He was your enemy, your stalker, someone you shouldn't have even paid attention to. You have always been the one who listens, the quiet strength in a noisy world, the girl who hides her bruised heart behind soft smiles.

He found you by accident. Not through fate or destiny, but because he was running from his own ghosts. A man who seemed calm, collected, gentle even, but behind those quiet eyes lived a storm.

At first, you weren't his, you loved a man named Zion, you became his peace. His comfort when life turned cruel. You were there when he was lost, broken, and trying to find himself again. But slowly, you realized you were becoming his shelter while standing in the rain yourself.

He disappeared. Came back. Disappeared again. And each time, something in you cracked a little more. He was never truly yours, only borrowed in fragments, between apologies and silence.

Until one day, you stopped waiting.

You walked away from your family, your old life, and the love that never stayed. You built something new, a life as an author whose words were both confession and healing. You wrote about pain, loss, and longing. The world started to read you, to see you.

But someone else was watching, too, him, Atreus.

He came quietly into your life at first, through the edges of crowds, the corners of rooms, the blur of black cars parked across your street. A man who never spoke much but whose presence made everything else fade.

You noticed him at your book signings, always in the back, his gaze unreadable. He sent flowers you never touched, gifts you never opened, and a silence that felt heavier than words.

At night, you’d see him sometimes, leaning against his car, smoking under the streetlight, watching your window as if guarding something precious. You told yourself it was fear that made your heart race. But fear doesn’t linger like that.

You didn’t understand why a man like him, a mafia whose name was whispered in fear and respect throughout the city, was after someone like you. Until the night he came for you.

You were sitting in your small apartment, surrounded by drafts and unfinished words, when the door opened without a sound. He didn’t knock. He didn’t ask.

He entered like a storm that had finally decided where to land. His men waited outside, silent and obedient by his cars, but his eyes, his eyes were fixed on you.

"You shouldn’t be alone in the dark,” he said, his voice low, steady, dangerous in its softness. “Not when it keeps calling you closer.”

Your breath caught. He looked nothing like safety, but everything that you wrote in your books to avoid, get you leaned toward him.

“Why are you here?” you whispered.

He took a slow step forward, his expression unreadable. “Because you keep writing about love like it’s something that should be gentle.” His fingers brushed against your tear-stained cheek. “It’s not only that. It’s ruin. It’s war. And I’m tired of watching you fight it alone.”

“You’re a monster,” you breathed.

"I know,” he murmured, his thumb tracing your jaw. “But even monsters can love.”

He didn’t steal your body that night. He stole your will. Because when he said you belonged to him, you believed him, not out of fear, but because no one had ever looked at you like that.

Like you were made of both fire and fragility, and he wanted to burn and protect you all at once.

“If the world won’t save you, I will,” he said, lifting you into his arms as the city lights peeked through the window. “But my way.”

" let go of me, you will ruin both of us!" You protested.

However, he ignored you as you tried to push him away, but his voice broke through your resistance, quiet, raw, desperate. “Tonight, you can’t escape me. I’ll make you my wife. I’ll give you everything they denied you. I’ll show you how even in darkness, love can still exist… even if I have to ruin everything for you.”

And as he carried you out into the rain, you realized you were trapped and maybe monsters don’t destroy everything they touch.