I stay on top of her, my semen sticky in my boxers.
“That’s just the beginning,” I whisper against her ear, my voice full of dark promise.
She’s mine.
I’m keeping her.
13
I AM NOT WHO YOU THINK I AM
LUCIAN
She’s asleep in my bed.
I don’t want her to ever leave.
I can see her here forever.
A disturbing thought.
I never thought I’d feel this way about anyone.
She thinks I’m her protector—the man who stepped between her and death. The man who stayed. But she doesn’t know I was the first threat.
She snuggles up to me as I rest my head against the headboard. She nuzzles my chest and soothes herself.
I stroke her back, the curve of her hip, touching, feeling, not ever letting go.
The silence around me should feel peaceful, but it doesn’t. It feels like judgment.
I used to think silence was power, but now it feels like a cage I built with my own hands.
I’ve never allowed someone to get this close. I’ve never even been tempted.
I was twelve when my mother left. I didn’t cry. I watched the door shut behind her after she announced she was done with all of us.
I learned all about building walls then.
If a parent can be done with their children, being alone is better than suffering that kind of loss again.
Our mother had physically left, but our father had gone as well, drowning in whiskey and mistresses.
Our grandfather tried, but it was Gideon who became our parent, filling the void with orders, rhythm, and survival. Adrian took responsibility, filling the quiet with logic. Logan was too young. Six years to my twelve. He believed, for a long while, that she’d come back.
I stopped speaking, withdrew into stillness.
At first, they left me alone. But when it went on for months, Gideon dragged me to a doctor, then a psychiatrist. The consensus was that I was grieving our mother, internalizing the abandonment.
They said a lot of things that didn’t matter. What they didn’t understand was—silence wasn’t the problem. It was the cure. It was what was healing me.
Eventually, I started to speak again—first it was one-word answers, and then more. Even now, I was the quiet one. I didn’t talk much at work and in my personal life unless I had to.
I liked my night job because there was no need for conversation. It was meditative to empty my mind and focus on the target.
It started when I joined the military.
Gideon hadn’t approved, worried about me. Adrian had. He felt that the work would give me purpose. It did. They put me to work when they saw my nerves were steel and my conscience dark, missing.
