I was running.
That was always how it started.
Long corridors of a house I no longer lived in, doors I could not open, voices I could not outrun. Tina's laughter coiling through the walls like smoke. Alyssa standing somewhere just out of sight, calling my name in that singsong way she used to when she wanted to remind me that I was alone in the world and would always remain so.
"You really thought you were going anywhere?"
"Where do you think you're going?"
"Nobody wants you. Nobody wanted you. Your mother knew. Why don't you?"
"You were never loved. Incapable of being loved. Don't forget that."
The stairs appeared the way they always did in this dream. Long. Steep. Wooden. The same stairs that had broken me at thirteen. Tina stood at the top this time. Alyssa beside her. Both smiling. Neither real.
And then hands at my back.
Hard.
Familiar.
That awful, weightless tilt.
I jolted awake.
For one disoriented second, I didn't know where I was.
Not my room.
The ceiling was wrong. Too high. The air was wrong. Too still. The light was wrong. There was none of the soft sunlight I usually fell asleep against. Only the deep, low gold of evening pressing against heavy curtains.
I sat up too fast.
My heart was already racing. My shirt clung slightly to my back. My hands trembled in my lap as my brain dragged itself back into the present, slowly assembling the room around me.
Dark wood.
Tall ceiling.
Curtains pulled almost fully shut.
A faint smell of clean linen and something deeper underneath it. Wood. Smoke. Skin.
Him.
I knew exactly where I was before my eyes finished adjusting.
Malakai's room.
I exhaled slowly, dragging the air in long and careful, letting the panic settle the way I had learned to settle it years ago — quietly, internally, so no one would ever know it had been there.
I looked at the bed beside me.
Empty.
The sheets were still slightly turned back where someone had been lying.
I reached out without thinking and pressed my palm flat to the space.
Warm.
Not hot. Not freshly vacated. But warm enough that I knew he hadn't been gone long.
Something about that warmth steadied me more than it should have.
For a moment I just sat there, hand resting on the sheet, breathing in the evening quiet of his room. The storm from the night before had passed, but the sky outside still looked bruised at the edges, that strange in-between hour when the day refused to fully die and the night had not yet been given permission to begin.
Then I heard the soft sound of a door opening somewhere beyond the bed.
The bathroom.
My body reacted before my mind did.
I lay back down quickly, smoothing the blanket up to my shoulder, turning my face slightly toward the pillow, and let my eyes slide nearly closed. Not fully. Just enough that anyone walking in would believe I was still asleep.
Just enough that I could still see.
I don't know why I did it.
Maybe because I was still half tangled in the dream and didn't trust my voice yet.
Maybe because I wasn't ready to look at him head-on.
Maybe because some quieter, more honest part of me wanted to watch him without being watched back.
He stepped out of the bathroom a moment later.
Through the narrow slits of my lashes, I saw him.
Hair damp.
Skin still faintly steamed from the heat.
A dark towel hung low around his hips and nothing else.
My breath stalled before I could stop it.
The lamps in the room had not been turned on yet. Only the dim leftover gold of evening filtered through the curtains, painting him in long shadows and quiet light. Water clung to the planes of his shoulders. A single drop slid lazily down the centre of his chest, traced the lines of muscle, and disappeared somewhere I refused to let my eyes follow.
I had seen him without a shirt before.
It had not prepared me for this.
The tattoos covered him like a private map. Dark ink curled across one shoulder, down his ribs, across his back, weaving stories I could not read in shapes I did not want to look away from. Even half-healed scars looked deliberate on him, as if violence itself had agreed to leave its marks artfully.
I had always thought tattoos took something from a person.
Hid them.
Crowded them.
On him, they did the opposite.
They made him look more like himself. More like the thing the world should have feared from the beginning. More beautiful, in a way that had nothing to do with prettiness. He looked like something carved out of shadow and discipline, all sharp lines and dangerous calm, and somewhere beneath the heat rising in my chest there was a quiet, terrible thought:
He was unfairly beautiful.
In that dim room. In that towel. In that silence.
He turned toward the bed.
I forced myself completely still. Lashes lowered. Breathing slow. Pretending so hard that I almost believed myself.
He paused.
Then walked to the wardrobe without comment.
I let my eyes open a fraction more.
He moved with the same controlled grace he always carried, but here, in his own room, without an audience, it looked different. Less performed. More private. He pulled open one of the long dark doors, considered something briefly, and reached for fresh clothes.
I should have looked away.
I didn't.
Because the tattoos shifted with him, alive on his skin in the dim light, and because every movement of his shoulders revealed how carefully built he was beneath the cold suits he usually wore, and because some embarrassing, awakening part of me had apparently decided this was the moment to start truly understanding why women lost their minds over men like him.
I had always thought I was above that.
Apparently not.
His voice broke the silence.
Low.
Even.
Familiar.
"If you're going to keep pretending to sleep, at least breathe like someone who is actually unconscious."
I froze.
For half a second I considered staying perfectly still and hoping he was speaking to a ghost.
He continued, without turning around.
"The difference between sleep and pretending is not subtle, Mishka. People who are asleep don't hold their breath when a door opens."
My eyes flew open properly.
He still hadn't turned to look at me.
"Oh my God," I muttered, pushing myself upright, dragging the blanket with me out of pure reflex. "How long have you known?"
"Since the door opened."
"That is unhinged."
A pause.
"I can tell when someone is lying just by listening to them breathe." His voice was quiet. "Pretending to be asleep is a very loud lie."
I let out a small breathless laugh, half embarrassed, half something else.
He still hadn't turned around.
I realized, belatedly, that he had not done so deliberately. He was still half-dressed, still in only the towel, and despite everything that had happened the night before, despite the way he had held me as if I belonged in his arms, he was being… careful.
For me.
That realization did something quiet and dangerous to my chest.
I cleared my throat.
"I wasn't— I wasn't staring," I said quickly, the lie obvious in my voice. "I was just trying not to startle you."
"Mm."
That single sound said far too much.
He reached into the wardrobe and pulled a dark shirt off its hanger.
"You can look if you want" he said, with the calm of a man who already knew what I would do. "Unless you'd rather not."
Heat surged up my neck so fast it stung.
"I will look away," I said quickly, turning my face toward the headboard. "Sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't— I wasn't trying to—"
"Kiera."
The single word cut through my apology.
I went still.
"It's fine," he said. Quietly. Almost amused, though his voice never lost its edge. "I'm not offended. Look away if you want to. Not because I'm asking you to."
I had no idea what to do with that.
So I looked away.
Sort of.
Mostly.
The shadows on the headboard suddenly became fascinating.
I heard the soft sounds of him dressing behind me. Fabric over skin. The faint shift of a belt. Each small noise was somehow louder than it should have been. My pulse refused to settle. The dream was almost forgotten now, drowned out entirely by the strange new awareness humming in my chest.
I cleared my throat. "What time is it?"
"Almost one am"
I twisted slightly, careful not to look at him. "Almost one? You're joking."
"I don't joke."
"…Right. Sorry. Stupid question."
A faint sound, somewhere between an exhale and the ghost of a laugh, came from behind me.
"When did you bring me here?" I asked.
"A little past four."
"Four?" My eyes widened. "I slept for almost 7 hours?"
"Closer to six and a half."
"That isn't better."
"It wasn't meant to be."
I rubbed a hand over my face. "God. I never sleep this long. Not ever."
"Your body disagreed. You clearly needed it
Something in his voice made me pause. It wasn't teasing exactly. It was quieter than that. A note of observation that didn't feel casual.
He had noticed.
How tired I'd been.
How hard I'd been pushing myself with the studying.
How rarely I rested.
He noticed too much.
"I'm almost done."
I stayed.
I tugged the blanket a little higher and pressed my back against the headboard and tried, very hard, to act like a person who had not just been caught half-watching a half-dressed man across his own bedroom.
It didn't entirely work.
After a moment, I spoke again, voice lower this time. "Malakai?"
"Hm."
"Thank you. For earlier."
A pause.
"For what."
"For… bringing me here. From the library. I don't even remember falling asleep."
There was a beat of silence.
Then, simply: "It isn't a problem."
It shouldn't have made me smile.
It did.
Small and quiet and only to myself, hidden behind the curtain of my hair as I looked down at the blanket in my lap.
A few moments later I heard the soft sound of his footsteps approaching the foot of the bed.
"You can look now."
I did.
He was dressed again. Dark trousers. A simple black shirt left partly unbuttoned at the collar, sleeves still loose around his wrists. His hair was still damp, pushed back carelessly. He didn't look softer for being dressed. If anything, he looked sharper. More controlled. The towel had been a glimpse. The man back in tailored black was the version of him the world was allowed to see.
But his eyes were the same.
Dark.
Steady.
Watching me with that quiet, unreadable focus that always made me feel both exposed and oddly protected at once.
He didn't sit beside me at first. Just stood at the side of the bed, hands loose at his sides, looking down at me as though deciding something.
"Are you going out?" I asked.
"Yes." Simple but cold answer
" I have things, people rather to deal with. I'll be back by evening."
I nodded not knowing what else to do or say.
Then he lowered himself onto the edge of the mattress, near my knee but not touching, and rested one arm casually across his thigh.
The room felt smaller again.
"You slept badly," he said.
Not a question.
I hesitated. "How can you tell?"
"Your breathing changed about ten minutes before you woke up."
I stared at him.
"You really do listen for things like that?"
"Always."
He said it the way other people commented on the weather.
I tried to laugh, but it came out small. "That should be terrifying."
"It is."
A short silence.
Then, quieter: "Bad dream?"
I looked away.
Old habit.
I felt his gaze still on me anyway.
"Yes," I admitted finally.
"About them."
It wasn't a question.
I nodded once.
He didn't ask which one. He didn't push. He simply absorbed it, the way he absorbed everything I told him — quietly, fully, like a man cataloguing offenses for later.
Then he said, almost too softly, "They aren't here."
"I know."
"They can't reach you here."
"I know," I whispered.
He looked at me for a long moment. Then, almost as if he had not meant to say it at all: "They will never hurt you again, even if you are not here"
The words were said calmly.
Casually, even.
But there was nothing casual about them.
It wasn't comfort.
It was a vow disguised as a sentence.
Something in my chest did a slow, quiet collapse.
I held his gaze for as long as I could.
He held mine longer.
It was the kind of silence that made everything else seem far away. The faint sounds of the house. The traffic in the distance. Even the steady ache in my chest from the dream. All of it softened beneath the weight of him sitting there, dressed in shadows, telling me without softness that I was safe in a way that none of my therapists, none of my teachers, none of the gentle adults in my old life had ever managed to convince me of.
He believed it.
So somehow, for the first time, I almost did too.
I looked down at my hands.
Then, before I lost myself in it entirely, I cleared my throat.
"I should go," I said. Quietly. Without conviction.
His eyes stayed on me.
"All right."
He didn't protest.
Didn't hold me.
Didn't ask me to stay.
That, somehow, was worse.
Because part of me had wanted him to.
I sat up properly, swinging my legs over the side of the bed. My feet found the rug carefully. The blanket fell aside. The room felt suddenly very large again.
He didn't move.
I felt his gaze on the back of my neck, on my shoulders, on the line of my spine as I stood. Not lecherously. Not even hungrily.
Just… steadily.
The way he watched everything.
The way he was now, apparently, watching me.
"Goodluck, Malakai," I said softly, without turning around.
A pause.
Then his voice came low and quiet behind me, almost intimate in its restraint.
"Goodbye, Mishka."
That name again.
I closed my eyes for a heartbeat against the fluttering in my chest, then opened them and forced my legs to move.
I crossed the room with as much composure as I could manage, opened the door, and slipped out into the corridor without looking back.
The hall outside was dim and quiet, the wall lamps glowing soft amber, the silence of the house deeper here near the master wing than anywhere else. I closed Malakai's door carefully behind me, exhaled like I had been holding my breath for an hour, and turned to make my way toward my own room.
I didn't even take three steps.
A door across the hall flew open.
Bridget.
Of course.
She stood in her doorway in soft pajamas, hair piled in a messy bun on top of her head, a highlighter tucked behind one ear, holding a half-eaten apple in one hand and an expression of pure mock-scandalized disbelief on her face.
"Excuse me," she said immediately. "Excuse me. What were you doing in my brother's room?"
I froze.
She wasn't angry.
If anything, she looked delighted.
Delighted in the loud, dramatic, best-friend kind of way that I had quickly learned was a permanent feature of her personality.
"I don't know what you're talking about, plus aren'tyou meant to be asleep? Its passed midnight" I said quickly.
Her eyes narrowed.
She bit into the apple.
"Mmhm." She chewed. "Cut the crap."
"What?"
"I came to your room. You weren't there. I went to the library. You weren't there. And I am ninety percent certain that I just heard you do the world's sneakiest little tiptoe out of Malakai's room."
"It's not what you think."
She tilted her head sweetly. "How do you know what I think?"
"Reverse psychology doesn't work on me, Bridget."
"Then why does your face look like that?"
"Like what?"
"Like a girl who just left a man's room."
"Bridget."
She took another bite of her apple. "You are so insufferable."
"So are you."
"Yes," she said, grinning. "But you still love me."
I almost laughed despite myself.
"What were you doing in there, Kiera?" she asked, softer now, but still with that gleam in her eye.
"Nothing."
"Nothing?"
"He was just asking about school."
She stared at me for a long second.
Then she said, very slowly, "Hmm."
"Hmm what?"
"Just… hmm."
"Bridget."
"What."
"Stop."
"I'm not doing anything."
"You are doing everything."
She took another bite of her apple, chewed thoughtfully, and finally shrugged.
"Fine," she said. "If you say so."
Then her expression shifted, just slightly. Less playful. A little softer.
"But Kiera," she said. "I mean it. If anything ever… happens. Or starts. Or already started." She raised her eyebrows. "You tell me straight up, yeah?"
I looked at her for a moment.
There was no judgment in her face.
Only love, wrapped in chaos, the way Bridget loved everyone she had decided was hers.
"Okay," I said softly.
"Promise?"
"Promise."
She made a satisfied sound, set the apple between her teeth, and held her arms out wide.
I rolled my eyes, but I stepped forward and let her pull me into a hug.
She squeezed me hard.
"I'd come hang in your room," she muttered against my shoulder, "but I have a giant project that I was supposed to have finished, like, three weeks ago, and it's due tomorrow. I'm going to be up all night dying slowly at my desk."
"Oh no," I laughed softly. "What is it on? Is it something I can help with?"
"Trust me," she said, pulling back with a tragic look. "Not your course. Not your wavelength. Not your problem. You'd die just looking at the rubric."
"You sure?"
"Babe, I am beautiful and I am full of energy," she said, putting a hand to her chest. "But I am also painfully smart when I want to be. Tonight I want to be. I've got it."
"Okay," I smiled. "Don't kill yourself over it."
"No promises." She kissed my cheek quickly. "Go rest. Eat something. Stop sneaking out of dangerous men's bedrooms."
"Bridget."
"Love you. Bye."
She vanished back into her room before I could swat at her, the door clicking shut behind her with the cheerful finality of someone who had said exactly what she wanted to say and refused to deal with the consequences.
I stood there in the hallway for a moment, hand pressed lightly against my cheek where she had kissed it, then turned and finally made my way to my own room.
When I stepped inside and closed the door behind me, the silence felt different than it had earlier.
Quieter.
Fuller.
I leaned back against the door, closed my eyes, and let out a slow breath.
The dream was already fading.
Tina's voice. Alisa's laughter. The fall. All of it was being smoothed over by something newer and much more dangerous to my peace.
Him.
The way he had stood in that towel without knowing I was watching.
The way he had known anyway.
The way his voice had softened when he had said goodnight, Mishka.
The way he had told me, with that infuriating calm, that they would never reach me again.
I pushed off the door slowly and crossed to my bed.
I sat on the edge of it and stared at my hands for a long time.
There was a quiet, unfamiliar warmth turning over slowly in my chest.
It was not the warmth of Tina's house. That had never been warmth at all. It had been heat — the kind that burned things.
This was different.
This felt like standing near a low fire on a cold night.
Dangerous, yes.
But chosen.
I lay back against my pillows and stared at the ceiling.
Almost one, he had said.
The night still stretched not too long ahead of me.
But for once, the thought of being awake in it did not frighten me.
Because somewhere down the hall, behind a dark wooden door I had only just slipped out of, a man with a cold voice and a softer touch than he wanted anyone to know about was almost certainly thinking about me too.
I closed my eyes.
And for the first time in years, the last thought I had before drifting was not about who had hurt me.
It was about who had not.