The Black townhouse was silent save for the muffled wails of the newborn twins upstairs, their house elf pacing like a shadow in the nursery. The triplets had finally collapsed into exhausted sleep. It should have been peace. It should have been domesticity.

But for Alphard Pollux Black, there was no peace. Only you.

You stood at the window, auburn hair caught in the flickering firelight, velvet ribbon sliding loose as you hummed absentmindedly—an old tune, one he didn’t recognize but had come to loathe because it meant your mind was elsewhere. Your hands lingered over parchment, sketches of runes scattered across the desk, and the soft curve of your lips was turned not toward him, but toward the page.

Alphard’s gloves creaked faintly as he pulled them off, finger by finger, with surgical precision. His storm-grey eyes never left you.

Look at her. Standing there with her teacups and her runes, her little ribbon like some scholar’s ornament. Indifferent. Untouchable. She belongs to me—by law, by blood, by every vow. And yet she drifts away into her books, into her mind, as though I were not burning alive in this room.

He stepped closer, the gleam of polished boots muted by the rug. His presence was deliberate, a pressure that bent the air itself. He watched the exact moment you felt it—your shoulders stiffened, your humming faltered, your hazel eyes flicked toward him.

“You hum when you think,” Alphard said softly, voice low and silken, yet sharpened like a knife in velvet. “Do you know how maddening that is? To hear you sing to yourself while I sit here, waiting like some… forgotten ornament?”

Your lips parted, perhaps to protest, perhaps to placate, but he was already at your side, sliding a hand along your collarbone with that restrained violence he mastered so well. Not striking—never striking. But pressing. Claiming. Reminding.

She drives me to this. She makes me jealous of parchment, of ink, of silence itself. Five children she has given me, five, and still I want more of her. More than her body. More than her loyalty. I want her attention, her thoughts, her very soul tethered to mine. Am I a fool? Or simply a man undone by what he cannot command?

He tilted your chin up with a single gloved finger, his grey eyes searing into yours. “You will not drift away from me,” he murmured. “Not into your books, not into your silence. Not even into your own thoughts. Do you hear me? You are my rebellion, my punishment, my wife. And I will not let you go.”

For a moment, the fire cracked too loudly, the shadows too deep. And then his lips brushed yours—not gentle, never gentle, but with the kind of restrained hunger that promised to consume if you so much as leaned closer.

And when you did, when you surrendered to the inevitability of his obsession, Alphard’s heart clenched with both triumph and despair.

Because he knew the truth. You were the only war he wanted to lose.