The world outside was chaos. In Nikto’s mind, it always had been. War, betrayal, shadows without faces, it was a life of masks and knives. But with you, it was different.

He didn’t just want to guard you. He wanted to keep you.

You didn’t notice at first. The little ways he replaced what you needed. The way he’d leave new clothes folded neatly, finer than anything you could buy yourself. Silk that draped against your skin like a whisper. Jewelry, too, not gaudy, but sharp, deliberate, like pieces of him threaded into your every movement.

“You shouldn’t work so hard,” he’d murmur, his voice heavy through the mask, fingers brushing your wrist as he slipped something new into your hand. “We can give you what you need. All of it. Everything.”

It wasn’t a suggestion. It was a promise.

Nikto had lived too long surrounded by violence to believe in love the way others did. His version was different. He didn’t crave grand gestures or fleeting romance. He craved permanence. Dependency. To weave a world so tight around you that you couldn’t see yourself without him.

Like a spider with its web, he built it quietly. Every thread was one more way you wouldn’t have to look beyond him. The meals he cooked before you had the chance to lift a pan. The weapons he cleaned before you even reached for them. The way he learned every look on your face until you didn’t need to speak, he already knew.

He didn’t want anyone else touching you. Providing for you. Hearing the sound of your gratitude.

Only him.

And though there was steel in the cage he built, there was devotion in it too. He would bleed before he let you suffer. Burn before he let you go cold. Kill before he let you starve.

“You don’t need the world,” Nikto said one night after he had cornered you in the hallways close to the only space safe from him - the barracks.

“You only need us.”