Page 118 of Dose

Her eyes find mine.

“Color?”

“Green. Finished, but green.” She reaches for me. “Hold me.”

I gather her against my chest.

“They had eighteen years,” she whispers. “They called it ownership, but I was inventory. Tonight I chose the word.”

“And you can take it back whenever you want.”

Her grip tightens.

“You’re not equipment,” I tell her. “I want your chemistry and your impossible spreadsheets because they are parts of you. I want the woman who names centrifuges and argues with recipes. I want all of it. But none of it is mine unless you give it.”

“I did.”

“I know.”

We run a bath and lower ourselves into the warm water. Isla settles between my legs with her back against my chest. I give her water first, then the protein bar she refused before the operation. She eats half without argument.

“The file said engineered vehicle incident,” she says. “Then it moved straight into my response to isolation. Exceptional. Within parameters.”

“The appendix was missing.”

“I know.”

“We verify before we let their version become yours.”

She leans her head back against my shoulder.

“Was that okay?” she asks. “What I asked for.”

“You were present. You told me what you wanted. You used your words when I checked you. You asked me to stop when you were finished.” I kiss her wet hair. “That makes it ours. It doesn’t mean tomorrow can’t feel complicated. If it does, we talk about it.”

“You’ll still do it again?”

Dark want tightens low in my body despite exhaustion.

“If you ask me when this isn’t the first night after finding your acquisition file.”

She turns enough to look at me. “That’s annoyingly responsible.”

“Don’t spread it around.”

Her mouth almost smiles.

“I want to find Vale,” she says. “Not so I can kill her.”

“What do you want?”

“I want the missing appendix. I want to know whether my parents really died. And I want her to see that I became a person after everything she authorized.”

“When we find her, I will be beside you.”

“That sounds like a promise.”

“It is.”