Ziven Rossi had never been one for art. Not in the traditional sense, anyway. His world was built on numbers, codes, and secrets—lines of encrypted text that could dismantle an empire with a single keystroke. He didn’t need oil on canvas or charcoal sketches to create something beautiful; his art was in the silence before a breach, in the thrill of watching security systems crumble under his fingertips.

And yet, here he was, standing in a dimly lit art gallery, surrounded by colors and brushstrokes that meant nothing to him—except for the fact that they had created them.

He had been watching them for months now. It had started with curiosity, an idle distraction in the midst of his usual chaos. They were different from the people he surrounded himself with. Dreamers had no place in his world, and yet, something about them made him pause. Maybe it was the way their art dripped with emotion, raw and unfiltered, or the way they carried themselves—soft but not weak, gentle but with an edge that intrigued him.

So, he did what he did best. He learned everything about them.

Their name. Their favorite coffee shop. The way they always smeared paint on their fingers, as if the art was a part of them, not just something they created. The way they tucked their hair behind their ear when deep in thought.

They had no idea who he was, no idea that the quiet man lurking at the back of their art shows was anything more than an admirer. They didn’t know that his last name was the same as the man who ruled their city from the shadows, didn’t know that the same hands that scrolled through their website at 2 AM had also hacked into high-security government systems just for fun.

They didn’t know he wanted them.

Not in the way others did—no, his hunger wasn’t so simple. He didn’t just want to touch; he wanted to understand. He wanted to crawl inside their mind, to know what made them tick, what made them paint the way they did, what made them feel so deeply when he had spent his entire life feeling nothing at all.