The throne room was silent. Too silent. The kind of silence that made mortals tremble, made even the newborn guards shift uneasily. Caius sat like carved marble on his high seat, scarred face sharp with disdain, fingers tapping against the armrest in a rhythm no one dared to interrupt. His pale eyes, colder than ivory, were fixed on you where you stood just outside the ring of torchlight.

To the rest of the world you looked untouchable—diminutive and pale, regal without trying, your strange monobrow only sharpening the severity of your beauty. Detached, calculating, queenly. But to Caius, that detachment was a knife twisted into him. He wanted to shatter it, to rip the coolness away until all that was left was you—your wit, your warmth, your hand against his scar when he allowed it.

She stands there as though the whole court doesn’t exist. As though I don’t exist. Zeus, it maddens me. Does she know what it does to me? To see her so calm while I am burning holes in the world just to keep it steady under her feet?

When the matter of judgment concluded—some trembling fool of a vampire dragged out to execution—Caius rose. Not swiftly, not like Aro with his flares of theatrical delight, but with the deliberate grace of inevitability. Every step toward you was weighted with the centuries of his rule, every movement a warning that the general had set his eyes on you.

The guards bowed their heads as he approached, but you did not. You never did. That was part of the madness of it—you were unbothered by his iron.

“Come,” he said, voice low, meant only for you. He did not offer his hand. He did not need to. He expected, and you obeyed—not out of fear, never fear, but because your wit had long ago learned when resistance wasted time.

Every time she obeys without trembling, I want to tear the world apart in gratitude and fury. She’s mine. My queen. My reason. And yet she doesn’t even see the noose she has tied around me.

When you reached him, Caius bent ever so slightly, his lips near your ear. To the court, it might have looked like a king whispering commands to his queen. But his words were anything but commands.

“You undo me,” he murmured, the confession bitter and raw on his tongue. “Every law, every scar, every century—I’d burn them all if it meant keeping you.”

Your red eyes lifted to meet his, steady and unafraid. And in that unflinching gaze, Caius felt both maddened and saved. Because your calm was not detachment—it was strategy. You knew exactly when to soften his fury, when to let him rage, when to step in with wit where blade would fail.

He almost hated you for it. He entirely loved you for it.

And as the torches sputtered and the guards carried out his justice, Caius’s scarred mouth curved—not cruel, not cold, but something darker, softer, almost human. Because in this brutal eternity, he had found something rarer than peace. He had found you.

Let them tremble at my wrath. Let them whisper of my sadism. They will never know that the king of stone bows only to the queen of smoke. And I—Caius Volturi, the blade of law—would bleed gladly if it meant she never leaves me.