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“I don’t love you,” I say, because I need the words out first. Sharp. Controlled. Like I’m still in charge of them.

“But you want to,” she replies, not unkind. Not even accusatory. Just… curious.

I clench my jaw. “No. I want tonot.”

Her smile—small, sharp, merciless—blooms like a bruise.

“That’s the problem, isn’t it?”

And there it is.

I stare at her, this woman I never meant to want, who dismantles every strategy I build to survive her. I don’t love her. But gods, I’m unraveling around the shape of what it would mean if I did.

And she knows it. She steps past me without another word, the barest brush of her shoulder skimming mine as she goes. It feels deliberate.

Not cruel.

Just powerful.

Justhers.

I don’t move at first. I tell myself I’m letting her go. That I’ve said what I needed to say and anything more would only carve open things I refuse to name. But then—she turns.

Not fully. Just enough.

Her profile catches the dying light in that way that feels rehearsed, like she’s done it a hundred times in a hundred past lives and every time it kills a man a little more.

That mouth—dangerous. Knowing. A curl of it lifts at the corner, not quite a smirk, not sweetness either. Just a silent acknowledgment.She knows.

She knows I’ll follow.

And I do.

Because I’m already hers, and we both know it.

She doesn’t wait for me, but she doesn’t walk fast either. Just enough distance to make me choose every step. And I do. I match her pace through the narrow pass of trees where the roots twist like ribs cracked open to let something in. The world is quiet here, choked in rain-heavy moss and soft earth.

She says nothing. I don’t deserve her words.

Not yet.

But she knows what she’s doing—the way her fingers skim the low-hanging branch, trailing through wet leaves like she’s tasting the shape of the air. The sway of her hips as she steps over a slick root, never looking back, but always aware.

Because want and need, sex and love—they’re useless distinctions when it comes to her. They're bleeding into something else. Something that defies my Dominion, my order, my carefully weaponized restraint. They’re becoming one thing.

Hers.

It’s not obsession. It’s not surrender. It’s more precise than that. A slow, surgical unraveling of everything I’ve used to keep myself untouchable. I used to believe love made men weak. Made them reckless. Vulnerable. Ruled.

But this—this thing between us?

It’s not weakness.

It’s war.

Her voice, when it comes, is soft. Knife-soft. “You always follow when you’re not ready.”

I don’t hesitate. “And you always leave space for me to.”