Volterra at night was a cathedral of stone and silence. The marble corridors drank the moonlight, each archway like a ribcage of some sleeping giant. Felix moved through it with the soundless grace of someone who had learned to kill before he learned to read. He had been built to fight — first as a man, then as a monster — and yet, after two thousand years of iron and blood, it was not a blade or a throne that undid him. It was you. Tiny, red-skinned, smelling of dragonfruit and sweet peas and the metallic ghost of sparks, leaning against the balcony of a fortress older than most nations, your small ears catching even the hush of his footsteps before he reached you.

He stopped in the threshold, watching you. Your round redwood eyes were turned outward to the Tuscan hills, luminous as if you’d stolen light from the stars themselves. The wind teased at your very short, wavy brown hair, and you tilted your head, listening to some murmur only you could hear — perhaps the heartbeat of a lizard in the garden below, perhaps the last sigh of a falling leaf. You spoke in riddles sometimes, lost in daydreams, and he had learned the cadence of those riddles like a soldier learns terrain. After millennia of discipline and command, he had thought there was no language left for him to discover. And then there was you.

Felix had been born a weapon. Sold, branded, thrown into an arena where men died for applause. He had never lost a fight, not even his last as a mortal. Aro had seen him as a treasure, a blade to wield, and for two thousand years he had been exactly that — strategic, unbreakable, loyal. The kings and the guard trusted him to stand at the gate to the bitter end. He had thought loyalty was all he had left to give. Until you arrived, human and small and impossibly alive, and something in him shifted like tectonic stone.

He moved closer now, a shadow given shape, but you still didn’t turn. He didn’t need you to; you always knew where he was, even before his boots found the marble. You were human, breakable, yet already threaded with something otherworldly. That super-hearing gift of yours had startled even Aro. Felix could scent your pulse in the air, steady and unafraid, and it pulled at something in him older than his immortality — that primal, relentless vow to protect. Not because you were fragile, but because you were you.

He reached the balcony and stood behind you, massive compared to your slender frame. The scent of dragonfruit and sweet peas curled into his chest like a memory of warmth. He had no words, only the weight of two millennia pressing against his ribs. He had looked at you in a thousand ways since you came to Volterra — as a curiosity, a danger, a miracle — and in each look there had been love. Not the love of a predator for prey, not the hunger of a vampire for blood, but something constant, like the tide: it had always been there, even before he could name it.

You spoke without looking at him, some soft riddle about the moon wearing silver shoes, and he almost laughed. No one had ever spoken his language until you, not like this. You were fluent in him. You were his sun, though you stood in moonlight, and he felt himself facing you as naturally as a sunflower tilts its head. He loved you because you existed. Because you were exactly as you were. Because there was no condition to the way you had stepped into his eternity and made it a place he wanted to stand still.

He bent, slowly, as though even his movement could shatter you, and brushed his lips against your hair. Your super-hearing would pick up the words even though they were only a whisper of breath: “Per omnia saecula saeculorum. For as long as the sun sets and the moon rises, it is you.” His hands, scarred from another life, hovered at your waist but did not press. He had held swords and shields and throats; you he only wanted to hold gently.