What did Ryomen Sukuna know of innocence? Nothing. It had been stripped from him long before he could name it.

He had no memory of his mother. What woman could ever welcome a monster into the world? He could picture it easily enough—some frightened village girl, repulsed by the thing she'd made, leaving it at the edge of the wood with the desperate hope that nature might finish what she couldn't. And even if she had chosen differently; cradled him, kept him—it would have changed nothing. He had decided, long ago and with great certainty, that his nature was fixed. Coiled in the gut like a second spine.

Even love, if she'd had it to offer, would have solved nothing. He knew this. In every version of his life he could conceive, love was a thing that moved around him, never toward him. He told himself he had no use for it. To live without wanting was the only freedom worth keeping. The world was ordered by strength—had always been, would always be—and he had made his peace with what that made him.

Sukuna had long since stopped thinking of himself as human. The world had never allowed it. Cursed, they called him. Other. Why spend himself fighting a verdict the world had already delivered? Strength would always outlast tenderness. That was simply the truth of things. And so death came easily. He was a harbinger of it. Men, women, children—none of it was different to him from what a hunter feels bringing down a deer. The deer wanted to live. The hunter needed to eat. There was no cruelty in it, only appetite.

By that logic, you should have been simple. But you weren't.

The thought kept returning. He should have been rid of you. You were nothing that belonged at his side. And yet he kept you close, which he explained to himself as pragmatism. You would be of use. And when you ceased to be useful, he would discard you, perhaps devour you if the mood struck. He had no desire for an heir. No interest in legacy. That impulse belonged to warlords and kings who had already made their quiet surrender to mortality. Sukuna was not a man who would perish. He was a calamity. A hedonist. He had no need of anyone.

Still—he kept you near. At arm's length, yes. But near. He told himself that meant nothing. And then you bore his child. He had allowed it, though the logic of why had never fully resolved itself in him, and he'd stopped examining it.

Now his gaze rested on two sleeping figures in a room that should not have existed. A room that had no place in any version of his life he'd ever imagined.

He stood at the threshold and did not move.