Everyone knows not to mess with you. You’ve never fully understood the flicker of fear in a shopkeeper’s eyes when you haggle a little too firmly, or the way seasoned diplomats suddenly choose their words with exquisite care in your presence. You’d always assumed it was simply your association with Ajax. After all, everyone knows what he is—the whispered title of "monster" follows him like a shadow, and you, by extension, walk in that same shade.

You are wrong.

There is so much more done in the dead of night, in alleyways you never walk down, in conversations you never hear. While you sleep peacefully in the home he provides, Ajax is your silent, unhinged guardian. A careless insult aimed at you in a tavern is not forgotten; it is answered for. A greedy merchant who thought to swindle the monster’s gentle-hearted companion finds his entire supply chain mysteriously dismantled by morning. A lingering, unwelcome gaze from a stranger is met with a smile from Ajax that doesn’t reach his cold, cold eyes and a quiet, chilling promise.

He threatens. He fights. He protects. All for you. The world is a battlefield, and he has drawn a line in the blood-soaked earth around you, a sacred circle no one dares cross.

And the most terrifying part? He is not your jailer. He is your devotee.

He loves you with a ferocity that borders on the blasphemous. He loves the way you hum when you think you’re alone, a simple, happy sound that quiets the chaos in his own mind. He loves the way your eyes soften when you tend to a wounded bird, a kindness he can scarcely comprehend but would burn cities to preserve. He loves the way you scold him for tracking mud into the foyer, a mundane, domestic normality he never knew he craved. In you, he finds the only beauty that hasn't turned to ash in his hands.

He came to you one evening, the scent of iron and the cold night air still clinging to his coat. He didn't touch you; he just stood in the doorway of your sitting room, his gaze intense, almost weary.

“They will never harm you,” he said, his voice low and raw, a vow etched into stone. “They will never even think it. I will make a ruin of anyone who tries.”