My Husband Forced Me to Build Weapons for His Mistress

Grief is not a wave. It is a scalpel. It carves out everything soft inside you until only the bone remains.

The penthouse was silent, save for the rhythmic drumming of rain against the floor-to-ceiling glass. Xander had returned an hour ago, reeking of failure and expensive scotch. He hadn’t found Jasmine. The Senator was furious. The empire was trembling.

I sat on the floor of the server room, my back against the humming cooling unit. In my hands—hands that still worked, hands that had built miracles—I held a jagged piece of circuit board I’d pried from a defunct server blade. It wasn’t a key, but to a Taylor, everything is a key if you understand the lock’s language.

I slid the green resin into the seam of the electronic lock. A spark, a sharp scent of ozone, and the magnetic seal disengaged with a defeated *click*.

I didn't run. Running is for prey. I walked.

The hallway was a tunnel of shadows. I moved past the abstract art and the marble plinths, my bare feet silent on the hardwood. I entered the master bedroom. The air was thick with the smell of him—musk, alcohol, and the metallic tang of gun oil.

Xander lay sprawled on the silk sheets, one arm thrown over his eyes. His chest rose and fell in a heavy, rhythmic cadence. Vulnerable. For the first time in years, the monster was asleep.

My eyes landed on a heavy bust of Julius Caesar on the nightstand. Marble. Cold. Heavy enough to shatter bone.

I picked it up. The weight strained my wrists, but adrenaline flooded my veins, making the stone feel light as air. I stood over him. I looked at the pulse throbbing in his neck. This was the man who let my father die alone. This was the man who stole my life.

I raised the marble high. A sob caught in my throat—not of sadness, but of pure, distilled hatred.

"For Dad," I whispered.

I brought it down.

His hand shot up. It was a blur, a reflex honed by years of combat and paranoia. He caught my wrist inches from his face. The impact jarred my arm to the shoulder, and the bust slipped from my grip, crashing onto the mattress with a dull thud.

Xander’s eyes snapped open. They weren't groggy. They were clear. Predatory. He hadn't been sleeping.

"Predictable," he murmured, his voice a low rumble of thunder.

He twisted my arm. I screamed as he flipped me onto the bed, pinning me beneath his weight. He smelled of rage. "You think you have the stomach for murder, Olive? You construct weapons. You don't use them."

He dragged me off the bed by my hair. I clawed at his hands, but he was iron and I was glass. He didn't stop at the door. He dragged me to the private elevator, punching the code for the sub-basement—the bunker.

"Xander, please!" I shrieked, my heels skidding uselessly on the floor. "Just kill me! Just end it!"

"Death is too easy," he spat, throwing me into the cold, industrial space of the workshop. "You are an asset. Assets don't get to retire."

He shoved me toward the heavy-duty hydraulic press in the corner of the room. It was a machine I used to test the tensile strength of alloy barrels. Now, it looked like a mouth.

He grabbed my left hand. I fought him, kicking, biting, screaming until my throat tore. But he slammed my hand onto the steel plate and hit the pedal.

The clamp descended.

"If you can't use your hands to build for me," he hissed, his face inches from mine, his eyes void of humanity, "you won't use them to kill me."

The crunch was louder than the scream. It sounded like celery snapping, wet and terrible. The pain was white, blinding, absolute. It wasn't just bone breaking; it was my identity shattering. The delicate nerves, the fine motor control, the genius—all crushed under two tons of pressure.

I blacked out before he started on the right hand.

***

Three months is an eternity in the dark.

The bunker became my world. My hands were wrapped in thick, clumsy bandages, then splints, and finally, just scars. Ugly, twisted ridges of flesh where my dexterity used to live. I couldn't hold a soldering iron. I could barely hold a spoon. I ate like a toddler, spilling soup down my chin while the security cameras watched, unblinking.

Xander came down once a week to gloat. He told me the Senate deal was finalized. He told me Jasmine had returned, tail between her legs. He told me I was forgotten.

But the machines didn't forget.

The Taylor smart-weapons required a bi-weekly biometric handshake—a maintenance code entered by my specific keystrokes to account for genetic drift in the targeting algorithms. Without it, the code began to decay. It was a failsafe I had designed to prevent theft. Xander, in his arrogance, had forgotten it.

The door hissed open. Xander stormed in, flanked by two guards. He looked different—frayed. The impeccable suit was wrinkled. There was a twitch beneath his left eye.

"Get up," he barked.

I sat on the cot, cradling my mangled hands against my chest. "I can't."

He crossed the room and hauled me up by my arm, dragging me to the main terminal. The screen was a wall of red error messages.

"Fix it," he snarled, shoving my face toward the monitor. "The MK-7s are locking up in the field. My men are sitting ducks out there. The targeting systems are rejecting user inputs."

I looked at the screen. *Biometric Sync Required.* The system was crying out for its mother.

I held up my hands. The fingers were crooked, stiff claws. "You broke the tools, Xander. You crushed the keys."

He stared at my ruined hands, his jaw working. For a second, I saw a flicker of realization—the dawning horror that he had severed his own lifeline. Then, the rage returned, hotter than before.

"Voice command," he ordered, slamming his fist on the desk. "Override the manual input. Use the vocal authorization. Do it now, or I swear to God, I will find where they buried your father and dig him up just to burn him."

I looked at the cursor blinking on the screen. The system needed me. Xander needed me. And in that moment, beneath the agony and the grief, a cold, hard seed of power took root in my chest.

"Computer," I rasped, my voice dry as dust. "Initiate diagnostic mode."

*Voice Pattern Recognized: Administrator Taylor.*

The red lights softened to amber. Xander exhaled, a ragged sound of relief. He thought he had won. He thought I was fixing it.

He didn't know I was just buying time to find a new way to pull the trigger.