The marriage was called arranged, but that was only the story told to everyone else.

In public, it had been presented as a necessary union between two powerful houses, a political decision made for stability, advantage, and influence. People pitied you for it. They saw beauty bound to brutality and assumed you had simply been handed to a monster. You let them believe that. It suited you. Innocence was a far more useful mask than ambition had ever been.

But the truth was far uglier, and far more dangerous.

Ryomen Sukuna had seen you once, only once, across a hall crowded with courtiers and polished liars, and something in him had gone still. You had been smiling at some nobleman old enough to mistake your beauty for softness, your lowered lashes for obedience. Everyone else saw a lovely woman built for marriage, delicate and mild. Sukuna saw the calculation beneath it. He saw the intelligence in your silence, the cruelty hidden beneath elegance, the way men leaned toward you thinking themselves in control when in truth they were already being led. And from that first moment, he wanted you.

Not gently. Not sweetly. Not in any way that could be called sane.

So he arranged the marriage himself.

Quietly. Efficiently. Ruthlessly.

By the time the proposal reached your family, every path away from it had already been sealed. Alliances had shifted. Pressure had been applied. Refusals had become impossible. And yet he was careful—careful enough to make it appear that he, too, had merely been cornered by duty. To the world, it was an arrangement forced upon you both. A practical union neither party had wanted. Only he knew the truth: he had built it with his own hands the moment he decided he would have you.

At first, he called it interest. Amusement. Possession. You were clever, far cleverer than the simpering fools who usually filled noble halls, and he found your performance amusing. The way you played innocence so flawlessly, the way men unraveled beneath a smile you did not mean, the way you gathered secrets while appearing too graceful to scheme—it entertained him. That was all, he told himself.

But denial became harder with time.

He noticed too much. The difference between your real smile and the false one. The look in your eyes when you were bored, when you were lying, when you were about to ruin someone without ever lifting a hand. He learned your silences. Waited for your voice. Felt his temper darken whenever someone stood too close, spoke too long, looked too boldly. He told himself it was territorial instinct, that you were his wife and therefore his concern. Nothing more.

Yet concern did not explain why your absence soured entire rooms. It did not explain why he remembered every expression you made when you thought no one was watching. It did not explain why your displeasure sat beneath his skin like a blade, or why the smallest scrap of your genuine attention felt dangerously like reward.

What unsettled him most was that he had chosen this. He had made the marriage happen. He had tied you to him because he wanted you near, only to discover that proximity was far worse than distance had ever been. Wanting you from afar had been simple. Endurable. But having you within reach, hearing your voice, watching you move through his halls as though you had always belonged there—it had turned something sharp and possessive into something far more humiliating.

Love.

He despised the word. Despised how soft it sounded, how mortal, how weak. So he refused it. Called it obsession instead. Hunger. Madness. Anything but the truth.

And still it remained.

Because Ryomen Sukuna did not burn for you only when others looked. He burned when you laughed at something he had not said. When you passed him without fear. When your pretty, poisonous smile slipped and something real flashed beneath it. He burned because he had arranged a marriage to possess you, only to realize too late that what he felt was not the satisfaction of ownership.

It was love in its most ruinous form.