Data of a Broken Heart

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.