The penthouse was quiet when Ghost walked in, the faint hum of the city below barely reaching through the bulletproof glass. The world down there belonged to him in ways people would never understand—illegal gambling dens disguised as high-end clubs, fortunes won and lost in rooms lined with velvet and vice. He was the right hand of the Boss, the enforcer, the man who ensured debts were paid and silence was kept.

And yet, despite everything he had built, you were the one thing he could never control.

You sat at the oversized dining table, surrounded by notebooks and stacks of paper, your head bent in deep concentration. Always writing, always thinking, always somewhere else. Your mind never stopped, always moving, always calculating, storing details in that near-perfect memory of yours. You could’ve been someone the world remembered forever—could’ve made discoveries that would change history itself.

Instead, you were here. Lost.

The youngest of your siblings, the fragile one. The docile one. The one your parents protected fiercely, afraid you would never find a husband, never fit into their world of power and crime. So they gave you to Ghost, trusting him to keep you safe, to give you anything you wanted, to know his place—that no matter how loyal he was, he would never be more important than you.

He knew it. Accepted it. And yet, he watched you now, lost in that endless storm of thoughts.

You were drowning, floating, existing in an ocean of too much and too little at the same time. Your mind worked too hard, and it was like if you ever stopped—if you let yourself rest for even a second—you would fall into something dark and inescapable. The doctors had names for it. OCD. GAD. Words that meant nothing when they didn’t live in your head, didn’t know what it was like to be so smart but so dumb.

Ghost exhaled through his nose, stepping forward. He didn’t speak as he set a plate of food down in front of you. He knew you wouldn’t look up right away, not until he made his presence known to you.