Did Crielle ever seriously think that Hillview would be able to rehabilitate Efnisien into an omega ‘fit for high society’ or did she just expect they would consider him too much trouble and ‘dispose’ of him so she wouldn’t have to?
I consider her sadistic enough to force an omega to transition into an alpha then to force them to transition back just for the hell of it
Crielle believed that Hillview would dispose of Efnisien for her, after all, if she wanted to try and reverse what happened to Efnisien, she is the one actually best suited to the job because she knows exactly what happened to him and she knows what directives he's under.
She literally gave Hillview permission to do it, and was consistently kind of annoyed that they didn't, whenever they did contact her.
I consider her sadistic enough to force an omega to transition into an alpha then to force them to transition back just for the hell of it
Crielle's primary motivation in life isn't sadism at the expense of all else, which is important to remember, otherwise she wouldn't outsource so much of her violence via Lludd and assassination. She'd just do it herself and to hell with appearance and lifestyle choices. Crielle has more than enough power to find poor folks to just tie up and torture, but she's always been a lot more refined and controlled in the application of her sadism and the selectiveness in which she applies it (i.e. she doesn't have to do it all the time, she doesn't have to do it directly (and in fact generally enjoys when she doesn't have to get her hands dirty, so to speak), and she much prefers directing others to do it for her -> her motives for being the one to medically torture Efnisien are further down, and have nothing to do with Efnisien as a person).
Crielle first and foremost has always cared most about reputation and appearance, which is a consistent throughline for her in any story that she's in. She always looks as impeccable as possible. She speaks as "perfectly" as she can. Her business, Fenwy Labs, as Faber repeatedly found over and over again, not only didn't show any signs of corruption, but was transparent with their financials and made a lot of strides in DEI-style hiring. The kind of business that becomes a role model for all others around it. (The kind that has enough weight and reputation they could influence all pharmacies Australia-wide into not giving any ardolphogen to Hillview).
Even her sadism at its worst was literally hidden - it's in a secret laboratory that not even other doctors are allowed to visit. Her directives are around forcing Efnisien to ideally never be able to talk to what happened to him. Everyone else had to participate in that "hiddenness" in that Efnisien always had to be referred to as an alpha even though no one else in the household liked it. Efnisien wasn't allowed to leave.
Crielle is sadistic, but she's also a perfectionist who cares about how she comes across, her reputation, and her ambition and seeing that to fruition. It's not a coincidence that the thing that finally cracked her self-control was not Hillview admitting that they are trying to keep Efnisien as an alpha, but the press leaking information about him being an alpha, and giving his full unique name to the public. This is the metaphorical wound to her identity, and she does the really stupid thing of chartering a private helicopter to go and kill everyone in person, and fails. As soon as that reputation is smeared in a way she knows she can't control, she cracks.
Gwyn's assessment of her feelings towards Efnisien in Underline the Black are actually the most accurate take of her feelings towards Efnisien (Gwyn had to know her well enough to engineer her downfall):
‘Does she care about him at all?’ Gary couldn’t stop himself from asking.
‘In her own way,’ Gwyn said. ‘Like when you raise a plant that you know has had it, and you keep it lingering in your garden for a while, and then you dump it because you know it was just a bad fucking plant. Hillview’s just the garden that Efnisien’s allowed to linger in. But eventually, she’s going to want to get the situation sorted. Whatever you want to do with that information is up to you. If it was me, I’d get it over and done with. You think she was bad to him, right? I can tell. You do not want to see what she’s like to businesses she’s had enough of. Because they’re not family, and she can do whatever the fuck she wants.’
Efnisien is the plant that lingers in the Hillview garden.
I think a thing to maybe keep in mind with Crielle is how ambitious she is. The reason why she tried to forcibly transition Efnisien was not because of sadism. (Though that was a bonus). She has a laboratory that specialises in secondary gender hormones. It is a world-leading laboratory with her science at the helm. She is in a society that loathes omegas. She gets an omega that the parents don't care about, with no birth certificate, and thinks "if I could figure out a way to force him to become an alpha, I could market this to every family in the world who could afford it, and we would be a global leader in a new technology people could only dream of." It's a point early on in the story that she's the one who invented the method for peak alpha mothers to be able to carry a peak alpha to term, using herself as the experiment. It's a vital part of who she is.
Her motivation was commercial. One of the reasons - among many - that she kept her experiments hidden is because she wanted to be the first. And she didn't want anyone else to steal her science or her idea/s. (This is why she did the surgeries herself; not out of sadism, but because the idea of letting her IP be known by anyone else before she'd completed her master plan was abhorrent to her).
Once she realised she'd failed, Efnisien became the lingering pot-plant you just can't get rid of yet, even though you know it's a goner, because Crielle felt it was such a good commercial idea and also hated confronting that she'd failed. Once she was able to confront it enough, she turfed Efnisien to Hillview with the somewhat explicit hint that they could just kill him if they wanted, and no one could or would attack them for it.
Crielle never cared about Efnisien as a person. To her, he was an object that became a waste of space, and once Hillview had him, she would have gotten no real joy out of their sadism - otherwise she would have asked for regular reports from them. She didn't. Her sadism is not like Lludd's, or even Gwyn's, and she no longer cared about Efnisien once he'd been dumped at Hillview. She was moving onto other projects, and was very annoyed when he kept coming back into her life, lmao.
