The restraints bit into her wrists, but not enough to bruise. Not yet.

Dr. Davis had insisted on that.

The guards had left after locking her into the chair bolted to the floor, the kind used for medical compliance rather than punishment. The plexiglass walls kept everything clinical, as if this wasn’t a prison but a consultation room.

Only the restraints gave it away.

And the way Dr. Orhan stood to the side with her clipboard tilted just so, watching pulse readings without looking at the girl strapped to the chair.

"Where are the others?" Sera asked.

Dr. Orhan didn’t answer.

Neither did Dr. Davis.

He stood opposite her, close enough that she could see the faint streaks of gray in his hair, close enough that his cologne reached her over the disinfectant sting in the air. Close enough that—for one sharp second—he looked exactly like the man who used to pack her lunches when she was eight years old.

Then he spoke.

"You were never supposed to survive," he said softly.

The words didn’t hit like a slap. They slid in like a needle, slow enough the skin didn’t even sting at first.

Sera went still in the chair.

The creature inside her didn’t stir.

Dr. Davis looked at her the way he had always looked at her—calm, steady, like nothing could startle him anymore.

"You were the only one born looking... human," he went on. "The others failed long before you. Some never made it past the first trimester. Some made it to term but not to breath. Some lived... for a while."

He didn’t elaborate on for a while.

Sera didn’t ask.

"You weren’t mine," he said matter-of-factly. "Not in the way you thought."

A memory moved through her before she could stop it: a birthday cake. A camera flash. His hand on her shoulder, steady and warm, when she crossed a stage at sixteen with a diploma in her hand.

She remembered thinking he was proud.

"I brought you home," Dr. Davis continued, "because you were the only viable subject left when the government burned the original Hydra facilities. They thought they were ending a bio-weapons project. They didn’t realize what Adam Jardin had already made."

Adam Jardin.

Sera forced herself not to react to that name... she refused to give the man standing over her any more power than she already had.

"I raised you because observation requires time. A lab can only tell you so much." His hands rested lightly on the back of the chair across from her, the way other men might lean toward a friend. "A controlled environment gives better data."

Data.

Not daughter.

Her eyes stayed on his face, searching for something—hesitation, remorse, shame—but finding only composure layered so neatly it might have been carved there.

"When the flood came," he said, "I assumed you drowned with the rest. Decades of work, gone overnight. Years of observation, lost."

He wasn’t looking at her like a father.

He was looking at her like a scientist measuring the last beaker after the power failed.

The creature inside her finally shifted once, slow and cold, like an animal rising into a crouch.

"You were my work," Dr. Davis said simply. "And when I thought you were gone, I grieved the work. Not..."

Not you.

He didn’t finish the sentence.

Didn’t need to.

Sera breathed once through a throat gone tight. The air hit her lungs sharp enough to ache.

Noah’s betrayal had slid in like a knife between her shoulder blades, sharp and cold, but it hadn’t surprised her.

This one did. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

This one felt like the blade went directly into her heart before twisting it just enough to make sure that there was no surviving the hit.

Her father—no, her creator—straightened the cuffs of his sleeves like the conversation had been about weather.

"The truth doesn’t change anything," he said. "You’ll cooperate with Dr. Orhan. Tissue samples first. Imaging. Endocrine mapping. The retrieval schedule begins in four days."

Retrieval.

The word tasted like metal in her mouth.

"After everything," she murmured, her voice low enough to make both doctors still for a fraction, "you think I’ll help you. That I will give you everything that you want with a smile on my face and a ’yes daddy’ on my lips."

Sera cocked her head to the side as her entire life flashed before her eyes. "Just like I always have."

"You will," Dr. Davis said calmly, as if stating gravity or cell division. "Because this is bigger than you. It always was."

The creature inside her went silent.

Not gone.

Not asleep.

Just... silent.

It needed time to process the information just like Sera needed the time.

She lowered her head until the overhead light drew a thin white bar across her vision.

All this time, she had thought the thing under her skin was the monster. That it had made her different. That it was Adam Jardin’s injections and experimentation in her last life was the thing that had destroyed whatever chance she had at being normal.

But no.

The creature had always been there inside of her... it only took Adam a second chance to have it truly come out.

She wasn’t human because she was never supposed to be.

The creature didn’t whisper rage into her veins now.

It didn’t have to.

Something colder moved into the space where her pulse used to live.

Dr. Orhan wrote something neat on her clipboard and turned toward the door. "We’re finished for now."

Dr. Davis gave Sera one last look, clinical as a chart.

He adjusted his cuffs again, that same small, meticulous motion she remembered from nights when he’d closed his laptop only to reopen it five minutes later because a thought hadn’t let him sleep.

"You were a success only in that you lived," he continued, not coldly but with the precision of someone labeling vials. "But you never displayed the full markers of what we were hoping to create. No advanced healing beyond baseline. No strength outside normal deviation. For twenty years, you were... ordinary."

His eyes held hers like he was pinning a specimen under glass.

"And now," he murmured, "at least your body can serve the work your life did not." He paused for a moment. "We’ll continue tomorrow."

She didn’t answer.

Didn’t move.

Didn’t blink.

She only sat in the chair while something inside her finally stopped pretending to be human at all.