I hold her a moment longer, weighing the cost of her kiss, and decide night clubs have never worked in our favor.

Without verbal acknowledgement, I release her but only to take hold of her hand. Then I head toward the stairs that lead to a closed-off section connecting two buildings. While she was dancing, letting another man grope her, I was scoping out the building to mark all exits and blind spots.

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 was sad I was dead. She felt sorrow. 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 all dead now.”

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 all I am. 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.

Out of desperation, I step toward her and grab her arm, momentarily forgetting Blakely’s investment in martial arts.

Reflexes sharp, she spins out of my reach and removes her hands from her pockets, clutching some object. “I’m not leaving here until you tell me the truth about what you’ve done to me, and how you’re going to fix it.”

I wipe my hand over my mouth. “I told you, there is no way to reverse the treatment,” I tell her honestly. “Once new neural pathways are created, they can’t be closed. They’re not a light switch I can toggle on and off. Not without permanent, necrotic damage to the cells.”

In other words, death.

“What you underwent,” I say, wishing I could translate numeric equations into words, “was extreme, for lack of a better explanation. Any further—”

“I understand,” she cuts me off. She stares past me into the mirror, a faraway look slipping over her face. When she directs her attention my way, I glimpse an echo of her former self. “All I want is my life back, you insane shit. I want myself back. If you can’t give me that, then we’re done, Alex. It’s over.”

I see her muscles tense as she closes the distance. I see her right shoulder drop. I make a split-second decision not to block her attack and let Blakely punch my face.

The impact jars me for a suspended moment, delaying my reaction time. My jaw takes the brunt of the strike, whatever solid object she’s holding distributing the impact without give.

She goes to deliver another punch, like she’s compulsively practiced on that punching bag, and I capture her arm and shoulder in an arm-lock to restrain her movements. We grapple like this, her wriggling to loosen my hold, me refusing to take her down, until she forces me to sweep her leg. I catch her around her lower back before she hits the floor.

“Your emotions are hindering your decision making,” I say.

“No fucking shit.” She jabs my ribs. On reflex, I release her.

She lands on her ass, but recovers quickly, rolling onto her hip. She swipes her foot out and takes me down beside her.

A laugh bursts free. “You’ve gotten good with your training.”

She groans as she gets to her knees. “I knew you were watching me, you sick—”

“Watching over you,” I tell her, turning onto my side and raising my hands in time to block her fist. Her jab stings the hell out of my palm, and I circle her wrist, squeezing hard to make her open her hand.

A roll of nickels clatters to the tiled floor. “You’re going to break your fingers. And I like your fingers.”

She tries to jerk out of my hold, but I won’t release her. “It was supposed to break your face.”