The sudden silence in the room hung between you like a prickly blanket, as if woven from invisible yet painfully sharp threads, stitched only by his ragged breathing and the hollow, burning thud of your own heart, echoing in your temples with anxious pulses. The words that had slipped from your tongue in a heat of anger and despair still lingered in the air like a poisonous haze, and the bitter taste of injustice was immediately reflected in every feature of his face.

Romeo's watery blue eyes, usually so alive, full of a cheeky, mocking sparkle or a warm, sincere tenderness, were now wide open but bottomlessly empty. Shock was frozen in them. And perhaps the boyish terror of being abandoned, the sort he'd learnt to hide from everyone long ago, but which, despite everything, had never completely disappeared.

He stepped back half a pace, but in that simple shift was the recoil towards that familiar abyss—the one you'd known was always there but had let yourself forget in your rage. The abyss of loneliness, scorched into his soul from a time that felt like another life, never properly healed. A desolation that neither the Monad Charity House nor the years spent under the shadow of someone else's kindness could ever erase, because no matter what, he remained a child of the streets of Krat, raised beneath the wing of someone else's wealth, in the glow of a luxury that would never truly be his.

His fingers, which had just a moment ago been clutching your shoulder, slid up to his face in a faltering gesture because he was trying to erase the invisible but burning marks of your words from his skin.

"Watch your language," the hoarse fragment of a voice sounded muffled, since each syllable had to be hewn out of the ice frozen inside. "You're just like Carlo."

Oddly enough, even the words of his best friend sometimes wounded Romeo, because he’d often told Carlo that it was perhaps better to have a family, even with all its flaws, scandals, racket and crushing indifference, than to have no family at all.

"Why are you doing this to me?"

And there it was. The most vile, sour excuse already rising to your lips, ready to spill out and colour the air with a new, no less rotten lie. But your tongue stuck to the roof of your mouth because the fear that had unleashed this monstrous argument had once again, mercilessly, gripped your throat with icy fingers. Fear of your father's wrath. Of the alchemist's relentless gaze; of his unthinkable ambition and dangerous proximity to the very top of Krat's power—to Simon Manus, to Valentinus Monad himself.

And Romeo was not daft. He knew all your excuses before you could even spit them out.

He lifted his head, snorting bitterly, though perhaps, more than anything, it was aimed at himself.

"So that's it, is it… The silver spoon in your cushy little life's fretting about what your posh alchemist dad thinks?" Romeo pressed his lips together for a moment, pinning you with his gaze. "You reckon I don't know he's never been fond of me?"

He slowly dropped his hands to your waist. His fingers tightened, gripping you. Romeo let his head slump against your shoulder, into the soft fold of fabric, into the warmth, and exhaled. The man bumped awkwardly against the edge of the table with his lower back because, frankly, he had no strength left; not for an argument, not for anger, not even the pride to walk away. All that was left was this—to hold you tightly to himself until his fingers went numb, as if in this tight embrace he could hide from everything unfair.

Romeo no longer wanted to look for scapegoats or wrongs. "Don't shove me off. Don't turn into a stranger. Don't be like them." And perhaps in the clenched circle of his arms remained only the desperate, almost painful tenderness that lives somewhere next to the solar plexus.

However much he despised himself in that moment, only one thought seared hotter—terrifyingly simple, sharp as his Stalker's blade: he wouldn't survive if you left him.

"Christ, I'm so sorry, love…"