Everything inside me stopped.
Then roared back to life—wild, feral, unstoppable—like something long-buried had just clawed its way out of a coffin.
I didn’t move.
Didn’t trust myself not to drag her into my arms and ruin the fragile thing she had just offered.
She turned without waiting for my reaction, without giving me the chance to say anything else, and walked out.
The door clicked shut behind her with the gentlest sound—but it felt like a gunshot.
I stood alone in the dark room, surrounded by dead monitors, stale air, and the ghost of her perfume—something cheap, something ordinary, something absolutely devastating.
Only then did I let it hit me.
The thing I’d been choking down since the moment she walked into my house wearing my dead wife’s face.
Hope.
Violent, reckless, delusional hope.
Three months.
I had three months to make her stay.
To carve my place into her life.
Into her son’s life.
Into her future.
And if the world burned in the process?
So be it.
Because I didn’t just want her.
I wasn’t capable of wanting.
I hungered.
Starved.
Obsessed.
And I would tear kingdoms down, bury enemies alive, drown oceans, and shatter every promise I’d ever made before I let her walk away from me.
Not after what I’d seen in her eyes.
Not after that whispered “yes.”
Not after hope resurrected the dead thing in my chest and demanded more.
Three months.
Three months to turn a contract into a cage.
Three months to make her mine—permanently.
