Calculated Obsession

The architect

I waited until Luca was asleep.

His office was unlocked. “Don’t mind if I do.” I thought to myself as I walked in. I rifled through files—shipment logs, security reports, nothing useful. Then I found it.

A photo, tucked in a drawer.

My mother.

Standing beside a Volkov lieutenant, alive. Alive.

The date stamp: 6 months ago.

My knees buckled.

“She faked her death,” Luca said from the doorway.

I whirled. “You knew?!”

“Not until recently.” He leaned against the doorframe, his face unreadable. “She’s The Architect.”

The room spun. “Why?”

I knew this from the picture Mia had shown me earlier. It was blurry and void of any, if not all, color, but I could still tell. I tried to lie to myself. Convince my mind it wasn’t true she was dead, and I’m paranoid. But once I closed my eyes, I dreamed of the basement again.

The concrete floor was cold beneath my knees, the flickering fluorescent light casting jagged shadows on the walls. I was nine years old, clutching a math test marked 99%.

“You missed a question,” my mother said, her voice sharp as a scalpel. She stood over me, her lab coat pristine, her dark hair pulled into a tight bun. “Carelessness, Elena. Science does not reward carelessness.”

I stared at the red X over problem #12. Solve for x: 3x + 5 = 20.

I’d written x = 5.

She’d wanted x = 5.0.

“You know the rules,” she said, handing me a stack of blank worksheets. “No dinner until you finish. Precision is everything.”

The dream shifted. Hours later, my fingers cramped from writing, my stomach gnawing itself hollow. My mother knelt beside me, her breath smelling of coffee and antiseptic.

“You’ll thank me one day,” she whispered, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. "The world will try to break you. I’m making you unbreakable.”

Then she was gone, the door locking behind her.

I woke up drenched in sweat, Luca’s penthouse silent except for the hum of the security system. My hands trembled as I fumbled for the glass of water on the nightstand.

Inhale. Exhale.

Inhale. Exhale.

My mother’s voice echoed in my head. In the years after she passed, I only experienced her torment through dreams. It always felt as though she was never gone. She was just always there. Even in death, she never let go of her disappointment of a daughter. I remember the day from my dream clearly. This was the nicest punishment I had ever received from her. As I grew older, the consequences of failure became more and more violent. Lashes, whips, hot coils, wooden ladles, my mother was always very creative. Precision is everything.

But precision hadn’t saved her.

I was 16 when she passed.

The coffin was closed. “Car accident,” they said. “Instant. She didn’t suffer.”

I didn’t cry. My mother hated tears. “Emotions are chemical distractions,” she’d told me once. “Control them, or they’ll control you.”

At the graveside, a man in a black suit approached me—Luca’s father, though I didn’t know it then.

“Your mother was a visionary,” he said, placing a hand on my shoulder. “A shame her work was… misunderstood.”

I shrugged him off. “She was perfect.”

He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Perfection is a painfully dangerous pursuit.”

I looked up to catch his eyes. I knew that. I knew it better than him, the painful pursuit that was perfection. My body remembered. My high pain tolerance was a testament. Broken bones, fractured limbs, scared skin, the evidence was still there. The experiment was me.

I am my mother’s life work, her greatest creation. In her pursuit of perfection through me, she put me through all kinds of torture. So as I stood there watching her casket get lowered into the earth, all I felt was relief. Who knew one could be liberated so easily? Sofia Rossi was in fact not untouchable, and her mortality was my freedom.

Luca found me in his office at dawn, the stolen photo of my mother spread on his desk.

“You should’ve told me,” I said, my voice raw.

He leaned against the doorway, arms crossed. “Would you have believed me?”

No. I wouldnt have. but he doesnt have to know that.

“Why is she alive?”

“Ask her yourself.” He tossed me the burner phone again.

I stared at it, my thumb hovering over the call button. Precision is everything. Fear gripped my bones. It was like I could hear her voice. As stern as always, it echoed through the air in the cold damp basement of the old mansion.

My knees buckled. Luca caught me, his grip firm.

“She’s using the Volkovs to steal her work which you’ve improved,” he said. “But you already knew that.”

No. No. No

That woman cannot be allowed anywhere near my work. Not at this stage. She is insane. She would kill if she needed to speed up the process. To her, life had always been nothing more than some carbon atoms.

…

Age 16. Just before the accident

My mother stood at the whiteboard, her handwriting a furious storm of equations. “Ethics are for the weak, Elena. True progress requires sacrifice.”

I shifted in my seat, my stomach churning. We’d dissected a lab rat that morning. It had still been alive.

“But what if the sacrifice is… wrong?” I asked.

She turned, her eyes blazing. “Wrong? You think Galileo cared about ‘wrong’? You think Marie Curie stopped because someone got hurt?”

“No, but—”

“But nothing.” She slammed her chalk down. “You want to change the world? Then stop feeling. Start thinking.”

That night, I heard her arguing with someone on the phone. “I don’t care if it’s dangerous. I’ll finish the trials myself.”

Two weeks later, she was dead.

Except she wasn’t.

…

Sensing my discomfort, Luca moved like a storm. One second he was across the room, his jaw tight, his eyes blazing, and the next he was on me. His arms wrapped around me, crushing me to his chest with a force that stole my breath. I didn’t resist. I couldn’t. His body was solid, unyielding, and for the first time in hours, I felt something other than the crippling fear of the woman who gave me life.

But it wasn’t enough. The chaos in my head was still there, clawing at the edges of my mind. I needed more. I needed to feel something—anything—to drown it out. My hands fisted in his shirt, and before I could think, I tilted my head up and kissed him.

It wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t sweet. It was more like a desperate cry for help. Luca froze for a split second, and then he kissed me back with the same ferocity. His hands slid from my back to my waist, gripping me like he was afraid I’d disappear if he let go.

The kiss deepened, turning wild, almost feral. His tongue swept against mine, and I moaned into his mouth, my fingers tangling in his hair. He backed me up until the edge of his desk dug into my thighs, and then he lifted me onto it without breaking the kiss. Papers were scattered on the floor, but neither of us cared. His body pressed into mine, and I could feel the hard lines of him, the heat radiating through his clothes.

My legs wrapped around his waist instinctively, pulling him closer. His hands roamed, one sliding up my side to cup my breast, the other gripping my thigh hard enough to leave bruises. I arched into him, my breath coming in ragged gasps as his lips trailed down my neck, nipping and sucking at the sensitive skin.

“Luca,” I gasped, my voice barely a whisper. His name was a plea, a prayer, and he answered it with a growl that sent shivers down my spine.

His mouth found mine again, and this time it was slower, deeper, more deliberate. His hands were everywhere, leaving trails of fire in their wake. I tugged at his shirt, desperate to feel his skin against mine, and he obliged, pulling it off in one swift motion. My hands roamed over the hard planes of his chest, and I felt the faintest tremor run through him.

But just as his fingers hooked into the waistband of my pants, a sharp cough shattered the moment.

We froze, Luca’s lips still against my neck, my hands clutching his shoulders. Slowly, reluctantly, we turned toward the doorway.

Luca’s assistant stood there, his face carefully neutral but his ears bright red. He held a stack of files in one hand, the other raised as if to knock on the already open door. “Uh,” he said, clearing his throat again. “Sorry to interrupt, but… there’s an urgent call for you, sir.”

Luca straightened, his expression shifting instantly to one of cool composure, though his breathing was still uneven. He stepped back, putting just enough distance between us to be proper, but his eyes stayed locked on mine, dark and smoldering. “I’ll be there in a moment,” he said, his voice clipped.

The assistant nodded, his eyes darting to me before he quickly retreated, closing the door behind him.

The silence that followed was heavy. Luca turned back to me, his gaze burning into mine. He reached out, brushing a thumb over my swollen lips, and I shivered at the contact.

“We'll finish this later,” he said, his voice low, a promise and a threat all at once.