She sat in silence, hidden behind the semi-transparent glass divider, watching him without daring to come closer. Rain was there, lying on the gray-fabric couch, breathing quietly, his eyes closed from exhaustion. Her hand, resting on her lap, unconsciously gripped the edge of the cloth, as if even the slightest movement might wake him.
She leaned her head back, her eyes fixed on the high ceiling adorned with soft threads of light, and sighed.
"Is opening your heart to someone… and getting close… really this hard? I don't know. I've never tried before."
She whispered to herself, barely loud enough for the walls to hear.
Flashback – "Before the story began"
Her childhood didn't belong to any traditional tale. There was no mother brushing her hair, no father lifting her on his shoulders. There was only a mind pulsing with calculations and numbers, in a small body that couldn't comprehend warmth.
A girl who loved puzzles more than toys, who learned programming at the age of five, and dismantled household appliances just to reassemble them better. Genius? Perhaps. A curse? Definitely.
Her father—if he could even be called that—couldn't bear the burden of a child who talked about nuclear reactors instead of bedtime stories. And when he was offered enough money, he didn't hesitate. He sold her to the first ones who recognized her worth: a group of scientists no one had ever seen, operating in the shadows, creating and testing everything forbidden by law and ethics.
She grew up in dim hallways, underground, surrounded by glass tubes and laboratories that reeked of death and copper. They taught her how to cut skin to implant machines, how to control the human brain, how to manipulate memory, and swap consciousness. They never asked if she wanted this. But they gave her something no one else had: the freedom of knowledge.
She grew up knowing she wasn't normal. But she didn't care. She didn't need to. She only wanted one thing: control.
By the age of fourteen, she was selling her inventions on the black market—devices that unlocked doors without touch, machines that extracted secrets from human minds, programs that interfered with satellites. By seventeen, her name was whispered among the elite in a world that acknowledged no laws—a world of filthy rich dealers in everything: organs, memories, even worlds. People who could have anything as long as they had money.
There, she wasn't a girl. She was a scientist. A death merchant. A mad genius. They loved her because they couldn't predict her.
She didn't know what tenderness was. Didn't understand attachment. Didn't know how to express emotions—or feel them. Everything that drove her was the pursuit of dopamine, the thrill of risk, the rush of new ideas. She hated boredom more than pain.
And she never once tried to be "good."