. Best coffee in the district. And when I pushed through the door, shaking rain off my jacket, he was already there in a corner booth with his back to the wall, a cup of something steaming in front of him, watching the door like he’d been waiting for me his whole life.
That was the thing about Morfeo. Moments with him were inevitable.
“You’re wet,” he said, standing as I approached.
“Rain,” I said. “Outside. Happens.”
His mouth twitched. “Observational skills like that, you should be a detective.”
“Detectives don’t get punched in the face for a living.”
“No,” he said, and his eyes dropped to my jaw where a bruise was ripening from Thursday’s sparring session. “They don’t.”
I slid into the booth across from him. The vinyl squeaked. The table had a jukebox selector, the kind with little chrome buttons and yellowed labels for songs that were probably older than my mother would have been. I pressed one at random. Nothing happened.
“Broken,” Morfeo said. “Everything in here is. That’s the charm.”
A waitress appeared. She had gray streaks in her hair and a name tag that said Dottie, and she didn’t ask what I wanted, just set a second cup down in front of me and filled it from the carafe she was carrying. The coffee was black and bitter and hot enough to burn my tongue.
“So,” I said, wrapping my hands around the cup. “This is where you bring all your strays?”
“Is that what you are?”
“I don’t know. Am I?”
Morfeo leaned back in his seat. He was wearing a white tank top under a worn denim jacket, and the contrast of the pale fabric against his skin, the dark hair on his forearms where he’d pushed the sleeves up, the way the diner’s neon washed his collarbones in blue and pink. It all felt like something I’d been supposed to notice. Like he’d dressed for me to look at him.
“Maybe I’m the stray,” he said.
“You don’t strike me as lost.”
“Don’t I?” He took a sip of his coffee, watching me over the rim. “I grew up in the system. State housing, foster shuffles, the whole gray-walled institutional package. I’ve been lost my whole life, Til. I’ve just gotten good at walking like I’m not.”
The thing about the way he said it was that it didn’t sound like a confession. It became a gift. Something he was handing across the table for me to hold, heavy and warm and just the right shape for my hands.
“That why you came to Ironwell?” I asked. “Looking for something?”
“I came because I liked the sign,” he said. “Neon’s hard to resist. You realize how many hours of human labor go into a good neon sign? The glass bending, the gas charging, the transformer humming. All that work just to make light that says, Here. This is a place you can be.
“You sound like you’ve thought about this.”
“I think about a lot of things.” He set his cup down. “Tell me something about yourself you have told no one.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
I should have said no. Should have laughed it off, asked him what his angle was, treated it like the line it almost certainly was. But Morfeo was looking at me with his head tilted somewhat and his eyes very steady, and the rain was running down the diner windows in sheets, and the coffee was warm in my stomach, and I felt . . . I don’t know. Seen. In a way I hadn’t felt since my mother died.
“When I was twelve,” I said, “I watched my mom fade out in a hospital bed. Brain cancer. Took six months. By the end she didn’t know my name. She’d stare at me and smile this polite, empty smile you give a stranger holding a door. And I’d sit there holding her hand thinking, I’m still here. Why can’t you see me?
The words came out of my mouth before I could stop them. I hadn’t told anyone that. Not my trainer, not the guys at the gym, not any of the handful of brief, fumbling hookups I’d had in the years since. It just spilled out of me and lay there on the table between us, ugly and raw and real.
Morfeo didn’t look away. Didn’t do the thing people do where they get uncomfortable and start rearranging silverware. He just nodded, slow, and said, “So you became a fighter.”
“What?”
“No one forgets a fighter,” he said. “You step into a ring, everyone watches. Everyone remembers. You hit hard enough, you make an impression that doesn’t fade.”
I stared at him.
“Am I wrong?” he asked.
I didn’t answer, but my jaw was tight and my eyes were stinging, and I had to look down at my coffee cup because if I looked at him any longer I was going to do something embarrassing.
His hand slid across the table and closed over mine.
“Hey,” he said. “I see you.”
Three words. I’d heard them before. From coaches, from corner men, from people who meant I see your potential or I see your flaws or I see the dollar signs your fists might generate. But the way Morfeo said it, low and rough and utterly certain, was different. He meant all of me. The boy in the hospital room. The fighter with the bruised jaw. The lonely mess underneath both.
I turned my hand over under his and laced our fingers together.
“You’re dangerous,” I said.
“I know.”
“I mean it. You’re going to mess me up.”
“Probably,” he squeezed my hand. “Do you want me to stop?”
“No.”
“Good.” He pulled his hand back and stood up, tossing a few crumpled bills on the table. “Come on. I want to show you something.”
“Where?”
“You’ll see.”
He grabbed my jacket from the booth and handed it to me, and I followed him out of the diner into the rain because I would have followed him anywhere. That was the terrifying part. We’d known each other for ten days and I’d already handed him the keys to every locked room in my head without even checking his ID.
The rain was coming down harder now, the neon of the diner sign bleeding pink and blue across the wet pavement. Morfeo ducked into the alley beside the building, and I followed, and when he turned around and pushed me up against the wet brick, his mouth found mine in the dark.
I made a sound. I’m not proud of it. Something raw and hungry and wholly involuntary. His hands were inside my jacket, fingers curling into the fabric of my shirt, and I grabbed his hips and pulled him against me and kissed him like I was drowning and he was air.
“Til,” he said against my mouth.
“Yeah?”
“I want . . .” He broke off, breath hitching as my teeth found his throat. “God. I want you. Right now. Here.”
“In the alley?”
“Are you saying no?”
The brick was cold and rough against my back. Rain was plastering my hair to my forehead. His body was warm and solid against mine, and he was hard and urgent, pressing into my hip. Wet garbage and ozone lurked in the air, somewhere in the distance a siren was wailing, and I wanted him so badly my hands were shaking.
“I’m not saying no,” I said.
His laugh was a vibration against my throat. “Good.”
It was frantic. There’s no other word for it. He undid my belt with fingers that weren’t quite steady. The first time I’d seen him anything less than perfectly controlled, and I shoved his jeans down over his hips and got my hand around his girthy cock and felt the sharp inhale he took, the way his forehead dropped to my shoulder. The alley was dark and wet and we were half clothed and desperate, and when he spit into his palm and reached for me, I had to bite down on my forearm to keep from crying out.
“Quiet,” he said, but he was the one breathing as if he’d run a mile. “Dottie comes out for a smoke break and we’re done for.”
Slick sounds of him stroking me fill my ears, so fucking filthy that I almost release a groan.
“I don’t care.”
“You say that now.” His hand moved in rhythm with my thrusts and I stopped being able to form words. “You’re beautiful, Til. You know that? The way you lose yourself. I can see it happening. Your eyes go somewhere else.”
“I’m right here.”
“No,” he said, and kissed me again, deep and searching. “You’re in your body. For once. Not thinking. Just feeling. That’s what I wanted. That’s what I . . .” He broke off with a groan as I tightened my grip, stroking him furiously. “Don’t stop.”
I didn’t. We moved together in the dark, all heat and friction and muffled sounds, and when he came it was with his face buried in my neck and one hand fisted in my jacket. I followed a few seconds later, shuddering against him, holding onto his shoulders like he was the only root that hadn’t snapped in a landslide that had turned the whole of a mountain into a roar of sliding stone.
We stood there for a long moment, breathing hard, foreheads touching. The rain had soaked through my jacket to my shirt. I was shivering and I didn’t care. Globules of his sticky cum clung to my hand and I didn’t care.
“Holy shit,” I said. “That was intense.”
“Mmm.”
“That was . . .” I couldn’t find another word.
“I know.” He pulled back just far enough to look at me. The neon from the street caught the rain on his eyelashes, made them glitter. His mouth was red and swollen, and there was a mark on his throat that I’d put there. “This is real, right? You feel this?”
I almost laughed. Those were supposed to be my words. My question. But he’d said it first, and there was something in his voice, something raw and unguarded that I hadn’t heard before, that made my chest ache.
“I do,” I said. “God, Morfeo, I really do.”
He kissed me again, softer this time. Almost tender.
“Good,” he said. “Me too.”
He brought his hand to his mouth right in front of me and licked my cum off while staring straight into my eyes. “We should probably go.”
The gym after hours was a different place than the gym during the day.
At noon, Ironwell was all noise and motion. Bags rattling on their chains, jump ropes slapping the floor, timers beeping, trainers shouting, the thick, meaty sound of gloves hitting pads. Nobody had time to notice the way the fluorescent lights buzzed or the way the mats reeked like decades of sweat soaked into the foam.
At midnight, though, it turned into a cathedral.
“You’re sure this is okay?” Morfeo asked, standing just inside the door I’d unlocked. “We won’t get caught?”
“Got a key from my trainer.” I flipped on the lights over the ring, leaving the rest of the space in shadow. “He knows I do late-night work sometimes. Helps me sleep.”
“Does it?”
“What?”
“Help you sleep.”
I thought about my apartment across the street, the bed I’d lain in the night before staring at my phone, waiting for his text. The way I’d replayed every word of our diner conversation, every glance, every accidental brush of his knee against mine under the table.
“Not lately,” I said.
Morfeo walked lazily through the gym, trailing his fingers over the heavy bags, the speed bag platform, the edge of the ring apron. He moved as if he were in a museum, as if everything he touched had a history he was trying to read through his skin.
“You grew up in here,” he said. Not a question.
“Pretty much. Started training when I was fifteen. Before that, I was just a kid who got into too many fights and lost most of them. My social worker thought boxing might . . . I don’t know. Channel it. Give me something to hit that hit back fair.”
“Did it work?”
“I’m still here. So, yeah. I guess it worked.”
He stopped at the edge of the ring, looking up at the old canvas, the ropes wrapped in electrical tape where the leather had worn through. “Teach me something.”
“What?”
“Teach me. Something about boxing. I’ve been watching you for a week and a half and I still don’t understand half of what I’m seeing.”
“You’ve been watching me?”
His mouth curved. “You knew that.”
I ducked under the ropes and held them for him to follow. He climbed through with less grace than I’d expected. There was something almost tentative in the way he moved, like he wasn’t used to being in a body that had to navigate physical spaces. Once he was inside, I dropped the ropes and faced him.
“Okay,” I said. “Stance first. Feet shoulder width apart. If you’re right handed, left foot forward. Bend your knees a little. Hands up . . . no, higher. Protect your chin.”
I moved behind him to adjust his elbows, and the moment my hands touched his arms, he twitched. Not in a bad way. In the way of someone who wasn’t used to being corrected, or maybe wasn’t used to being touched without an agenda.
“Relax,” I said. “You’re too stiff. Boxing is about flow. You can’t hit if you’re locked up.”
“I’m not planning to hit anyone.”
“Then what are you planning?”
He turned his head just enough to look at me over his shoulder. In the dim light, his eyes were very mysterious. “I wanted you to touch me. I could have just asked, but this seemed more romantic.”
I laughed. It startled out of me, bright and loud in the quiet gym. “You’re an asshole.”
“I’ve been told.”
He dropped his hands and turned to face me. We were standing close in the center of the ring, the canvas creaking under our feet, the ropes casting long shadows across the floor. The gym smelled of leather and chalk and the faint metallic tang of the space heaters that barely worked.
“You know what I see when I look at you?” he asked.
“Tell me.”
“Someone who’s been fighting so long he’s forgotten there’s an off switch. Every minute of every day, you’re in the ring. Even when you’re sleeping. Even when you’re eating. Even when you’re letting me kiss you in a rain-soaked alley.” He reached up and touched the bruise on my jaw, feather light. “You don’t know how to be still.”
“I’m still now.”
“No. Your heart’s racing. I can see it in your throat. Your hands are half clenched. You’re waiting for the bell to ring.”
I wanted to argue. Wanted to say he was wrong, that I was perfectly relaxed, that I knew how to be still as well as anyone. But he was tracing the line of my jaw with his thumb, and his other hand had found my hip, and he was right. My heart was pounding. My muscles were wound. I was waiting.
“Let me,” he said. “Let me take you somewhere else.”
He kissed me, and it was nothing like the alley. The alley had been hunger and urgency and need. This was something else altogether. He kissed me as if he were learning the shape of my mouth, as if he were memorizing the way my lips fit against his, as if he were taking notes I couldn’t see. When his tongue touched mine, it was a question. When I answered, it was with my whole body.
Somehow we ended up on the mats. He’d brought a towel from his bag, he’d brought a towel, like he’d planned this, like he’d known, and he spread it out and laid me down on it like I was something precious. The canvas of the ring was just visible through the gaps in the ropes above us, the old lights casting a yellow glow across his face.
“I want to see you,” he said. “All of you.”
I hesitated. It was stupid. After what we’d done in the alley, modesty was a joke, but the gym was different. The gym was where I was strong. Where I was a fighter. Where nobody saw the parts of me that were soft or scared or uncertain.
“Til.” He said my name like it mattered. “I already know. I’ve been watching. I see the way you hold yourself when you think no one’s looking. I see the way you check your reflection in the windows after every workout, looking for flaws. I see you.” He kissed my forehead. “Let me see the rest.”
I pulled my shirt off.
He took his time.
His hands were slow and deliberate, tracing the lines of my shoulders, the curve of my ribs, the hollow at the base of my throat. He found every scar. The one on my eyebrow from an elbow in my second amateur fight, the one on my lip from a street fight I’d started and lost, the one on my knuckles from the heavy bag before I’d learned to wrap my hands properly. He touched each one as if it were a story he was asking to hear.
“This one?” he asked, his thumb brushing a pale line under my collarbone.
“Broken bottle. I was fourteen. Wrong place, wrong time.”
“And this?”
He’d found the scar on my side, a jagged little thing from a surgery I barely remembered.
“Appendix. When I was ten. My mom was still . . .” I stopped. Swallowed. “She was still herself then. She made them give me extra ice cream in the hospital. Said I’d earned it.”
Morfeo bent his head and pressed his lips to the scar. It was such a small gesture. Such a gentle one. My eyes burned.
“You’re not what I expected,” he said against my skin.
“What did you expect?”
“A fighter. Someone hard. Someone who’d fuck me against the ropes and send me home.”
“And instead?”
“Instead you’re . . .” He lifted his head and looked at me, and there was something almost pained in his expression. “Soft. Underneath. You’ve built this whole fortress around yourself, but inside you’re still that kid in the hospital room, waiting for someone to see you.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Didn’t know if there was anything to say. So I pulled him down and kissed him instead, and he let me, and his hands kept moving, and my clothes kept coming off, and by the time we were both naked on the towel, the cold air of the gym raising goosebumps on my skin, I’d forgotten to be self conscious. Forgotten to be guarded. Forgotten everything but the weight of his body on mine and the sound of his breathing and the way he kept saying my name like a prayer.
“I’ve never . . .” I started, and stopped.
He paused, looking down at me. “Never?”
“Not like this.” I swallowed. “Not with someone who . . . I mean, I’ve done things. Hookups. Quick and dirty. But nobody ever wanted to just. Look at me.”
“I want to look at you.”
“I noticed.”
He smiled, and it was an actual smile, not the sharp-edged thing he usually wore. It made him look younger. Softer. Like perhaps he had a fortress too, and I was getting close enough to see the cracks.
“Can I . . .” I reached up and touched the scar behind his ear, the one I’d noticed the first time we met. It was small and precise, almost surgical, a thin line of pale tissue against the dark stubble of his undercut.
He flinched. Just for a second, just barely, but I didn’t miss it.
“Old injury,” he said. “When I was a kid. I don’t like to talk about it.”
“You can tell me anything,” I said. “I’m yours.”
He stared down at me. Something moved behind his eyes, something vast and complicated that I couldn’t read, and then he kissed me so hard it was almost bruising.
“Don’t say things like that,” he said against my mouth.
“Why not?”
“Because I might believe you.”
“I want you to believe me.”
He pulled back and looked at me for a long moment. Then he reached down and took both my hands in his, pressing them into the mat on either side of my head.
“I’m going to take care of you,” he said. “You’re going to be so glowing with pleasure you forget your own name. And then I’m going to do it again. And again. Until you can’t remember a time when someone wasn’t touching you like you were the only thing in the world worth touching. Do you understand?”
I couldn’t speak, so I nodded.
“Good.”
He started with my mouth. Kissing me slow and deep while his hands roamed my body. My chest, my stomach, my hips. He found the places that made me gasp and the places that made me shiver. He learned the rhythm of my breathing and matched his own to it. By the time he moved lower, I was already shaking.
“Easy,” he murmured. “I’ve got you.”
His mouth found my hipbone, the inside of my thigh, the sensitive skin behind my knee. Every touch was deliberate. He placed every kiss exactly where he wanted it. I’d never been with someone who moved like this, so controlled, so patient, so utterly unhurried. It was as if he were conducting an experiment, or performing a ritual, or maybe both.
“Morfeo.” His name came out strangled.
“I know.” He kissed the crease of my thigh. “I know.”
When he finally took me in his mouth, I had to bite my lip to keep from screaming. The gym was empty, but the walls were thin, and the last thing I needed was one of the neighboring businesses calling the cops because they thought someone was being murdered.
This was his forte. God, he was good. He knew exactly how much pressure, exactly how fast, exactly when to pull back and when to push. He watched my face the whole time, reading my reactions like a language he’d studied for years. When I was close, so close it was building at the base of my spine, he stopped.
“No,” I gasped. “Don’t stop. Please.”
“Not yet.” He crawled back up my body and kissed me, and I could savor myself on his tongue. “I need to be inside you when you come. Is that okay?”
“Is that . . .” I laughed, breathless and dizzy. “Yes. Yes. Please.”
He reached for his bag. He’d brought supplies, of course he’d brought supplies, he’d planned this down to the last detail. I watched him prepare with a kind of detached wonder. His hands were steady. His expression was focused. He was meticulous and methodical and wholly unhurried, even though I could see the tension in his shoulders, the way he barely held his own desire in check.
“You’re beautiful when you’re focused,” I said, echoing his text from that first night.
He paused, looking at me over his shoulder. “I meant that. When I said it.”
“I know.”
“I mean everything I say to you, Til. Every word.”
Something about the way he said it made my chest tighten. There was an urgency to it, almost a desperation, as if he were trying to convince himself as much as me.
“I believe you,” I said. And I did.
He shifted his weight, sliding his thighs between mine until his knees caught against mine. I hooked my arms around his shoulders, the solid, dry warmth of his skin smooth on mine, the faint grit of gym chalk from the mats dusting his forearms. I pulled him down and let gravity do the rest, until his forehead met mine. Our breaths tangled in the cool, stale air of the room, shallow at first, then pulling deeper as the set of his shoulders softened against mine. His hands found my waist, thumbs pressing into the dip of my sides, anchoring me as he let his weight settle. I let my legs fall open, wrapping one around his thigh, then the other, locking my ankles behind him to draw him flush.
“Ready?” he asked. His voice was rough, scarcely above a whisper, but I the vibration rustled against my lips.
“Yeah.”
He pressed forward with his cock and the air left my lungs. The first stretch was sharp, a bright line of tension that abruptly melted into a heavy, spreading pressure. I let my body go slack beneath him, surrendering to his weight, my body yielding inch by careful inch. He didn’t rush. He watched my face as if it were the only thing in the room that mattered, his dark eyes tracking every flicker of sensation, every subtle shift of my jaw. His fingers trailed up my ribs, mapping the line of my skin as he moved, easing in until the friction sat just right. When he finally settled fully, he went still. His entire frame trembled, a fine, almost imperceptible shake running through his arms. His breath hitched, coming out in ragged, wet gasps against my temple.
“Til.”
“I’m here.”
“You feel . . .” He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing against my collarbone. “You feel incredible.”
“So do you.”
He started to move. At first it was barely a drift. Shallow, testing strokes that dragged friction along my inner thighs, slow enough to count. Then he found his depth, letting go completely, and the rhythm built. His hands slid from my waist to my hips, fingers digging into my skin as he pulled back until only a whisper of him remained before driving forward again. With each pass, my toes curled against his back. I ran my hands through his hair, feeling the damp strands cling to his forehead, tracing the tense line of his jaw. He leaned into my touch, his thrusts growing bolder, syncing with the way my hips met his.
The old gym ropes creaked overhead with every shift of his weight. Yet the room stayed muted enough to hear the slap of skin against skin, the slick, wet sound echoing off the high ceilings, mixed with the distant, relentless hum of the neon sign outside. Dust motes swirled in the pale shafts of night light cutting through the windows, catching in the sweat that beaded along his collarbone. His pace quickened, his breath growing heavier, his forehead resting against mine as he chased the friction. I arched up to meet him, my nails scraping lightly down his back, every ripple of muscle beneath his skin buoying them. He kissed me again, deeper this time, his tongue tracing my bottom lip before slipping inside, tasting me as he drove forward.
“This is real,” I said, the words slipping out before I could catch them. Was I asking or telling? I just knew the way his hips rolled against mine, the way his chest pressed flush against mine with every thrust, the way the towel had slipped sideways, leaving a cool draft against my heated skin.
“This is real.” He broke the kiss just long enough to speak, his voice ragged, his thumbs pressing into my hip bones. “You’re real. I’m real. This is—” He broke off, his thrusts stuttering, his hips snapping forward with a sudden, sharp jerk. He pulsed inside me, hot and heavy, a tight coil winding deeper. “God, Til, I’m—”
“Me too,” I gasped, my fingers tightening in his hair, pulling him closer as the pressure built from my core. It spiraled tight and relentless, climbing higher with every thrust, every brush of his body against mine. “I’m right there. I’m right—”
The release hit like a struck match. I cried out, my back arching off the towel, my thighs clamping around him as wave after wave ripped through me. I came with his name on my lips and his weight pressing me down, my vision blurring as the old gym lights overhead swam into focus. Flickering fluorescents stretching into a constellation I’d never noticed before, cold and beautiful and suddenly everywhere. He groaned, a raw, broken sound, and buried his face in my chest. His thrusts grew frantic, shallow, until he shuddered madly, his hips locking against mine as he poured himself into me. He stayed there for a long moment, his chest heaving against mine, his breath hot and uneven against my skin. Gradually he lifted his head, brushing a damp strand of hair from my face, his eyes soft, dark, and utterly present. The neon sign buzzed on. The ropes settled. And in the quiet, tangled space between us, neither of us moved to break it.
We lay there for a long time afterward, tangled together on the towel, our breathing slowly evening out. The sweat cooled on my skin. The gym settled around us, creaking and sighing like a living thing. I traced patterns on his back with my fingertips and listened to his heart beat against my ribs.
“I’ve never done that before,” I whispered.
He lifted his head. “What?”
“Let someone see me. Like that.”
“And?”
“And . . . I don’t know. I thought it would be harder. I thought I’d feel exposed. Vulnerable.” I swallowed. “I just feel safe.”
Something crossed his face. Something raw and wounded and almost frightened. But it was gone before I could name it, smoothed over by the mask he wore, the one I was only starting to recognize as a mask.
“Good,” he said. “I’m glad.”
He pulled out gingerly and cleaned us both off with the corner of the towel, and then he lay back down beside me and pulled me against his chest. The towel was too small for both of us. My hip was on the bare mat. I didn’t care.
“Tell me about the poster,” he said.
“What poster?”
“In your apartment. The boxer. The one above your bed.”
I smiled into the darkness. “Marco Ibanez. They called him ‘The Saint.’ He fought in the ‘60s, mostly in small venues. Vancouver, Portland, places like that. Never won a title. Lost more than he won, if you go by the record. But he never quit. Never got knocked out. Never took a dive.”
“You admire that.”
“He fought with heart. That’s all I want. To fight with heart. To be remembered for something real.”
Morfeo was subdued for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was strange. Hollow, almost. “Heart can break just as easily as it can win.”
“Then at least it’s breaking for something.”
He tensed. But before I could ask what was wrong, he pulled me closer and kissed the top of my head.
“We should go,” he said. “It’s late.”
“In a minute.”
“In a minute,” he agreed.
But when I looked up at his face, he was staring at the ceiling, and his eyes were a thousand miles away.
Morfeo
The dampener hummed behind my ear like a trapped wasp.
I’d turned it up to maximum before the diner. Standard protocol for the phase-two connection. Emotional proximity required a corresponding increase in dampener output to maintain clinical distance. Standard. Routine. The first thing any Extractor learned.
But my hands were shaking as I walked into the diner bathroom after we’d finished in the alley, and when I looked at myself in the mirror, my face flushed, my lips swollen, the mark on my throat already darkening to a bruise, I saw something I didn’t recognize.
Fear.
No. Worse than fear.
Recognition.
I’d run this protocol fourteen times. Fourteen subjects. Fourteen harvests. Each one was a script I’d followed to the letter. Initial contact, emotional mapping, vulnerability identification, intimacy escalation, data extraction, memory erasure, separation. Clean. Clinical. Efficient. The only feelings I’d ever felt during an assignment were the satisfaction of a job well done and the faint, manageable discomfort that the dampener was designed to neutralize.
This was different.
Til Brogan was different.
It wasn’t his body, though his body was . . . God. The way he’d responded to me in the alley, the sounds he’d made, the way he’d surrendered completely and still somehow felt like he was the one in control. That wasn’t supposed to happen. I was supposed to be the one running the scene. I was always the one running the scene.
But when he’d looked at me afterward, forehead to forehead, rain dripping from his hair, and asked me if this was real—This is real, right? You feel this?—I’d answered before the dampener could intervene. I’d answered from somewhere the dampener wasn’t supposed to be able to reach.
I do.
I’d meant it.
I splashed cold water on my face and stared at my reflection. The dampener log in my neural display showed normal function. Fluctuation within acceptable parameters. No cause for alarm.
Liar, I thought. Lying machine.
The gym was worse.
I’d planned the seduction down to the minute. The diner for emotional priming, the alley for physical urgency, the gym for the deeper work. The slow, deliberate unraveling of his defenses. I’d identified his core vulnerability the first night I met him, the fear of being unseen, unremembered, erased. The mother-shaped wound at the center of his psyche. All I had to do was press on it gently, consistently, with enough tenderness to keep him from realizing it was pressure at all.
And I did. I pressed. I employed every technique I’d been trained in, every psychological lever the corporation had taught me to pull. I see you. Let me see the rest. You’re beautiful when you’re focused. The words were scripted. The delivery was seamless. The harvest drive in my bag was recording every neural fluctuation, every emotional spike, every precious microgram of raw heartbreak precursor.
But somewhere between the ropes and the mats, something went wrong.
His skin. The way it tasted. Salt and sweat and something faintly sweet, like the residue of cheap soap. The scars on his body. I’d read his file, knew about the street fights and the surgery and the broken bottle, but knowing and touching were different. The way he’d tensed when I touched the one from his appendix, and then the way he’d told me about his mother anyway, giving me more of himself even when it hurt.
The way he’d said, I’m yours.
Nobody had ever said that to me. Not in any of the fourteen assignments. Not in the gray institutional years before that. Not ever.
I’d told him to stop. Don’t say things like that. Because I might believe you.
That wasn’t in the script.
Neither was the way my chest hurt when he came, his body arching under mine, his eyes open and fixed on my face like I was the only thing holding him to the earth. Neither was the way I held him afterward, stroking his hair, his heartbeat slowing against my ribs. Neither was the way I’d asked him about the poster, the boxer, his stupid, beautiful dream of fighting with heart.
Heart can break just as easily as it can win.
What was I doing?
This was an assignment. A job. A harvest. In three months—less, now—I would activate the micro-mites and erase every trace of myself from his memory. He would wake up one morning and not remember my name, my face, the way I’d touched him, the things I’d said. He would be hollowed out and sold for parts, and I would be paid, promoted, praised.
That was the deal. That was always the deal.
But as I walked him back to his apartment through the rain-slick streets, his shoulder bumping mine, his hand finding my hand like it belonged there, I thought what if it wasn’t?
What if I didn’t finish the harvest?
What if I let him keep his memories, his feelings, his unbroken heart?
What if I let myself keep him?
The dampener screamed a warning. My neural display flashed red: Emotional contamination detected. Administer correction immediately.
I ignored it.
At his door, he turned to face me. The rain had stopped, and the city’s perpetual neon glow reflected in the puddles at our feet. His hair was still damp, curling. His jaw was bruised. His eyes were soft.
“Do you want to come up?” he asked.
“I shouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
Because if I go up there, I thought, I’ll never want to leave. Because I’m already in too deep. Because I’m supposed to be harvesting you, not falling in love with you.
“I have an early morning,” I said.
He nodded, like he’d foreseen that answer. But he didn’t let go of my hand. “Can I see you tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“And the day after that?”
“Til—”
“I know.” He smiled, and it was the saddest thing I’d ever seen. “I’m coming on too strong. I always do. My trainer says I don’t know how to pace myself. I’m just . . . I’ve never felt like this before. About anyone. And I’m scared it’s going to disappear if I don’t hold on tight enough.”
I kissed him. I didn’t plan to. I just did it. A hand on the back of his neck, pulling him close, my mouth on his like I was the one drowning now.
“It’s not going to disappear,” I said when I pulled back. “I promise.”
The lie was copper in my mouth.
He touched my face, the scar behind my ear, like he couldn’t stop himself, and then he unlocked his door and disappeared inside.
I stood on the sidewalk for a long time. The neon buzzed overhead. The city hummed around me. The dampener throbbed against my skull.
I pulled out my phone and called Stilo.
“It’s late,” he said by way of greeting. “This had better be important.”
“I need an adjustment.”
A pause. “To what?”
“The dampener. It’s . . .” I swallowed. “It’s not functioning at full capacity. I’m experiencing intermittency.”
Stilo was silent for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was precariously calm. “Intermittency.”
“Yes.”
“Feelings.”
I didn’t answer.
“Extractor.” He said my title like a curse. “You know what happens to Extractors who catch feelings. You’ve seen the disciplinary files.”
“I’m not catching anything. I’m asking for a technical adjustment.”
“Of course you are.” I heard him tapping something, a stylus on a tablet, probably. Making notes. “Come to the backroom tomorrow. Noon. We’ll run diagnostics and issue you a new unit. Stronger. More aggressive.”
“Fine.”
“And Morfeo?”
“Yes?”
“If I find out this is more than a technical issue, I’ll recommend you for reconditioning. Do you understand what that means?”
I did. We all did. Reconditioning was what happened to Extractors who went rogue, who fell in love, who grew a conscience, who tried to warn their targets or sabotage their harvests. They went into the white room and came out . . . different. Blank. Obedient. Empty.
“Understood,” I said.
“Good. Accelerate the harvest. The yield projections from this subject are exceptional. Don’t waste them on sentiment.”
He hung up.
I stood in the rainless street, the neon washing my skin in blue and pink, and I looked up at the window of Til’s apartment. The light was on. I could see his silhouette moving behind the curtain, pulling off his shirt, maybe. Getting ready for bed. Ordinary movements. Ordinary life.
In a few months, he wouldn’t remember any of this. Wouldn’t remember me. Wouldn’t remember the diner or the alley or the gym or the way I’d held him afterward, tracing the scars on his body, promising things I had no right to promise.
But I would remember.
God help me, I would remember everything.
I turned and walked away. The dampener hummed its insect hum. The harvest drive sat heavy in my bag, pulsing with data, waiting to be filled.
And for the first time in my career, I hated what I was.
[Morfeo’s personal log, audio transcription. Timestamp: 02:47 a.m.]
Subject Til Brogan. Emotional resonance profile: exceptional. Exceeding projections.
Vulnerability index: recalibrating. Original estimate placed subject at 94%. Current observations suggest 100%. Subject’s attachment formation is accelerating beyond standard parameters. Trust thresholds have been breached. Physical intimacy has been achieved and reciprocated.
Atypical findings: The dampener is not functioning correctly.
No. That’s not accurate.
The dampener is functioning exactly as designed. The problem is that the dampener was designed for feelings that are manageable. The mild discomfort of physical intimacy, the faint echoes of empathy, the predictable guilt response that all Extractors learn to suppress.
What I am experiencing is not manageable. What I am experiencing is not mild.
When subject said I’m yours—
[Long pause. Audible breathing. Ambient sound of rain on a window.]
When subject said I’m yours, I felt something. Something the dampener couldn’t touch. Something that originated in a part of my brain the corporation told me didn’t exist anymore. The corporation was supposed to have surgically removed that part during my initial conditioning. The part that feels.
[Static. A sound that might be a laugh or might be a sob.]
Stilo is issuing a new unit tomorrow. Stronger. More aggressive. He thinks the problem is technical. He thinks the solution is more dampening.
He’s wrong.
The problem is that Til Brogan is real. In a world full of scripts and protocols and commissioned seductions, he is the only real thing I have ever touched. And I am going to destroy him.
[Long pause.]
I am going to destroy him, and I don’t know how to stop.
[End transcription.]
End of Chapter Two.