At the door, I stop, watching her chest move as she breathes in unevenly.
“Tonight, I created a monster,” I whisper in the darkness. “And that monster, she’s mine now. You’re mine now. She’ll sleep in your skin, breathe through your lungs, and wake withyou every morning. She’s never leaving. Not until the day you die.”
I smile, like Victor Frankenstein watching his monster take its first breath.
“You asked for the monster. I delivered.”
Now, I’m supposed to leave, but my brain is debating whether or not I really want that to happen. My hand hovers on the door handle long enough to betray hesitation.No, it’s the aftershock of a successful experiment, not me caring.
I refuse to believe otherwise, so I leave before I do anything stupid like stay and make sure she’s safe.
And when the latch clicks shut behind me, sounding like the final nail in the coffin, it finally hits me: I broke Victoria.
CHAPTER 16
AZRAEL
3 YEARS AGO
The first time I descended into the Facility, it felt like slipping beneath the skin of the world into a sterilized hell.
The elevator sank in silence, a coffin of steel and light that allowed the macabre aura of the place to invade my senses, foreseeing a place where tormented souls go to find their ending.
When the doors parted, I stepped into a corridor too clean to be humane. Walls, ceiling, floor, all the same icy white that burned your eyes if you stared for too long. The air reeked of chlorine, rusted metal, and cheap disinfectant, while the over-scrubbed floor mirrored the overhead fluorescents until the hallway seemed to stretch into infinity. Everything about this place screamed damnation.I was finally home.
No signs on the walls indicated a direction, nor were there plaques on the doors naming the inmates inside. No details, noinformation, no pretending anything in there is alive or worthy of being remembered. I’d already removed them all.
The mind, especially the fractured one, clings to context and recurring signs that can keep up contact with reality. It begs for normalcy, something that makes sense in an abyss of nothingness. I took that away too. No room numbers. No clocks. No ‘you are here’ markers.
In this place, you aren’t here. You aren’t part of something. You aren’t alive or worthy of being something. All you are is anobodyin a place that doesn’t exist. Which is just a metaphorical way of saying, ‘you are fucked.’
Anyone that steps inside this underground building unwillingly will not come out alive, or at least not with all their pieces intact.
At twenty-five, I’m the youngest clinical director in federal history. Appointed not through favors, but because no one else dared to do what I could. Two doctorates—one in neuropsychology and one in behavioral engineering—and with more published papers than most tenured professors. Of course, some of my work had to be censored. Experts in the field feared the idea of me applying the concepts I was preaching, and I made the Review Board nervous. Rightly so.
It’s just, I’d always craved chaos, always wanted to inflict pain and see how far the human mind could be pushed toward self-destruction before it realized it was too late. And now, I finally have the free rein to put all my fantasies into practice.
On paper, the program is called Cognitive Realignment Mapping, but this is just a bureaucratic euphemism. The government’s goal? To take life-sentenced inmates and create subjects who do not question the reason anymore and will fearlessly go straight into the middle of a battlefield when they are told to, because their brain has forgotten how to process emotions.
My goal is less patriotic and more focused on the only goal in life that truly matters, the only result worth pursuing. I want to create an army of psychopaths, the perfected version of humanity. An elite class of individuals immune to empathy, fear, or any other stupid feeling that humans seem to possess.
The Paragon Project—a project meant to create pure perfection.
Reconstruction. Evolution. The federal boys think I’m cataloging subjects, bribing their starving neurons with promises and rewards. But I know better. They must relinquish their free will, submit to my desire, and forget everything that once made them alive.
The idea is simple: don’t fix broken minds. Destroy them. Build better ones.
The old definitions of psychopathy are pitiful, to say the least. Trauma, abuse, neglect, unstable attachments. They treat it like it is some disease. Like something that needs to be cured or managed and kept under control. But I see it for what it truly is: an upgrade. A mind beyond fear, beyond guilt, beyond useless emotional static.
Psychopathy gives clarity. If you want a mind that never breaks, you must first design one that has nothing left to lose.
They give me criminals, people who society has forgotten or wishes never existed. I take away their pasts, shove their memories into a corner of their brain that will never be touched again, and redesign them into my subjects.
They are no longer people, just numbers, variables in my experiment.
Stage 1: Break the mind. No-touch manipulation of the body and mind.
We start with deprivation of anything that could awaken their senses: light, sleep, and sound. Remove everything they’ve regarded as normal until now. Then comes the overstimulation,with contradictory narratives such as calling them random names, providing a fake description of their past, and switching the clinician who is training them, while using the same nametag. Then we create memory loops, repeating the same interviews for days or weeks in a row until they start to question their own lucidity.