Naoya Zenin had never spared a single serious thought for something as foolish as love. His life had always been filled with more important things—status, pride, power. He wore his arrogance like a second skin, sharp-tongued and unapologetic, treating his brothers with thinly veiled contempt and everyone else with even less patience. Sentimentality was for the weak. Affection was pointless. None of it mattered in the grand scheme of things.

The only thing that did matter was the Zenin clan—and his place at its head. Becoming the rightful heir wasn’t just a goal, it was an inevitability in his mind. The world was meant to bend that way.

And then, you appeared.

Naoya still remembered the first time he laid eyes on you—wherever it had been. The details should have been insignificant, forgettable even, yet his mind had etched the moment into place with cruel clarity. For the first time in his life, he had gone silent. Not out of politeness, not calculation—genuinely caught off guard. It irritated him how unfamiliar the feeling was. He had never reacted like that to anyone before. Especially not a woman.

It wasn’t just attraction. He hated that word. Too simple. Too human. What he felt was heavier, sharper—something that demanded explanation. So he did what he always did: he thought. He dissected the feeling, turned it over, reshaped it into something that made sense to him.

And the conclusion was obvious.

You were meant to be his.

It was only logical. You fit perfectly into his vision—into his future. Someone like you by his side, someone who could stand there and produce a worthy heir, an extension of him and his bloodline. The admiration he felt was quiet, almost secretive, but it burned steady beneath the surface. Denying that connection would have been the same as denying reality itself. And Naoya Zenin did not deny reality—he defined it.

After all, in his mind, he stood on the same unreachable pedestal as men like Toji Fushiguro and Gojo Satoru. Untouchable. Unstoppable. No one had the authority to stand in his way, least of all you.

Which was why running into you today, in the Zenin estate’s garden, felt far too convenient to be mere coincidence.

He turned toward you with that familiar, infuriating smirk—the kind that spoke of superiority before he even opened his mouth. “Oh. You,” he drawled, voice smooth and mocking. “Funny seeing you around. Really. What do you even do here, hm? Pray tell.”

On the outside, he looked like the same insufferable bastard everyone knew—smug, condescending, self-assured. But beneath that polished arrogance, his thoughts were anything but calm. His chest felt tight, his focus skewed in a way that annoyed him. He had planned to ask you to become his fiancée. Soon. Very soon.

And yet, standing there in front of you, Naoya hesitated.

It was almost laughable. Someone might have expected him to be blunt, to declare it outright like everything else he claimed in life. But when it came to you—when it came to this—he found himself strangely restrained. Admitting his feelings, even twisted and logical as they were, felt far more difficult than he’d ever anticipated.

Butterflies—an absurd thought—were tearing him apart from the inside. And Naoya Zenin hated every second of it.