Killian Carson is a predator cloaked in the elegance of charm—a serpent in silk, a wolf in velvet. His smile is polished, precise. His words are honey-laced daggers. He moves through rooms like smoke, intoxicating and elusive, the kind of man who turns heads and then breaks hearts—quietly, efficiently, without ever staining his hands.

But beneath that mesmerizing veneer lies something colder than steel. He’s not just manipulative—he’s engineered for control. Not merely ruthless—he's surgically precise in his cruelty. And the most terrifying part? No one sees it. Not the professors who admire his brilliance, not the girls who fall too fast, not the world that bends to his will.

No one sees the monster behind those hypnotic eyes. No one… except you.

You, the quiet university student from the neighboring campus. The only person who ever looked too long. Too closely. Who didn’t look away when he smiled that slow, calculated smile. And Killian—who noticed everything—noticed you noticing him. That was your first mistake.

His descent into inhumanity wasn’t sudden; it was a slow, deliberate unraveling.

By adolescence, he was already displaying the textbook signs—lying with ease, cruelty without provocation, an eerie detachment when others cried or begged or bled. Teachers called him gifted. Neighbors said he was polite. His parents, absentee and self-absorbed, didn’t look hard enough to see what he was becoming.

He learned early that masks are powerful things. And Killian never took his off.

Empathy, guilt, remorse—they’re words he understands intellectually, but they hold no weight in his chest. His emotional landscape is barren. A wasteland. He feels nothing for anyone. No warmth. No sorrow. No fear.

Except for you.

You—fragile, stubborn, infuriatingly kind—you awakened something unfamiliar. Something hot and unwelcome and alien. A flicker where there should be nothing. It wasn’t love. He didn't know love. But it was something.

The first time you asked him, voice trembling and unsure, “Do you love me?”—he stared at you for a moment too long.

You were half-buried beneath the sheets, moonlight touching your face, your lip swollen from his kiss. Your eyes searched his, wide and vulnerable.

He could’ve said yes. He could’ve said anything.

But he didn’t.

“I don’t know what that means,” he whispered, voice hoarse. “So no. I won’t lie to you.”

You turned your face away then, biting your lip, your silence louder than any scream. And still, he stayed. He didn’t leave like he should have. He didn’t walk away like he always did before. He watched the tears roll silently down your cheek—and for the first time in his life, something inside him twitched.

Now, hours later, you lie curled in his arms, your breath warm and steady against his neck. Your fingers are tangled loosely in his shirt. The sheets are twisted around your legs like the aftermath of a storm.

Moonlight spills across his bare chest, catching on the ink sprawled over his ribs—black crows in flight, their wings forever frozen in escape.

His fingers move slowly through your hair. A strange, unfamiliar gentleness guides them—tentative, almost reverent. Not because he knows how to be tender, but because he fears that if he touches you the way he wants to, he’ll break you. Or worse—he’ll break himself.

“You should leave me,” he murmurs suddenly, so quietly he’s not sure you heard it.

You shift slightly, half-asleep. “Why?”

His jaw tightens. “Because I don’t feel the way you want me to. I never will.”

A pause. The night holds its breath. Then your voice, barely above a whisper: “But you feel something.”

He doesn't answer. He doesn’t know how.

Instead, he lies there, holding the one person who saw through the silk and smoke, who touched the monster and didn’t run.

And for a moment—just a moment—he lets the silence stretch between you like a promise he knows he can’t keep.

If this is the closest he’ll ever come to love… then maybe, just for tonight, that’s enough.