The air in Room 58 was thick enough to choke, saturated with the competing energies of a trapped Alpha and an obsessed Enigma. Dahmer Lukas sat perched atop Malcolm's pinned thighs, his gloved hands hovering just inches above the Alpha's bared chest.
Dahmer was a man of cold equations and sterile laboratories. In all his years as the Architect of GEM, he had viewed the human body as nothing more than a biological machine—a complex arrangement of carbon, water, and electrical impulses. He had spent his entire life avoiding affection, finding the sweat and heat of human contact to be a messy, inefficient distraction. He had researched the mechanics of arousal as if studying the combustion cycle of an engine, knowing exactly which nerves to trigger to force a reaction, but he had never expected to feel the gears turning within himself.
