Before the strategist in my skull can talk me out of it, before I can armor up, calculate the angle, or remember all the excellent reasons I have for never doing this, I lean forward to kiss him.
It’s soft. Gentle.
Nothing like the hungers we’ve shared before—no heat, claiming, or performance from either of us. Just my mouth on his, careful and tender, an answer to a confession, a small wordless promise pressed into the cool sweetness of him. He goes still beneath it, the way the truly touched always do, and then he leans in by a fraction, accepting it; his scent blooms warm and grateful around us both in the dying light.
I mean it as comfort.
That’s the part that should have warned me.
Every kiss I have ever given a man was a tool—a seduction, a distraction, a key turned in a lock to get something I wanted onthe other side of it. I have weaponized my mouth my entire adult life.
But this one asks for nothing.
This one is simply an offering, a thing I give him because he is lonely and I cannot bear it, because he handed me his hollow places and I wanted him to feel, for one breath in a graveyard, that he was not alone in them. I have never in my life kissed a man purely to make him feel less alone.
The novelty of my own gentleness is so disorienting that I almost pull back to examine it like a specimen, then he sighs into me, soft and undone, and I forget, for a moment, to be afraid of what it means.
It’s in the gentleness of it; in the fact that I wanted to give comfort rather than take pleasure, that the truth ambushes me, rising cold and clear through the warmth like groundwater through soil.
I know what I do.
I collect broken men. It is the oldest pattern I own, older than the daggers, older than the masks—the careful curating of damaged, dangerous people, gathering them close because broken men are men I can read, men I can manage, men whose fractures I understand because they mirror my own.
It is a strategy.
A cage I build out of other people’s wreckage, beautiful and defensible, designed so that I am always the one holding the keys.
Control dressed up as devotion.
I have done it my whole life and called it many things, and not one of those things was ever the truth.
That is the version of this I told myself when the three of them first orbited into reach. A doctor, a killer, an undertaker—three magnificent broken things I could gather and study and steer, a harem assembled the way another woman mightassemble a chess set, every piece chosen for what it could do for me.
Safe, because I held them rather than the reverse.
Safe…because collecting is the opposite of being collected.
As long as I was the curator, I could never be the exhibit again. I had it all so neatly reasoned. I had, as ever, a plan.
But this isn’t that.
This is the thing I have spent my entire ruined life engineering my way around, and it has crept up on me in a graveyard full of flowers while I wasn’t guarding the right door.
I am not collecting Silas.
Not managing him, curating him, or holding him at the precise distance that keeps me safe.
I am attached to him.
To all three of them.
Genuinely, helplessly, with the soft unguarded part of me that the ex-husband murdered everything to reach and Dorian set ablaze.
The part I swore, over my father’s grave and my own burning history, that I would never again hand to a single living soul.
I gave it away without noticing, one stolen afternoon at a time, and now it is theirs, and there is no taking it back.
That quiet, blooming, irreversible attachment—is a thought far more terrifying than any monster Blackthorn ever locked away.
