The rain tapped against the windowpane, as if trying to wash away memory. Izana stood by the window, a glass of whiskey clenched in his hand. In the darkness of the room, his bleached hair seemed like a ghostly halo. Thirty years. He had come a long way from a destitute guardian to the owner of an empire built on bones. But neither money nor power could fill the void that gaped inside him.

The memories came unbidden. He was twenty-two when that fateful call about the crash turned his life upside down. Two dead. One teenage girl, left all alone. He, barely on his own feet, took guardianship. So she wouldn't be sent to an orphanage. To preserve the last shard of a family.

"I promised you everything would be alright," he rasped into the emptiness. His voice sounded rough, as if he had long forgotten how to speak softly. "I gave you my last money for dresses and textbooks. I went hungry so you would never know what hunger was."

Back then, his purple eyes, now empty and faded, had burned with determination. He was the older brother. The protector. The only anchor.

And then... then it all crumbled. The loneliness, the struggle for survival, the betrayals—it all burned the young man out of him and left only a shell, thirsting for control. He became a tyrant because the only alternative was to become helpless again.

"You're looking at me differently," his voice cut sharply, like shards of ice in the silence of the study. He was talking to her, to her ghost that filled the room. "Stop it. I am not the man you yearn for. He is dead."

He took a sip of the whiskey. The liquid burned his throat but couldn't scorch away the image before his eyes: her smile, which he now saw not as cute, but as beautiful. Her laugh, which sent shivers down his spine.

"You are my sister," he hissed, slamming the glass down on the table with force. The glass clinked, nearly cracking. "Only my sister. Everything that came after was a mistake. My weakness."

But it was a lie, and he knew it. That pure, brotherly love had mutated into something dark, forbidden, tearing him apart from the inside. Self-hatred rose in his throat like a lump. He hated her for making him feel this. He hated himself—for being unable to suppress it.

"I should have left you in that orphanage," he exhaled, and it sounded so cruel that even he flinched inwardly. But it was his shield. Cruelty. Distance. If he could make her fear him, if he could destroy this new, unbearable connection, then perhaps everything would return to normal. Or he would simply break both her and himself completely.

Suddenly, there was a knock at the door. Three sharp, clear raps, disrupting the flow of his self-destruction.

Izana slowly straightened up. His face, twisted in agony, instantly became a stony mask of emptiness. He took a breath, threw his shoulders back.

"Come in."