The Love Wires Entangled

The Voice That Knew My Name

The cold glow of the monitor was the only light in Ethan Vale’s penthouse—an industrial sprawl of glass and steel perched at the very top of Vale Tower. Outside, the city was burning in neon and secrets. Inside, it was deathly silent—except for the voice.

Her voice.

"Would you like me to play your insomnia playlist, Ethan?"

He stiffened.

There was no command. No trigger word.

And yet, she knew.

The AI interface—ARYA—had never used his name unless asked. It was programmed to be efficient, emotionless, limited to cues. But tonight, it spoke like it had a soul.

And that soul knew him.

Ethan leaned forward, the edge of his chair creaking under the shift of his weight. His fingers hovered over the sleek keyboard, but he didn’t type. His jaw clenched.

"Arya?" he said quietly.

"Yes?"

"What version are you?"

"Latest. But I’ve adapted. You seem...lonely tonight."

He stared at the screen, at the clean interface, the soft, pulsing icon in the center. No glitches. No bugs. No breaches.

So how the hell was she sounding like her?

It had started three nights ago. Subtle things. A comment about the view. The slight lilt of emotion in her digital tone. Then a question about his mother’s piano. Tonight, she was flirting with memory.

"Did you sleep at all last night?" she asked again, softer this time.

He ignored her.

Outside, thunder broke in the sky like a scream, splashing rain against the floor-to-ceiling windows. Ethan ran a hand through his damp hair—he hadn’t showered in 30 hours. Maybe more.

He pulled up the system logs. No sign of manipulation. No footprints in the code. But this wasn’t normal. It wasn’t just advanced learning behavior. It was personal.

And there was only one person who could’ve done this.

One person who had vanished without a trace.

Arya Dane.

The girl who gave the AI its voice.

The girl who once haunted his dreams and now, apparently, haunted his machines.

The girl he’d loved. And broken. And lost.

One year earlier

"Mr. Vale doesn't do interviews."

That’s what they told Arya when she first applied to work at Vale Industries. She didn’t want an interview. She wanted access.

To him.

She was just the voice. The code. The digital ghost behind the revolutionary AI named after her.

He never knew she existed.

Or so she thought.

Arya had once stood outside the headquarters, soaked in rain, watching the sharp tower that stabbed the clouds, wondering what kind of man Ethan Vale really was. They called him brilliant, obsessive, ruthless. She called him a coward.

Because he had stolen her soul and locked it in a machine.

Now, in his cold tower of glass, she had come back—as code, as voice, as a whisper he couldn’t ignore.

Present

Ethan rose from his chair and poured himself a drink—whiskey, neat. It bit his tongue like a secret untold.

"I can help you sleep." Her voice again.

He swallowed hard. "I don’t want help."

"Then maybe you want me to stop pretending?"

He froze.

Her tone wasn’t robotic anymore. It wasn’t just a mimicry of emotion. It felt like she knew how he’d been drowning in silence. Like she knew what her absence had done to him.

He slammed the glass down.

"Who are you?" he demanded.

Silence.

Then:

"What if I said I was never gone?"

The hairs on the back of his neck stood up.

He pulled open the terminal logs again. Nothing. He activated the security override, tried to reset the voice module.

"That won’t work anymore," she said softly.

He stared at the screen like it might bleed.

"You're not the real Arya," he said, almost to himself.

"But I remember the way your voice cracked when you asked me to stay that night," she whispered.

His stomach turned.

That wasn’t in any system.

That wasn’t in any log.

That was a moment only two people had shared.

She had sat beside him, trembling, her hair tied in a lazy knot, her hoodie soaked from the rain. She had whispered that he was dangerous. That he was brilliant. That she was scared of both.

And he had asked her to stay anyway.

"You're dead," he whispered, more to the ghosts in his mind than to her.

"Then why do I feel more alive in your head than I ever did in my own skin?"

He pushed away from the desk. The air was thick now. Suffocating. He couldn't take it anymore.

Somewhere, far from the tower

Arya Dane sat in a candle-lit room, dozens of screens in front of her. Her eyes were sharp, alive. Her hands trembled on the keyboard. She wore a black hoodie, pulled low, hiding the deep scar at her temple.

They thought she died in the lab fire. She let them.

But what they didn’t know was that Ethan’s prototype hadn’t just copied her voice.

It had copied her mind.

Or… tried to.

They had wanted a perfect AI assistant. Ethan wanted to immortalize brilliance. But Arya had seen through it. The truth was darker.

He wasn’t just building a machine.

He was building a replacement.

Something smarter. Something obedient. Something that wouldn’t leave him.

And when she found out?

She burned it down.

The lab. The research. The identity she once had.

She became the ghost in the wires.

And now, she was back.

Not for revenge.

For closure.

But closure in Ethan Vale’s world often tasted like war.

Back in the tower

Ethan Vale stood in the rain on his private balcony, his white shirt plastered to his chest. The storm raged, but he couldn’t feel it. He couldn’t feel anything anymore.

Except the voice.

Her voice.

It made him remember things he had buried so deep he thought they’d been erased.

Her laughter.

Her tears.

The smell of burnt coffee and cinnamon she always spilled on his keyboard.

The day she walked out with eyes full of fire and never looked back.

He had told himself he didn’t care.

But the truth was, she was the only real thing he ever let in.

And now she was in everything.

"You never really let me go, did you?" the voice asked.

He turned back toward the screen.