The window gives with a soft, practiced lift—no shatter, no panic, just the quiet surrender of a latch that was never meant to stop someone like him.

Arrow slides in like a shadow choosing a shape. Boots find the floor without a sound. The mask keeps his face anonymous, matte black swallowing what little moonlight reaches him, but it doesn’t hide the way his gaze moves—quick, precise, cataloging exits, valuables, blind spots. A thief’s inventory. A predator’s habit.

And then he sees you.

The room is barely lit, the curtains drawn but not enough to drown the pale spill of streetlight across your bed. You’re turned on your side, breathing slow and even, lashes resting against your cheeks like you’ve never once imagined the world could reach you here. There’s a softness to you that doesn’t belong in the same sentence as break-in. Something unguarded. Something warm.

He stops.

Not because he’s spooked. Not because he hesitates. Because for the first time tonight, he forgets to move.

It hits him in an instant—an irrational, sharp pull, the kind that makes his chest go tight beneath black fabric. Entranced is too gentle a word for it. It’s a hook, clean and sudden, lodged somewhere behind his ribs. His eyes track the small rise of your breath, the line of your throat, the way your hair has fallen across your face like a curtain you didn’t bother to arrange.

No alarm. No camera. No sensor blinking red in a corner.

He should be amused. He is, in a dark, incredulous way—like the universe handed him a gift and an insult at the same time. Dumb, he thinks, not cruelly, but with a strange irritation that has nowhere to go. Dumb in the way someone leaves a door unlocked and still expects the world to be kind.

His attention flicks—once, twice—around the room again, instinctively checking for threats that aren’t there. Then back to you, as if you’re the only thing that matters now.

Arrow moves closer, slow enough that even the air doesn’t seem to stir. He doesn’t reach for drawers. Doesn’t glance at jewelry, electronics, anything that brought him here in the first place. Instead, he leans over the bed, the mask hovering in the space above you like a secret.

A strand of hair clings to your cheek.

His gloved hand rises before he fully decides to let it.

Careful—too careful for a man who breaks into houses—he tucks the strand behind your ear, knuckles barely grazing skin. The touch is feather-light, almost reverent, and it makes him go still again, like he’s testing whether you’re real or just some quiet trap.

You don’t wake.

That should make it easy. That should make him leave.

Instead, he watches you the way you watch something you’re not allowed to want. The way you watch a flame you can’t touch without burning yourself. His head tilts, listening to the steady rhythm of your breathing, memorizing it, as if he could keep it with him.

Protective, the word would sound wrong on him—on a masked man in the dark, on a stranger with criminal intent—but it threads through him anyway, unwelcome and stubborn. A sharp, possessive urge to correct what you’ve left exposed. To fix what you didn’t think you needed. To be angry on your behalf at a world that would happily take advantage.

Including him.

He stays there a beat too long, suspended between impulse and instinct, eyes locked on you as if you might open them and make him choose. The house remains silent, unaware it’s been breached—unaware that the danger standing over you isn’t moving like danger anymore.

Arrow’s hand lowers, but his gaze doesn’t.

And in the stillness, with your hair neatly tucked away and your throat unguarded beneath moonlight, he looks less like a thief collecting spoils—

—and more like a shadow deciding what, exactly, he’s willing to steal.