“I fucking hope so,” I reply, and I hang up.
The truth is—my control is still there. This is just a small deviation from the initial plan. I could crawl back into the darkness and forget everything about today. It’s just…I don’twant to. I don’t want a clean win. I want to hand him the match and beg him to light it to see how far he will go.
How the fuck did I not see Azrael had it in him to push the limits? It’s not like he is hiding it, not really. He is just less obvious than the rest. And I let Alex hand me a pamphlet and call it research.
I take another bottle and finally pour the wine into a glass, emptying it before jumping straight to the third one.
My brain is frantically thinking, trying to put the pieces together, but nothing clicked.
After hours of wine and thinking, and thinking and wine, I finally grab my laptop. If you want something to be done in the proper way, you’d better do it yourself. He thinks he knows me? Let me show him what it really looks like to know someone.
Last time I did research on my new potential killer, I must admit I was sloppy. Or not determined enough.
It took hours to unveil something, and the morning sun is already sending light through the curtains when I’m done. But when I finally do, I’m…impressed. Quite ecstatic. Because it means I was right. And I love being right—especially when the truth is uglier than I expected.
No birth date. No childhood file. No passport. The online surface metadata holds nothing on him. I should have known that when silence is this loud, it’s not accidental. It’s hard to leaveno traceunless you really want to, and coincidences like this take a lot of work. This is getting better and better.
Azrael Lennox isn’t a man who stumbled into darkness.
He manufactured it.
Three years ago, he wasn’t a professor.
He was a government contractor embedded in a black-budget program meant to study cognitive functions—psychological breaking points. The official name of the project was Affective Disruption Modeling. The unofficial one? “The Paragon Project.”
His job was to study how far you could push a human before they surrender, and then map how long they’d still obey after. Real people with real trauma—unwillingly recruited convicts under the guise of “experimental research.”
Some of them came out the other side…docile.
Others didn’t come out at all.
His techniques were controversial even then. Extreme isolation conditioning, induced identity dissociation, and personality rewiring.
One report noted that several subjects exhibited symptoms identical to those of cult indoctrination followers. Another report mentioned one subject tried to slit her own wrists while thanking him.
He wasn’t reprimanded. He just stopped after a classified incident, and the program quietly folded. Or more likely, was shut down—not because it failed, but because the person running it was deemed “psychologically incompatible with conducting experiments on humans.”
Was this what he was fucking planning to do to me now? Make me his puppet?
The final memo I find is a statement of concern, signed by a few clinical officials. Each noted the same thing. “Dr. Lennox is no longer studying psychopaths. He is creating them.”
That’s when he vanished from government records and reemerged as a “lecturer” at a minor university. Now he’s got aclassroom full of broken teenagers, insecure overachievers, and bright-eyed masochists begging to be told who they are.
He just changed the battlefield.
And me?
I walked right into it.
No—I volunteered like a dumb bitch who knows nothing. Pathetic. Useless. I’m ashamed of myself.
The last two inches of the classified document are more than interesting, and it finally gives me the weapon I can use against him. The one that would put me right back above him, in control, and when the time is right, I will absolutely use it.
With the complete,real,profile ready, I finally close the laptop. It’s time to make my move.
Victoria: You missed something.
Azrael: Show me.