"Close your eyes anyway."
She does. I watch her breathing slow, watch the tension gradually drain from her shoulders. She's exhausted—four weeks of captivity, the auction, the senator, the execution. Her body is giving out whether she wants it to or not.
After twenty minutes, her breathing evens out. She's asleep.
I should leave.
I don't.
I sit there for hours, watching her sleep, trying to understand what's happening to me. This girl—this nineteen-year-old orphan with nothing and no one—has walked into my life and upended everything I thought I knew about myself.
Dangerous, I think again.
But I don't move.
She wakes screaming just after four a.m.
I'm there before she's fully conscious, hands on her shoulders, voice low and steady. "You're safe. Lily. You're safe. It was a dream."
She's gasping, crying, clinging to my arms like I'm the only solid thing in the world. "Don't leave. Please don't leave."
"I'm not going anywhere."
I shift onto the bed properly. Pull her against my chest. She buries her face in my shirt and sobs—great, wracking sobs that shake her whole body. I hold her through it, one hand on her back, the other in her hair.
I've never held anyone like this. Never comforted anyone. Never wanted to.
I want to now.
"I've got you," I murmur against her hair. "You're safe. I've got you."
She cries until there's nothing left. Then she just breathes, face pressed to my chest, fingers curled in the fabric of my shirt.
"Stay," she whispers.
I shouldn't. Every instinct I've honed over fifty years tells me to pull back, maintain distance, protect myself.
"I'll stay," I say instead.
I hold her until dawn breaks over Severny Harbor, gray light filtering through the windows. She sleeps. I don't.
I just watch her.
And I realize, with a strange ache in my chest, that I've never had this. Someone sleeping beside me. Someone who needs me. Someone to come home to.
Fifty years I've lived alone. Told myself it was safer. Told myself attachments were weakness. Built an empire of solitude and convinced myself it was enough.
But this—her warmth against my chest, her breath soft and even, the quiet domesticity of simplybeingwith someone—
This is what I've been missing.
Not sex. Not companionship. Something deeper. Someone who fills the silence. Someone who makes the penthouse feel less like a fortress and more like a home.
Dangerous, I think. But the word has lost its teeth.
I know, with a certainty that terrifies me, that everything has changed.
The first days blur together.
