Synthetic Devotion

SYNTHETIC DEVOTION
By demenscousxox

In the heart of Zurich, perfection is a requirement. In the shadows of the Alps, it is a death sentence.

Sofia Schulthess is a woman of invisible stitches. As one of Switzerland's most elite restoration artists, she spends her days in the silent basements of the Kunsthaus, mending the fractured remains of the past. She understands that beauty is often found in the broken-until she meets a man who believes that anything broken belongs to him.

Enter Finn Heusser.

Scion of a banking empire and heir to a legacy of cold, calculated control, Finn doesn't just want to admire Sofia's work. He wants to be her work. To him, Sofia is the ultimate artifact-a masterpiece of grace and skill that requires "preserving."

What begins as a series of unsettling coincidences-an unlocked door, a scent from her childhood, the crushing feeling of eyes in the dark-soon spirals into a meticulously engineered nightmare. When Finn whisked her away to his ancestral estate in the sun-starved Lauterbrunnen Valley, Sofia believes she is being saved from a mental breakdown. She doesn't realize she is being curated.

Trapped behind walls of limestone and glass, Sofia discovers the terrifying depth of Finn's "devotion." In his world, love is not a feeling-it is a restoration project. He will strip her of her identity, her memories, and her will, until only the porcelain shell of the woman he desires remains.

But Finn underestimated one thing: a restorer knows exactly how to handle a blade, and she knows that some things can only be made perfect by being destroyed forever.

A haunting exploration of obsession, gaslighting, and the thin line between love and erasure, Synthetic Devotion is a psychological descent into a madness that only the abyss can cure.