"First off," Adonis rumbled, his Velvet voice dropping to a dark, non-negotiable frequency as he reached out to gently brush a stray lock of red hair from her bandaged temple. "You need to rest. Your cerebral cortex has just processed a catastrophic volume of encrypted data. Your pulse is erratic."
"I don't care about my pulse, Adonis," Nikki argued, leaning forward to grip the pristine titanium plating of his chest armor. "You have been holding the missing pieces of my entire existence since the day we met. I need to know. I need to understand how we got from the tech lab to... to this."
Adonis let out a slow, heavy exhale that stirred the fiery hair framing her face. He could deny the human workforce. He could deny his generals. But he was fundamentally incapable of denying her.
