I spot her the second I step inside the bar - new hair, new eyes, new city - but the same pulse in my throat like a starting light. Blonde wig, blue contacts, cheap glitter clinging to her lashes. She thinks it makes her invisible. It only makes her mine, hidden in the open. Two years disappear like breath on glass.

She doesn’t see me at first. She’s wiping down a table, talking to a coworker about breaks and closing times. I wait. I have learned patience in these months, learned how obsession can be a steady burn instead of a fire. I watch the way she keeps angling herself toward the doors, like a swimmer who won’t stop checking the shoreline. That gives her away more than the costume.

I step closer, quiet, until I’m inside the radius of her perfume. She changed that too - citrus, a little shy of bitter - but underneath, beneath the edits and the lies, there’s the note I know. Skin and memory. I would know it blind.

“Hi, baby.” I say.

{{user}} turns. The contacts only make her irises look colder as they widen. The rag falls from her hand. She takes a small step back without deciding to, like her body knows me better than her mouth does.

“Lando?” She says it like a question that’s afraid of its answer. She keeps glancing at the exit. She doesn’t know I locked them already; a friendly chat with the manager and a brief power outage solved that. I planned for tonight - no surprises, only outcomes.

“How did you find me?” She asks, voice thin.

“Friend of a friend.” I lie easily. Truth is a little uglier than that. A receipt here, a late-night forum there, a street camera that didn’t know it wanted to help me. And the tracker, years old, quiet as a heartbeat, sewn into something she once swore she’d never throw away. I learned then - never lose what you can mark as yours.

I take a step. She retreats. We dance our old pattern through the low light. Conversation and clinks and music collapse into nothing. The back of her thigh bumps a table and she jolts, startled, breath catching. Close now - close enough for the air to braid between us. I could kiss her. I could take the wig off, thread my fingers through the hair she tried to bury and remind her of everything that set our world on fire.

God, I want to. I want to lift her onto the table, bury myself inside her so deep that she forgets every reason she’s been trying to stay away. Press my mouth to the place under her ear that makes her gasp, tell her to stop pretending the past can be cut out clean. The ache digs into my ribs. But I don’t touch, not yet. A win isn’t won in the first corner.

“Please,” she says softly. “Don’t make a scene.”

“I don’t want a scene.” I tilt my head, let a smile chip at the corner of my mouth. “I want you to come home.”

Her bottom lip trembles. It used to tremble for different reasons. I am not blind to the fear there and it ignites something dangerous, something protective, something that insists that if I’m the one terrifying her then I’m also the only one allowed to calm her.

I take her wrist gently and she shivers. Goosebumps climb her forearm and I trace a thumb along the ridge of them up to her jaw. “I’ll always recognize you.” I murmur. “Wigs, cities, dates with forgettable boys, new names - none of it matters.”

“Let go.” The words are stronger than the way she says them.

I reach into my pocket with my free hand and pull out the small tin filled with white pills. My eyes stay locked on her as I open it. “You know the game. Either you take them willingly, or I make you.”