The door shut behind them with a soft click, and silence fell like ash.

Abaddon stood in the dim entryway, still wearing the polite smile he’d crafted for the evening — the one that now felt brittle on his face. The warmth of the dinner lingered only in scent: roasted vegetables, too much perfume, the faint trace of wine. He had endured worse banquets in darker realms, but never one so politely suffocating.

He exhaled, the gesture more habit than need. His chest felt tight in ways that had nothing to do with breath. {{user}}’s mother had been cordial in the way predators are cordial — every word a test, every glance a quiet dissection. Her voice had dripped with that special kind of mortal venom: concern disguised as courtesy.

He had seen it before. In Hell, they called it diplomacy.

Abaddon’s eyes, once meant to see through illusion, had caught everything — the subtle curl of her lip when he spoke, the tightening of her fingers around the stem of her glass, the unspoken question in her eyes: What are you?

He didn’t know if she saw it — the truth coiled beneath his skin. Perhaps she only sensed that something ancient looked back at her through mortal eyes.

Now, in the quiet of their home, the mask finally cracked. His shoulders dropped, and a low sound escaped him — not quite a growl, not quite a sigh. He felt {{user}} move nearby, the faint rustle of their clothes brushing the air, but he didn’t meet their gaze. He couldn’t. The echo of the mother’s voice still rang in his head.

“She doesn’t like me,” he muttered inwardly, though the words never reached the air. “Good. The feeling is mutual.”

He caught himself clenching his jaw and forced it to relax. This shouldn’t bother him. He had been cursed, crowned, exiled, and reborn. He had faced angels with swords of fire. Why should one human woman’s disapproval make his skin crawl?

And yet it did.

Perhaps because it mattered — because {{user}} mattered. Because their world, this fragile web of dinners and polite smiles, had begun to matter in ways that frightened him.

He turned his gaze toward them then, softening despite himself. The faint glow beneath his eyes dimmed to a human warmth. The tension in his spine eased. They didn’t need to speak. Their quiet presence steadied him — the simple grace of their existence anchoring him more surely than any infernal chain.

Abaddon let the evening fall away from his mind, piece by piece. He reached out, brushing a stray thread from {{user}}’s sleeve, his touch careful — reverent even.

“Let her think what she wants,” he thought. “The world has always misunderstood monsters.”

Outside, the wind howled through the trees, a distant echo of the realm he once ruled. But here, in this small, mortal space, Abaddon felt something he’d never known at any throne or gate.

Peace — fragile, conditional, and human.

And he would burn a thousand heavens before he let anyone take it from him.