Hunter.
Protector.
Owner.
Every word felt noble at the time. But they were just disguises. Just a throne I could sit on while pretending the blood on my hands was for her.
“You can leave,” I tell her, voice raw. “You should.”
Her head tilts. Her mouth twitches like a question’s forming—but she swallows it.
And then she whispers, “No.”
I blink.
Her palm doesn’t leave my chest.
“I don’t forgive you. Not yet. Maybe not ever.”
“I don’t want?—”
She cut me off. “But I’m not running. Not tonight.”
I look at her—really look—and it hits me again, sharp and brutal, how much I’ve asked of her. How much she’s carried just to be here now, curled against the very hands that shattered her.
The weight of it lodges in my ribs, tight and burning.
She lowers her head again, resting it just above my heart, and her voice is soft when she says it:
“I just want to sleep. Here. With you.”
I nod, slow.
And we don’t speak again.
Not until I lower us both to the floor completely.
Not as I pull the throw blanket from the couch and drape it over her trembling shoulders.
Not as she curls tighter into me, the plug still inside her, the bruises on her hips still singing with memory.
I cradle her like a secret I want to protect but don’t deserve.
And somewhere in the dark, behind the hum of the city and the ache in my skull, I finally feel it:
Not peace.
Not redemption.
But stillness.
The kind that comes after a storm, when all that’s left is breath and silence and the promise of morning.
I kiss her forehead once.
Not to mark her.
Not to claim her.
