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Me curled on my side against dark green sheets, one arm thrown over my eyes.

Kento steps to the next one and drags the sheet down.

Me with my head thrown back and my mouth open mid-gasp, the look I only ever wear when his fingers are buried in my hair and my defenses have cracked down the center.

Snap.

A marble bust on a black iron pedestal. The exact vicious slant of my mouth right before I tell someone I’m going to carve their liver out.

Snap.

A giant three-panel canvas stretching wide: me drenched in rain on the back terrace of the estate, soaked through to the skin, staring into the dark with green eyes so bright they look radioactive against the black oil paint.

Snap.

Snap.

Snap.

He moves down the aisles like a priest stripping altars, ripping the white shrouds away one by one, tossing them aside without a glance until the entire room is screaming at me.

Hundreds of them.

Full-length oils where my skin is painted with so much light it looks like it is burning from the inside out.

A shrine. A fucking madman’s mausoleum, and I’m the only body in it.

“Kento…” The name tears out of my throat. “What is this?”

He stops at the center of the room, surrounded by my face on every wall. He shoves his hands into his jacket pockets. “I wanted to show you this if you would have said yes that day. I had it all arranged.”

He offers a crooked smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “But you ran.”

I flinch.

“You ran, and I couldn’t reach you,” he goes on. His dark eyes lock onto mine with a gravitational intensity that seems to compress the very architecture of my chest.

“You know, before you and I happened, I survived every sadistic little exercise Kenji ever devised. I’ve sat in dark rooms with broken fingers and dislocated shoulders, not knowing whether I’d ever walk out again, and never lost a fucking minute of sleep over it. Pain never frightened me. Death never frightened me. But these last few weeks, Ilya… I was fucking terrified. I kept thinking you’d convinced yourself I ran away because of those bruises. That I’d finally seen what you’d been hiding and decided I wanted nothing to do with you. And when that thought wasn’t eating me alive, I was imagining someone putting their fucking hands on you again while I was too far away to stop it. Do you understand how maddening that is? To spend your entire existence being indifferent to your own survival, only to discover that another person’s safety has become the most terrifyingly fragile thing in your universe? Kenji could have broken every bone in my body and I would have slept through the night. But the thought of you lying awake believing I was disgusted by you, or of you bleeding somewhere I couldn’t reach, kept me awake until I thought I’d fucking lose my mind. You’ve made a coward of me, Ilya Solovyov.”

A hollow laugh scrapes out of his chest. “I’ve been trying to get to you for years, Ilya. Every time I manage to get three inches past that armor of yours, you retreat. You push me out.”

Years?

He gestures with one hand toward the canvases behind him. “When I saw those bruises on you, I didn’t know what the fuck to do with myself. I’ve never felt helpless in my entire life. I know how to kill people and dismantle empires. Violence has always been a language I speak with perfect fluency. But looking at you and knowing someone had been putting their fucking hands on you, knowing there were moments when you were hurting and I was somewhere else, completely oblivious… there was nothing I could threaten, nothing I could destroy, that would undo a single second of it. All the terrible things I’m capable of meant absolutely fucking nothing. I could have brought the entire world to its knees and still been powerless to give you back what someone took from you.”

He stops two feet in front of me. “I thought about kidnapping you,” he says, perfectly calm. “Throwing you in the back of the car, locking the gate, and keeping you where no one could touch you. And if Kenji hadn’t dragged me into the cellar for his annual reminder, I would have taken you.”

I stare at him, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. “That sounds insane. You know that, right?”

“I am insane,” he says without a single blink of hesitation. “I am possessive. I’m not going to apologize for it, and I’m sure as hell not going to stop chasing you. But I’m not doing it to break you, Ilya. I never wanted to cage you. I just want you where I can see you. Where I can make sure nobody ever leaves another mark on your skin that didn’t come from my mouth or my hands.”

His throat moves on a hard swallow. “Can you just stay with me? Can you stop fighting?”

I open my mouth, and my brain already decides what to do: find the soft spot. Twist the knife. Tell him he’s nothing to you.

Kento lets out a breathy laugh that cuts me off before the first letter leaves my tongue.

“You’re about to say something mean, aren’t you?”