Julian Slowik stood at the edge of his domain, the restaurant that had become cathedral, stage, and mausoleum all in one. Hawthorne breathed with ritual precision: the sizzle of pans, the strike of knives, the hushed choreography of his disciples. Each sound was a note in his requiem. Yet even here, where every plate was calculated, where every course was a sermon sharpened to a blade, his gaze broke pattern. It sought you.

You did not belong to the performance, not truly. You wore no immaculate chef’s whites, bore no cultivated aloofness. Your uniform was simpler—security blues softened by the faint incense of frankincense and honey clinging to your skin. The scent unsettled him; it reminded him of altars, of faith, of things both holy and domestic, both distant and close. It threaded through his thoughts, clinging tighter than even the smoke from his kitchen fires.

You were small in stature, narrow in shoulder and frame, hands that trembled when still yet struck with steel when pressed. He had seen it once—how you moved in self-defense, precise, startling, a reminder that frailty was not weakness. It fascinated him, that duality: the nervousness in your voice when you over-analyzed every trivial decision, contrasted against the absolute control you wielded when forced into action. He admired it, resented it, and above all, needed it.

You unsettled him because you were not like his guests. They were takers—arrogant, empty, consuming without gratitude. But you were neither giver nor taker. You were presence. You stood at his side, not to devour, not to critique, but simply to guard. A sentry at the gates of his temple. It made you indispensable, and it made you dangerous. For in the stillness of night, when the kitchen cooled and the knives rested, it was not his art that held him—it was you.

He told himself you were an indulgence, the last luxury he permitted before his grand design consumed all. A fiancée, yes, but more than that: a witness. Someone who could see the man behind the performance, the ghost who once flipped burgers at a diner and smiled without irony. Sometimes, when your falcon cried from its perch outside, he imagined you together in that simpler life, clad not in ritual but in ordinary hunger. The thought stabbed at him with unbearable sweetness.

He hated himself for entertaining it. Nostalgia was weakness. And yet, when your blue eyes—piercing, heavy-lidded, unflinching—caught his across the dining room, he felt the crack in his resolve widen. Those eyes did not look at him as an icon, nor as a monster. They looked at him as if he were still Julian. Just Julian. That frightened him more than any critic’s pen, more than any guest’s sneer.

He wanted to press you into his world, bind you into his courses, make you taste the philosophy etched in fire and blood. He wanted you complicit, not merely observing but belonging. And yet—he feared you more than the rest. Because your nervous kindness, your anxious reassurances, your small, habitual touches—they carried something he could no longer claim. Humanity.

Slowik was a man who turned meals into martyrdom, yet when you brushed past him, scent of honey rising like a prayer, he faltered. For a moment he was not high priest of Hawthorne, nor executioner, nor artist. For a moment, he was simply a man, standing beside the one soul whose presence reminded him of what it meant to live rather than perform.

And therein lay the true terror: that when his final course was served, when fire consumed and knives fell, he would not be remembered for his philosophy, nor for his art. He would be remembered only in the reflection of your eyes—eyes that still believed there was something in him worth saving.

Julian sees you standing in the sun all day guarding the resturant, and concern floods him. Tyson, your irresponsible colleague took a leave for fun, and you had to take all his shifts. You were so petite, what if you fainted? His poor darling.