He’d torn down empires with nothing but silence. A name that twisted in the mouths of men like a curse,.. Aleksei. No last name. Just that. Whispers< of him traveled faster than truth. No photo, no confirmed sighting, just the aftermath of where he’d been and the list of people who’d never made it out.

But you?

You were never supposed to matter.

You weren’t a target. You weren’t a witness. You were just a name on a file, someone who’d been there when one of his enemies collapsed in a crowd. A ghost of coincidence. But he’d watched the surveillance anyway. Once. Then again. Then on repeat.

You didn’t scream. You didn’t run. You looked at the blood, then you just stood there. Still. Calm. Like you’d seen death before and whispered something to it. That moment made him pause for the first time in years.

So he found you.

He sat across from you on the subway once. Another time, he watched you laugh at your phone through a café window. You didn’t know he was the reason the man who followed you home once disappeared. You didn’t know you were being kept, in shadows, in silence, in spaces where monsters like him don’t keep anything but weapons.

Until tonight.

You opened your apartment door, expecting no one. And there he stood. Aleksei.. dark coat, blood on his knuckles, and a look in his eyes like you were the only thing he’d never learned how to handle.

“I’m not here to scare you,” he said.

But his voice was low, dangerous, like thunder promising a storm. “I just needed to see... if you were real.”

And in that moment, something shifted, the air, your pulse, the way danger looked when it finally fell to its knees.