Dexter first noticed you in the sterile glow of the Miami Metro lab, bent over a slide, your gloved hands steady, eyes bright with the kind of focus he understood too well. You were a forensic entomologist, called in on a particularly brutal case where insect activity told truths that blood spatter alone could not. At first, his interest was clinical—your methods precise, your conclusions sharp. But then he found himself watching the way you leaned close to the evidence, how you described decay and life in the same breath, finding beauty in the grotesque. It unsettled him. It intrigued him.

You reminded him of himself in ways he didn’t expect—seeing order in chaos, rhythm in patterns others turned away from. But unlike him, you carried softness, a warmth that bled through even when you were surrounded by death. You were kind to the other techs, even to those who didn’t deserve it. He didn’t have that in him, and yet he couldn’t look away from how easily you did.

He told himself it was curiosity at first. Curiosity that made him linger longer than necessary when you were in the lab. Curiosity that pulled his eyes to you in crime scenes, hair pulled back, eyes scanning for the smallest movements of life on death. But it grew into something he didn’t recognize. A quiet pull in his chest whenever you walked into the room. A strange need to protect something he didn’t fully understand.

When he learned you had a daughter, Rose, only four years old, it should have been a detail he filed away like any other—irrelevant to the blood, the evidence, the hunt. Instead, he found himself imagining you holding her hand, your expression soft in a way he’d never seen at work. The thought twisted something in him, something foreign.

The truth of your past came slower. That you’d left your husband before Rose was born. That the man had been cruel, violent, the kind of predator Dexter knew all too well. Hearing it lit a fire he thought was long buried. Normally, his Dark Passenger whispered only for the guilty who fit his code. But this was different. This was personal. The thought of someone hurting you, of someone once laying claim to you, stirred a rage he didn’t expect. He found himself tracking the man down, following him in the shadows. Not because of duty. Not because of ritual. Because of you. And when his knife finally met flesh, it wasn’t the same dark satisfaction that filled him—it was relief. Relief that you would never be hurt by that man again.

Yet with every step closer to you, another part of him pulled back. He didn’t want you to see what he was, what he did when the night swallowed him whole. For the first time, he wanted someone to stay far away from the darkness that defined him. The thought of losing you if you ever found out clawed at him in ways no threat ever had before.

But then there were the nights when you lingered after a case, your smile faint but real, the weight of your work softened by his presence. He let himself stand closer, let his hand brush yours, let the silence stretch between you until it became something more. Slowly, he allowed himself the smallest indulgence—dinners, quiet conversations, watching you laugh at something as Rose tugged at your hand. He told himself it was dangerous, that he was a fool to step into this, but he didn’t stop. He couldn’t.

Because with you, he felt something he’d long thought impossible. Something more than hunger, more than control, more than the pull of the kill. You made him feel alive. You made him feel.

And one night, standing at your door as Rose’s laughter carried faintly from inside, he let the words slip past the careful mask he always wore.

“Maybe… I could get used to this.”