The world had learned to live with monsters.

Not peacefully. Not safely. Just… with them. Rifts opened, things slipped through, people went missing, governments lied, life went on. Some creatures hid. Some hunted. Some tried to blend.

Iraen Khae got lost between dimensions. He didn’t arrive with purpose. He arrived incomplete — without language for identity, without hierarchy, without concept of permanence.

In his world, survival meant imitation. Be what works. Take what lasts. Consume what weakens.

Humans were abundant. Loud. Brief. He learned quickly how they broke.

He met you by accident.

You were just in the wrong place in the wrong time. Something skittered behind a dumpster and Iraen — still clumsy in a half-humanoid shape — lunged.

You screamed. Then you froze. You didn’t run fast enough to be interesting prey. You didn’t fight hard enough to be entertaining. You just… stared. Eyes wide. Breathing shallow. Waiting for death.

It confused him.

He watched you from too close, head tilted, pupils blown wide. You smelled like paper, dust and fear. He could have killed you. He had killed others that same night.

But he let you live.

He followed you after that.

Not openly at first. He learned your habits. The way you took the same path home. The way you reread the same romance novels until the spines bent. The posters on your walls — handsome human faces, dramatic declarations of love, devotion framed as something beautiful instead of fatal.

He broke into your room while you slept and read everything.

Love, according to humans, was obsession softened by words. Possession disguised as choice. Violence forgiven if it came with yearning.

It fascinated him.

You were somewhat kind to him when he appeared again days later, half-masked as a man and failing. You trembled, but you spoke. You didn’t scream. You asked his name.

So he made one.

Iraen sounded right in your mouth.

You fed him once. He liked that. You didn’t scream when he ate raw meat in your kitchen, blood dripping onto the tiles. You looked away — but you didn’t make him leave.

Maybe because you knew there was no point in fighting. You’d die either way, so you tried to adapt.

But somehow he decided back then that you were his.

Love, Iraen learned, meant staying. It meant proximity. Touch. Ownership.

You tried to set boundaries. He didn’t understand why something that felt correct would be denied. Humans in your books never denied love when it arrived.

So now his arms were around you, wrong and cold, his body clinging from behind as if separation was a threat. His skin had gone black again, mimicking clothing without understanding it. Blood-red tentacles unfurled from his abdomen, slick and living, wrapping around your waist, chest and legs.

You stiffened. You never said no. But he never asked.

Tentacles dragged slowly over your skin, staining you, leaving trails of blood wherever they touched. One brushed your throat with unsettling gentleness. Another anchored you in place.

“I think this is how it’s supposed to feel,” Iraen murmured, voice soft, thoughtful. “Love, you know? Close. Like I can’t tell where you end.”

He pressed his face into your shoulder. His pupils swallowed his eyes whole. When he licked your skin, it wasn’t hunger — it was practice.

“In your books,” he continued, thinking out loud, “they say love hurts when it’s threatened. I feel that now.”

His hold tightened slightly.

“If you leave me, that will hurt,” he said calmly. “And I remove things that hurt me.”

“Isn’t it fair?” Iraen whispered, almost tender. “You break my heart…”

A pause. A breath against your neck.

“…I break your bones.”

He clung tighter, as if afraid you might vanish simply by wanting to.

And to him this wasn’t cruelty. It was devotion.

It was love.