The Girl the Alpha Academy Couldn't Break
"I just learned that someone orchestrated your presence near me specifically, calculated exactly which family histories would make your eventual loyalty most likely once circumstances forced the choice. How do I know any of your choices were genuinely yours, rather than simply the predictable outcome of careful psychological engineering, generations in the making?"
"Because the engineering doesn't change the fact that I love you," Evren says, his voice breaking. "Whatever positioned me near you originally, whatever my father ordered, whatever Vashcross or this Architect or anyone else calculated about my likely response, the actual feeling, Neris, that's mine. Nobody can engineer genuine lov