Chapter 22: Lockdown Lust
The DNA helix hit Heechul’s temple with a wet, sickening crack. It was a sound of shattered glass and broken bone, out of place in the pristine silence. For a moment, the professor stood, his razor-sharp eyes wide with a profound, almost comical surprise. Then his legs folded, and he dropped, a tailored suit collapsing into a heap on the linoleum. A dark bloom of blood seeped from his hairline, vivid against the sterile white floor.
Silence, thicker than before, rushed in. The only sound was the hum of the containment unit in the corner, a low thrum of latent energy.
Hyukjae stared at Donghae’s hand, still clenched around the broken base of the model. “Fuck,” she breathed, the word more awe than curse.
Adrenaline spiked, metallic and hot in Donghae’s throat. He dropped the bloody glass, the shards skittering across the floor. Heechul wasn’t moving.
“His tablet,” Donghae said, his voice a rough scrape. “The research. All of it.”
Hyukjae moved, her earlier terror galvanized into sharp action. She snatched the slim, silver tablet from the workstation where Heechul had left it. The screen showed glowing data streams, genetic sequences, the words “SUBJECT E – UTERINE ENHANCEMENT PHASE 3.” She didn’t read them. With a guttural cry that was all fury, she swung her arm and smashed the tablet against the edge of a metal reagent shelf.
The screen died instantly, but it wasn’t enough. She brought it down again, on the floor, stomping on it with the heel of her sneaker until the casing split, wires spilling out like metallic guts. “Burn in hell, you smug son of a bitch,” she spat towards the unconscious professor.
A shrill, deafening alarm erupted from the ceiling. Red emergency lights began to strobe, casting the lab in a hellish, rhythmic glare. A monotone, synthesized voice boomed from hidden speakers. “Security breach detected in Lab Seven. Unauthorized data destruction. Full laboratory lockdown initiated.”
A heavy metallic thunk echoed from the main door. The pneumatic lock on the door to the Phase-Shift anteroom sealed with a definitive hiss. They were trapped.
“No, no, no!” Hyukjae yelled, running to the main door and yanking on the handle. It didn’t budge.
Donghae’s eyes darted around the sealed room. Heechul on the floor. The shattered tablet. The blaring alarm. And there, in its reinforced glass enclosure, the experiment itself. It wasn’t a machine, not exactly. It was a pod, opaque and pulsating with a faint, internal pinkish-silver light. The containment unit. The source. It hummed louder now, as if awakened by the chaos.
He saw the look on Hyukjae’s face as she turned from the door—pure, unadulterated panic. The same panic from the shower, magnified a thousandfold. The locked door. The alarms. The thing that had remade her body, still active, humming beside them. It was a cage with the monster inside.
A primal, desperate logic overrode his fear. If they were going to be sealed in here with it, if this was where it ended, he would not let her fear be the last thing she felt. He would bury it. He would drown it in something else. In him.
He crossed the room in three strides. He grabbed her by the shoulders, spun her away from the door, and pushed her back against the cold steel of a central workstation. The edge dug into the small of her back.
“Donghae, the door—“
“Fuck the door,” he snarled, his face inches from hers. The strobing red light made his expression look savage, carved from shadows. “It’s still on. It’s still fucking on.”
Her eyes flicked to the pulsing pod, then back to him, wide with understanding. “The reversal protocol… it was on the tablet. I destroyed it.”
“Then we do it the other way.” His hands went to the button of her jeans. His fingers, slick with sweat and a smear of Heechul’s blood from the model, fumbled. He tore at the fabric instead, the denim giving way with a rough, ripping sound. He shoved the material down over her hips. “I’m going to fuck you back to normal before this place explodes.”
It wasn’t a romantic claim. It was a curse, a ritual, a wild attempt to assert a different kind of science—the biology of possession, of claiming, of raw, brute function over form.
She didn’t fight him. She helped him, shoving her jeans and underwear down to her knees with frantic haste. Her pregnant belly curved between them, a soft, urgent reality. He unzipped his own pants, freeing his cock, already hard from the adrenaline and the terror. He was rough, almost brutal, as he hooked one of her legs over his hip, spreading her open against the workstation.
There was no preamble. He guided himself to her entrance and pushed inside in one solid, deep thrust.
She cried out, a sharp sound swallowed by the blaring alarm. She was wet—fear did that, he’d learned—but tight, so tight around him. The heat of her was a shock, a blazing contrast to the cold steel at her back and the cold dread in the room.
He set a brutal, driving pace immediately. Each thrust slammed her body against the workstation, making the glassware on top rattle. He fucked her with a single-minded intensity, his eyes locked on hers. He wanted to see it—the moment the fear in her eyes dissolved into something else.
“This is you,” he grunted, the words punched out of him with every drive of his hips. “Fucking you. Not his experiment. Not his prototype. You feel this? You feel me?”
“Yes!” she screamed, her fingers clawing at his shoulders, gripping the fabric of his hoodie. Her head tossed back, hitting a stack of lab manuals. “Deeper, goddamn it, fuck me deeper!”
He obeyed, angling his hips, pounding into her with a ferocity that bordered on violence. The lewd, wet sound of their coupling fought with the electronic wail of the siren. Her breasts, trapped under her sweater, bounced with each impact. He yanked the fabric up with one hand, exposing them, palming the heavy weight, pinching her nipple until she gasped. A thin stream of milk beaded and leaked, tracing a path down her skin.
The obscenity of it—here, in Heechul’s sacred, sterile lab, with the man bleeding on the floor and the alarm screaming—drove him higher. He was marking the lab, marking her, with the most basic, animal function he possessed.
“Gonna fill you up,” he panted, his rhythm becoming erratic, frenzied. “Gonna put so much of me in you it floods out all his fucking science. You hear me? You take it. You take all of it.”
Hyukjae’s orgasm hit her suddenly. Her body bowed against him, her internal muscles clamping down on him in rapid, fierce pulses. She didn’t scream pleasure; she shouted raw, ragged affirmations into the strobe-lit air. “Yes! Fucking yes! Don’t stop! Don’t you dare fucking stop!”
It triggered his own climax. With a final, gut-deep snarl, he thrust hard and held there, pulsing, emptying himself into her in hot, urgent spurts. It felt less like release and more like an injection, a desperate transfer of essence.
He slumped against her, his forehead damp against her shoulder, both of them breathing in shattered gulps. The alarm still blared. The red light still strobed. He was still buried inside her, softening.
A new sound cut through the electronic din—a low, escalating whine from the containment pod. The pinkish-silver light was brightening, pulsing faster.
Donghae pulled out, a cold dread seeping back in. He helped her pull her ripped jeans up, his hands gentler now, trembling.
The synthesized voice returned, different now, calmer. “Containment instability detected. Emergency purge initiated. Phase-Shift field active. All organic matter in Lab Seven will be subject to recalibration in T-minus sixty seconds.”
“Recalibration?” Hyukjae whispered, staring at the glowing pod. “What does that mean?”
Donghae looked from the pod to Heechul’s still form. To the shattered tablet. There were no controls. No off switch. The professor was the only one who knew how to stop it, and he was unconscious—or dead.
“It means it’s going to fire again,” Donghae said, his voice hollow. “Like it did the first time. With you.”
Hyukjae’s hand flew to her belly. “The baby…”
Fifty seconds.
Donghae’s mind raced, a frantic slide show of images. The mug on his shelf, facing the wall. The shower spray. Her laugh before any of this. The look in Heechul’s eyes—not just obsession, but a deep, bitter envy. Recognition. He’d wanted to create something. He’d wanted a legacy.
An insane idea, born of terror and fleeting memory, took root.
He grabbed Hyukjae’s arm. “The pod. It needs organic matter. A template.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He didn’t just throw you in there!” Donghae yelled over the whine, dragging her towards the pod. Its surface was warm, vibrating. “He used a template! His own genetic baseline was probably the control! He wouldn’t risk random mutation!”
Thirty seconds.
He looked at Heechul. “We give it him back. We put him in. His own system… maybe it reverses it. Maybe it stabilizes it. Maybe it just eats him alive. I don’t know!”
Understanding dawned in Hyukjae’s eyes, grim and vengeful. “Do it.”
Twenty seconds.
They staggered to Heechul’s body. He was a dead weight. Donghae hooked his hands under the professor’s armpits; Hyukjae, grunting with the strain of her belly, took his feet. They hauled him across the floor, leaving a smeared trail of blood. The whine from the pod was a high-pitched scream now, the light so bright it was hard to look at.
Ten seconds.
They heaved Heechul’s limp form up against the pod. There was no latch, no door. As the countdown in their heads hit zero, the opaque surface of the pod shimmered, like the surface of a mercury lake disturbed. It flowed open, a viscous, metallic maw.
With one final, combined effort, they shoved Kim Heechul inside.
The pod sealed instantly, swallowing him whole. The light pulsed once, violently, then turned a deep, angry crimson.
The alarms cut off abruptly. The red strobe lights died. The main fluorescent lights flickered back on, blinding in their normalcy.
Silence, ringing and absolute, fell over Lab Seven.
Donghae and Hyukjae stood, clutching each other, gasping for air, staring at the pod. It was quiet now, dark. No hum. No light.
On the floor, where Heechul had lain, lay only the shattered glass and the smeared blood.
From inside the pod, there came a single, muffled thump. Then nothing.