Love by the monster I created

Rena's POV

"I never thought the man I loved would become the monster I created."

The words echoed inside my head like a death sentence as I stood in the middle of the dark laboratory. The machines hummed quietly around me, their blue lights blinking like silent witnesses to my mistake. The air was thick with the scent of ozone and copper the smell of a miracle that felt more like a crime.

Rain slammed against the tall glass windows of the abandoned warehouse, a relentless, rhythmic assault that matched the frantic drumming in my chest. Lightning flashed across the ink-black sky, momentarily illuminating the heavy steel table in the center of the room.

And the man lying on it.

Hale.

Once upon a time, Hale had been the gentlest man I knew. He was the kind of man who carried stray cats home in the rain and stayed up until four in the morning helping me finish my research papers, caffeine-stained and smiling. His laughter used to fill every corner of my life, a warmth that made even the coldest nights feel like spring.

But now... he was the reason my hands wouldn't stop shaking.

I glanced at the eviction notice sitting on my workbench, crumpled and damp from my own sweat. I was broke, my reputation in the medical world was trashed, and I was three months behind on the rent for this illegal basement. I had sold my car, my mother's jewelry, and my own soul to buy the black-market processors hummed beneath the table. If this didn't work tonight, I would be on the streets, and Hale would be nothing more than a memory in a body bag.

The monitors beeped steadily beside him, the neon green numbers rising and falling like a fragile, artificial heartbeat. I stared at them, my eyes burning, afraid to blink. Every digital pulse was a reminder of the laws I had broken to bring him back.

Afraid that if I did, everything would stop.

"You're going to wake up," I whispered, my voice trembling as I adjusted the neural-link stabilizer. "You have to. I can't do this alone anymore, Hale. I'm drowning."

The truth was, I wasn't sure what he would wake up as. I had stitched him back together with technology that wasn't meant for human skin. I had played God because the silence of a world without him was a noise I couldn't drown out.

Suddenly, the steady beep of the monitor turned into a frantic, high-pitched scream. The blue lights in the room flickered violently, dying out for a second as a massive surge of power drained the building's grid.

In the sudden, suffocating darkness, I heard it.

A sharp, metallic snap.

The heavy leather restraints I had used to bolt his arms to the table didn't just break; they disintegrated. I stumbled back, my heel catching on a stray power cable, sending me crashing into a rack of glass vials. They shattered, the sound like diamonds