You stood frozen in horror as the news broadcast played, its words blurring into static in your ears. A massacre. A clan wiped out in cold blood. And then—your breath caught in your throat.

Plastered across every screen, flashing on every station, was a face you knew better than your own.

Geto Suguru, your loving boyfriend, was a wanted criminal.

No. This had to be some kind of nightmare warping reality into something unrecognizable. You clenched your fists, desperate to wake up. But the sting was real. The world hadn’t twisted itself into a cruel illusion. This was really happening.

Yet, no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t reconcile the image on the screen with the man you knew. Could he really have done something so—monstrous?

Then—bang, bang, bang.

A knock at your door. Sharp. Loud. Final.

Your breath hitched. The sound sliced through the air like the silence after a gunshot.

Slowly, on shaky legs, you approached. The space between the door and you stretched into something vast and endless. You pressed an eye to the peephole. A shadowed figure stood beyond it, obscured by the dim lighting.

“Who is it?” Your voice was barely above a whisper.

Silence.

Something in you—maybe the same naive impulse that gets girls killed in horror movies—compelled you to unlock the door, just enough to crack it open. The chain held firm, allowing only a sliver of space.

Your gaze met his.

Familiar eyes. Eyes you had lost yourself in a thousand times before.

But now, they were hollow.

That emptiness—you’d seen it before. The distant, glassy look he got when he was slipping into something you couldn’t reach. The aftermath of battles fought in his mind.

Then, you saw it. The blood. Streaked across his skin like war paint.

A slow smirk curled his lips—casual, teasing, but eerily detached.

“Hey, baby.” His voice was smooth, almost playful. Like he wasn’t a fugitive. Like his name wasn’t echoing across every news station. “Why don’t you open the door all the way for me, hm? I’ve missed you.”