Page 65 of Everdoll

I paused for a moment. “Did it go well?”

She smiled. “Yes, we’re going out.”

Penelope was a sensitive person who could easily fall into depression, so I was glad. “Congratulations.”

“What about you, brother? Did you confess to Miss Mina?”

At the mention of her name, heat spread across my pale face. Confess? Well, I’d told her countless times I loved her, and she’d said it back. So I knew it wasn’t one-sided. Yet we still weren’t together.

Because she thinks you’re a damn machine, you idiot.

I sighed again, my mood deteriorated.

“You’re grown up now and even talking to me about those things? If you have this much free time, maybe we should extend study hours.”

Penelope rolled her eyes and let out a sound with frustration. I laughed at her.

When I finally threw myself out of the Loxton estate, I smiled wide.

In a few months, it will be five years—five whole years. But for me, it felt too short. I hadn’t spent a single night without feeling her in those years. Even though I knew it was physically impossible, I had even searched for a way to preserve a person’s scent. A few days before they died, I even asked my mother if she had done any research on the matter. She only told me to take one of her personal belongings. But it wasn’t the same.

I needed to feel her, to run my fingers over her soft skin, to kiss every inch of her delicate neck and move down to her breasts. But every time I tried to explore further, Mina would say she was ticklish and stop me. Though we hadn’t been that close in the past months. I wondered what her reaction would be now, and the thought excited me.

The excitement lasted until I reached the house.

As I approached the building, there was no trace of it left. My sensors were glowing. Sensors could detect blood type. They last triggered the night Bernova died. And now they were screaming wildly.

No.

No.

No.

I would do anything to prove my guess wrong. Over the past month, I rarely left Mina alone to prevent this from happening. It couldn’t happen. I wouldn’t allow it. When I reached her door, it felt like peering down into my own open grave.

“Mina?” I knocked on the door repeatedly, but there was no response. Locked. I shouted louder, repeating her name over and over. The walls of the house echoed with my voice, the walls closing on me.

Just a possibility. Stay calm.

As I stared at the door, my mind went blank, stripped of all logic. The mechanical arm attached to my shoulder extended on its own, its metal claws digging into the iron lock and leaving deep scratches across the surface.

As the door creaked open, I scanned the room. Every step I took echoed off the floorboards in the graveyard silence. Mina wasn’t there. With a cold dread tightening in my chest, I checked the small bathroom.

She wasn’t there either. Thank God.

Hadn’t she come home from school yet? I checked the location of the tracking device I had attached to her identity chip, and it showed she was at home. She was at home, damn it. I left her room. My heart screamed at me to turn back, but my feet had already carried me down to the ground-floor bathroom.

No.

The door wasn’t locked. Ever since I’d stepped into the house, the nightmare scenario in my head was there. I stood frozen for a few seconds, praying the sight in front of me was just a hallucination. But it refused to fade.

“No…”

I murmured, then wiped the tears—those salty drops I felt for the first time—from my cheek with the back of my hand and lunged forward.

“No, no, no, no!”

I took the girl’s body in my arms, all my sensors alarming, sending signals to me, but I couldn’t glance at any of them. I needed to feel. I cuddled her tight, pressed my ears to her chest. It’s beating. Mina’s heart was still beating in this world. She was still real. But she was ice cold, she didn’t smell like she used to. All the warmth of the body was gone.