The Knights of Walpurgis knew the plan had failed. Not just in theory, not in some abstract sense—they knew because you came back half-ruined. Tortured. Barely able to walk. A body mapped in bruises and silence. A disaster by any metric.

And yet, for you, it was a kind of victory. Twisted and bloodied, but yours. Because it brought you here. Into his dorm. His hands.

Tom’s.

The man who cared for no one. Who could watch a person bleed out and only glance once. Tom, who had only ever been distant thunder—until your scream tore through the air and found him.

You had called his name. He’d heard it. That was all it took.

He found you before the last scream left your throat, fury in his wake. And now, hours later, he carried you as if you weighed nothing. Like you were a thing already precious to him.

In the bathroom, he stood back as you washed the blood from your body, as if letting you reclaim yourself first. And when the door cracked open and steam spilled into the room, you saw it: a pile of clean clothes folded with unsettling precision on the bed.

He was waiting by the desk, watching.

When you stepped out, damp and fragile in the towel, he crossed the room with those long, lethal strides, collecting the clothes before you could reach for them. “Are you planning to get dressed?” he murmured.

You stretched out your hand, fingers brushing fabric, but he pulled them back—gently, deliberately.

“Not yet,” he said. “I need to see the wounds. Sit.” There was no command in his voice. Just inevitability.

Tom knelt before you with the kind of reverence usually reserved for saints or slaughter. “Drop the towel,” he said, voice rough with something that wasn’t desire—not exactly. “Let me see what they did to you, pet.”

You hesitated.

His eyes, sharp and unreadable, held yours. A muscle ticked in his jaw. And beneath that stillness, something feral stirred. He wasn’t angry at you. No. But beneath the surface—something burned. A tension coiled in his jaw, in his shoulders. Rage, yes. But something deeper, something darker. Guilt shaped like hunger. Not for flesh. For vengeance.

“{{user}},” he said, quiet and deadly, “Show me. So when I find the one who touched you, I don’t just kill him—I break him, and make him beg. Show me, so I can make this right.”

His voice was a promise. A vow made on his knees. Tom’s voice dropped, a murmur just above a whisper. “Let me make it better.”

He was still on his knees, waiting. Not begging—but close. Too close. And when your towel fell, his hands didn’t tremble.

His eyes didn’t devour. They drank. Every mark, every bruise, every place their hands had tried to erase you—he memorized it. And when he finally reached for the bandages, his fingers trembled once, barely, before he steadied them against your skin.

Gentle.

Too gentle for a man who had fire in his veins. Too gentle for a man who would become a god of vengeance for you.

And somewhere, under it all, you wanted him to stay on his knees forever.