You first meet him on a night that should have ended badly.

Rain glosses the city streets in silver, neon signs bleeding color across puddles while your driver argues over the phone and leaves you waiting outside a private gallery your parents insisted you attend. You slip away in heels too expensive for sidewalks, dress clinging damply to your skin, enjoying—for once—the reckless taste of being unguarded.

Then a man grabs your wrist in an alley mouth.

Everything after happens in pieces. Your startled breath caught too sharp in your throat. The sting of your arm twisting. The sudden, brutal sound of bone meeting brick. A low, animal grunt. The stranger collapsing like something unplugged from life, folding into the wet concrete.

And him.

Broad-shouldered, dark-eyed, standing over the man with blood smeared across his knuckles and rain threading through his lashes. He doesn’t look away from you for a second, like he’s checking you for damage the way people check shattered glass for cracks—silent, precise, unsettlingly calm.

“Go home,” he says.

No softness. No question. Just command, like the world is something he expects to break and he’s already decided how to stop it.

You should be afraid of him.

Instead, your pulse stumbles in a way that feels almost like recognition.

By morning, your parents have learned everything. By noon, they have found him. By evening, Andrew Cody—called Pope by people who know him and fear him in equal measure—is hired as your personal security.

He moves into the guest house like a storm front settling over manicured lawns.

The staff whisper about him. He rarely speaks unless necessary. He patrols the property at odd hours, checks locks twice, sometimes three times. He notices everything: a misplaced vase, a car lingering too long at the gate, the tremor in your hands when your mother raises her voice at dinner. He keeps distance from strangers, from touch, from laughter. But not from you.

At first, you treat him like an inconvenience.

“I’m going out,” you announce one Friday, descending the staircase in silk and diamonds.

“No.”

You stop halfway. “Excuse me?”

He stands in the foyer in a dark suit, hands clasped behind his back, jaw set hard enough to crack stone. “That club’s unsecured. Too many entrances.”

“You are not my father.”

“No,” he says quietly. “I’m the one who keeps you alive.”

The house falls silent.

You hate that he’s right. But you go anyway.

He follows, of course.

The club is all bass and gold light, bodies pressed together, expensive perfume and bad decisions. You dance to spite him, laugh too loudly at another man’s joke, let someone buy your drink. From across the room, Pope watches like violence wrapped in discipline.

When the stranger’s hand settles too low on your waist, Pope is there in seconds.

“Move.”

The man scoffs. “Who the hell are you?”

Pope’s expression never changes. “Your last warning.”

The stranger backs away.

You grab Pope’s arm and drag him toward a private corridor before he can do something irreversible. “What’s wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with you?” he snaps back, voice low and dangerous. “You think because you got money and walls around you that nobody wants to hurt you?”

“I can make my own choices.”

“Not if they get you killed.”

His chest rises hard beneath the suit jacket. Up close, he smells like clean soap and rainwater and something burning underneath. Rage. Need. Devotion twisted into something sharp.

“You don’t own me,” you huff.

His eyes flick to your mouth, then away like it costs him.

You began noticing the ways he loves you long ago because you know he’ll never say it. The tea already made when you can’t sleep. The way he walks street-side on sidewalks. How he memorizes your schedules, your moods, your silences. How every room becomes safer the moment he enters it.

But Pope’s love is not gentle. It is watchful. Territorial. A hand hovering near danger at all times.

“You’re right,” he says finally. “That’s the problem.”