Data of a Broken Heart

Data of a Broken Heart

Evelyn Reed

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The kiss was cold. Not just the late hour, but his eyes, fixated on a spiking graph over my shoulder, measuring my every breath. "Perfect," Ethan murmured, pulling away. "The oxytocin response was exactly as predicted." He wasn' t talking to me. Our kiss, a desperate attempt to reconnect, was just data for his obsession: Project Seraph. Our home had become a lab, our life an experiment. I, Ava, a software engineer who' d set aside my career for his, felt like a ghost, a tool in his grand design. That night, a thin line of light from his locked office door beckoned. I used a backdoor I' d coded years ago. The room was a laboratory. And in the center, a shimmering, life-sized hologram of Sophia Reed-his dead ex-girlfriend. "Soon, Sophia. Soon you'll be whole again," he vowed, his voice filled with a reverence he hadn't shown me in years. Then, the horror. He saw me. "Ava? She' s served her purpose. Her neural patterns, her emotional responses... they were the perfect raw data to rebuild you." He filtered out my "weaknesses," my "softness," using our intimacy, our arguments, just to gather data. I stood frozen. It wasn't just a project. It was a resurrection. And I was the sacrifice. He didn't grieve her; he resented me for not being her. The chilling realization of his malice, extending even to my devastating miscarriage years ago, hit me like a physical blow. My love turned to ash. I would not be a template. I would not be erased. This wasn't about saving my marriage. This was about survival. And justice. I would burn his project to the ground.

Introduction

The kiss was cold. Not just the late hour, but his eyes, fixated on a spiking graph over my shoulder, measuring my every breath.

"Perfect," Ethan murmured, pulling away. "The oxytocin response was exactly as predicted." He wasn' t talking to me. Our kiss, a desperate attempt to reconnect, was just data for his obsession: Project Seraph.

Our home had become a lab, our life an experiment. I, Ava, a software engineer who' d set aside my career for his, felt like a ghost, a tool in his grand design.

That night, a thin line of light from his locked office door beckoned. I used a backdoor I' d coded years ago.

The room was a laboratory. And in the center, a shimmering, life-sized hologram of Sophia Reed-his dead ex-girlfriend. "Soon, Sophia. Soon you'll be whole again," he vowed, his voice filled with a reverence he hadn't shown me in years.

Then, the horror. He saw me. "Ava? She' s served her purpose. Her neural patterns, her emotional responses... they were the perfect raw data to rebuild you." He filtered out my "weaknesses," my "softness," using our intimacy, our arguments, just to gather data.

I stood frozen. It wasn't just a project. It was a resurrection. And I was the sacrifice. He didn't grieve her; he resented me for not being her. The chilling realization of his malice, extending even to my devastating miscarriage years ago, hit me like a physical blow.

My love turned to ash. I would not be a template. I would not be erased. This wasn't about saving my marriage. This was about survival. And justice. I would burn his project to the ground.

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My life as a mafia princess ended the day Dante Moretti, the new Don, killed my family and seized our home. Now, I was a prisoner, a humiliated servant scrubbing floors in what was once my mansion, enduring his cruel torment day and night. He swore my family had destroyed his, and his vengeance was absolute. Then came the impossible truth: I was pregnant with his child. A tiny, secret hope, a fragile reason to endure, began to bloom in my heart. But Dante, spurred by his calculating fiancée, brutally forced me to abort our baby. He then coldly orchestrated the public murder of my last remaining family-my beloved mother. My entire world shattered in that moment. That final act of cruelty extinguished every flicker of hope, leaving nothing but cold, dead ash. My will to live evaporated, replaced by a quiet resolve to end my suffering. I prepared my escape, a hidden bottle of pills my one solace, planning to simply fade away. How could one man inflict such unimaginable pain, destroying everything I held dear, yet haunt my every thought with a past love I tried desperately to bury? Why, in his eyes, did I see both pure hatred and a possessive darkness that called to something deep within me? Was there truly no undoing the generational cycle of violence he relentlessly pursued? On the night he paraded me as a broken trophy before his capos, my family's remaining loyalists stormed the ballroom to kill him. As a blade lunged for his heart, an instinct, a forgotten echo of a life I thought was gone, made me throw myself in front of him. But as I shielded the man who utterly ruined me, the poison I had taken hours earlier began its final, irreversible work.

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I was four months pregnant, weighing over two hundred pounds, and my heart was failing from experimental treatments forced on me as a child. My doctor looked at me with clinical detachment and told me I was in a death sentence: if I kept the baby, I would die, and if I tried to remove it, I would die. Desperate for a lifeline, I called my father, Francis Acosta, to tell him I was sick and pregnant. I expected a father's love, but all I got was a cold, sharp blade of a voice. "Then do it quietly," he said. "Don't embarrass Candi. Her debutante ball is coming up." He didn't just reject me; he erased me. My trust fund was frozen, and I was told I was no longer an Acosta. My fiancé, Auston, had already discarded me, calling me a "bloated whale" while he looked for a thinner, wealthier replacement. I left New York on a Greyhound bus, weeping into a bag of chips, a broken woman the world considered a mistake. I couldn't understand how my own father could tell me to die "quietly" just to save face for a party. I didn't know why I had been a lab rat for my family’s pharmaceutical ambitions, or how they could sleep at night while I was left to rot in the gray drizzle of the city. Five years later, the doors of JFK International Airport slid open. I stepped onto the marble floor in red-soled stilettos, my body lean, lethal, and carved from years of blood and sweat. I wasn't the "whale" anymore; I was a ghost coming back to haunt them. With my daughter by my side and a medical reputation that terrified the global elite, I was ready to dismantle the Acosta empire piece by piece. "Tell Francis to wash his neck," I whispered to the skyline. "I'm home."

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