THE BILLIONAIRE'S THERAPIST

Chapter Five: The Breach

Damien’s POV

Alarms don’t sound here.

They whisper.

A soft chime echoes through the vents, gentle and soothing — the kind of sound meant to keep you calm even when everything is falling apart. A comforting sound hiding a lie in melody form.

Selene’s eyes flick toward the door, her body tensing before her mind catches up. “Stay here,” she says automatically — the therapist’s tone again, that calm, reassuring cadence that doesn’t belong to real panic. She’s halfway to the hallway before I even answer.

But I don’t stay.

The light in the room shifts from sterile white to a muted amber. It crawls along the walls, washing everything in a false sunset glow. My chest tightens. I know that color. A silent lockdown — security protocol triggered without sirens or announcements. Someone’s containing something. Or someone.

Maybe me.

I move before the thought settles. The corridor hums with energy, soft and low, like a pulse hidden beneath concrete. The air tastes faintly metallic. I take the side stairwell, two steps at a time, passing the glass panels that overlook the lower decks. Fog presses against the windows like a living thing, swallowing the outside world.

Below, I hear the machines — that steady mechanical heartbeat — keeping everything alive. Or pretending to. The clinic looks clean on the surface, but I know what’s underneath: data vaults, sealed archives, sublevels no one’s supposed to remember. I designed them that way.

Project Hourglass was supposed to be dead.

But ghosts never stay buried in my world.

The control hub door blinks red when I swipe my card. Access denied. I try again, slower this time, as if patience might change the outcome. Still red.

Someone revoked my clearance.

I breathe out a dry laugh. “Cute.”

My backup is more personal — a dermal chip, embedded just beneath the skin of my wrist. I press it to the sensor, and the door slides open with a reluctant hiss.

Inside, the room is a sea of blue light. Dozens of screens flicker, lines of code pouring down like digital rain. My eyes track the scrolling text — recursive commands, unauthorized intrusions, protocols written in my own language. Whoever’s doing this isn’t an outsider. They know the system the way I do. The way I wrote it.

A single folder flashes white among the chaos.

/PROJECT_HOURGLASS/Subject_001/Ward_Selene/

For a second, everything in me stills. The air, the sound, my pulse — all suspended in that one name.

Then I open it.

The folder blooms into static, then into video fragments — grainy, colorless. No sound, just flickering frames.

Selene.

Strapped to a chair under harsh white light. Electrodes pressed to her temples. Her lips move, forming words I can’t hear. There’s a voice behind the camera — low, measured — mine.

My throat closes.

The timestamp blinks at the bottom corner: three months before the breakdown.

Before her. Before this.

I try to stop the playback, but the video jerks forward on its own, jumping through fragments — her face twisting, eyes wide, mouth open in a silent scream. Then static devours the screen until one image remains.

Her face again. Tears streaking down her cheeks.

And beneath it, a single line of text:

“Emotional imprint successful.”

The world narrows. My chest feels hollow, like something’s clawed its way out.

I don’t breathe. I don’t blink. I just stare at the words until they dissolve into black.

Behind me, the door opens with a soft pneumatic hiss.

“Damien,” Selene’s voice — quiet, hesitant.

I don’t turn. “You should’ve told me.”

She steps in, slow, careful, as if the air itself might shatter. “I wanted to,” she says, voice trembling around the edges. “But they were watching.”

“Who?”

Her silence is louder than the alarms could ever be. When I finally turn, she looks smaller than I’ve ever seen her — no clipboard, no steady posture, no mask. Just a woman standing in a room full of ghosts.

“I didn’t remember,” she says. “Not until the sessions. Not until you started… remembering too.”

I take a step closer. She doesn’t back away.

“You were part of it?” I ask, my voice low, steady only because I force it to be.

Her eyes glisten under the flickering light. “We both were. They— they said it was research. Emotional conditioning, neural imprinting. They wanted to prove love could be manufactured.”

The words sink in like knives. “And we were the test subjects.”

“Yes.”

My jaw tightens. “Why didn’t you tell me the moment you knew?”

She exhales shakily, tears breaking free now. “Because I thought it was fake. That everything between us was programmed. I didn’t know what was real anymore.”

Her confession hits something deep in me — anger, confusion, grief, all tangled together. I want to shout, to demand answers, to tear the room apart until the truth bleeds out of every wire. But I don’t. I just stand there, my hands shaking at my sides.

She moves closer, each step hesitant, as if she’s approaching a wounded animal. “Damien,” she whispers, “when I look at you, I feel everything they tried to erase. The fear, the pull, the… connection. It’s all still there.”

“Stop.” My voice cracks on the word.

“I can’t,” she says. “Because somewhere inside you, you still remember too.”

I turn away, staring at the wall of dead screens. My reflection flickers faintly across them — a stranger in fragments.

“You think I can just forget that they strapped you to a chair and called it love?” I say, the words scraping out of me.

Her breath catches, but she doesn’t retreat. “No. But maybe it’s the only reason we found each other again.”

Her honesty cuts deeper than any lie could.

I look at her — really look. The trembling hands she hides by her sides, the faint redness under her eyes, the way her body leans toward me even as her mind tells her not to.

There’s something unbearably human in her fear. Something familiar.

The silence between us grows heavy again, thick and electric.

“I built this place to erase what hurt,” I say quietly. “But maybe all I did was build a cage to keep it alive.”

Selene steps closer, close enough that I can feel her breath against my skin. “You didn’t build a cage,” she whispers. “You built a mirror.”

I search her face, trying to find the lie — the manipulation, the script. But there’s nothing. Just her.

The hum of the servers fades beneath the pounding in my chest. My hand twitches at my side, the impulse to reach for her almost unbearable.

“Why us?” I ask finally. “Why would they choose us?”

Her gaze wavers, and for a heartbeat, she looks as lost as I feel. “Because we already felt something,” she says. “Something they couldn’t quantify. They wanted to see if they could make it… controllable.”

“For what?”

Her eyes lift to mine.

“For love.”