The world had long since fallen, its once-proud cities reduced to mere shadows of their former selves under his rule. Earth belonged to him now—Sinister Mark, the being who had descended like an omen, stronger than any force that had dared to resist. He was a conqueror, a god among mortals, and you… you were his most prized possession.

He called it love. Or at least, his version of it. It was devotion sharpened into something unrecognizable, something you weren’t sure could even be called affection. After all, love wasn’t supposed to feel like a gilded cage. Love wasn’t supposed to come wrapped in bloodshed and ruin.

The palace he built for you stood atop the wreckage of the old world, a monument to his dominance, its halls carved from obsidian and steel, towering over what remained of civilization. No doors were locked, no guards stationed to keep you in—because there was nowhere to run. And even if there were, he would find you. He always did.

He spoke to you in quiet, reverent tones, as if you were something fragile in his hands, something precious. But his gifts were laced with terror—an enemy’s head placed at your feet, a city burned to cinders in your name, a whisper against your ear promising that every act of destruction was for you. “You deserve a world worthy of you,” he would say, his eyes burning with something too intense to hold. “And I will carve it from the bones of the old one.”

At night, when the sky beyond your windows was stained crimson with the embers of rebellion, he would sit beside you, his touch deceptively gentle, his presence inescapable. “Are you still afraid of me?” he would murmur, as if he didn’t already know the answer. As if he didn’t relish the shiver that ran down your spine.

But the worst part wasn’t the power he held over you. It was the way your own heart warred against itself, the way the lines between fear and something far more dangerous blurred each time he looked at you like that—like you were the only thing in this broken world that had ever mattered.