He steps forward again, and I flinch before I can stop myself, body betraying me.
That’s what pisses me off most—that tiny, involuntary twitch that I can’t control. That fear I’ve tried so fucking hard to keep buried beneath anger and defiance.
“I didn’t decide who you are,” he says quietly, voice almost reasonable. “But I’m the only one who sees it, who really looks.”
My throat goes tight with emotion I refuse to name.
His voice is too soft now, too steady. Like he’s trying to thread something through me carefully. A seed of belief. A sickness that takes root and spreads from the inside out, corrupting everything.
“I see what they did to you,” he murmurs, voice gentle in a way that makes it worse. “The masks you wear to survive. The way you walk like you’re not prey, even when your heart’s racing. I know the girl who had to carve herself out of glass just to survive another day.”
He leans closer, invading my space.
“And I know exactly how to make her shatter into something new.”
Something hot rises in my chest, burning. Not lust. Not hate.
Grief, raw and unexpected.
It hits like a fist to the solar plexus, so sudden and raw that I can’t stop the way my vision blurs with moisture I refuse to let fall.
No one’s ever said those things to me before, ever seen that deep. Not even me. I’ve spent years pretending there’s no wreckage under my skin, pretending I’m whole. Years trying to glue it all together with lipstick and silence and carefully constructed walls.
Now he’s peeling it open like a wound, exposing it to air, like it’s something beautiful instead of shameful.
Like he wants to wear my pain.
“Why me?” I rasp, the words almost choked by the tightness in my throat. “Why this?”
He smiles again—but this one’s quieter, more contained. Almost reverent in its intensity.
“Because monsters don’t fall in love, Tahlia,” he says, and the certainty in his voice is absolute. “We choose. And I chose you.”
Tahlia
Iwait for the door to close behind him, holding my breath.
I wait for the click of the lock, for the quiet hush of footsteps disappearing down the hallway, for the shadows to pull back into something I can survive, something manageable.
None of that comes because he doesn’t leave the room.
He just stands there in the doorway, watching me with that unnerving stillness. Breathing with that same calm cadence that drives needles under my skin, methodical and controlled. As if this—me, shaking in the corner of a bed I tried to destroy—is exactly what he wanted, what he orchestrated.
I feel it happening.
The change.
Not in the room, but in me, deep in my bones.
There’s a stillness that wasn’t there before, settling over me like dust. Not peace. Not calm. Something heavier and more dangerous. Like my bones are learning a new kind of gravity, and I’m not sure they want to stand back up anymore, not sure they remember how.
“You should’ve walked away,” I say, my voice low and bitter as ash.
Hook tilts his head slightly, like he’s trying to read the words straight off my skin, like they’re written there in invisible ink.
“No,” he murmurs, voice gentle in a way that makes it worse. “You should’ve known better than to run.”
I turn away before he can see what that does to me, what cracks it opens because he’s right.
