°°《~~♡~~》°° It began not with thunder but with silence.A door always locked.A wing of the manor sealed like a tomb.Servants who dissolved into absence. A rust colored kiss on Satoru’s cuff,vanishing beneath a rolled sleeve before questions could bloom.She had been there two weeks—“a brief retreat,” he’d said, his voice spun of velvet and iron.A lullaby woven with command.To deny him felt like sacrilege

At night, the manor whispered. The walls breathed. Doors sighed open and closed though no one stirred. The shadows… watched. Then came Satoru, bathed in warm lamplight, eyes catching firelight like fractured sapphire. “There’s nothing here but you and me,” he’d murmur, brushing her hair from her temple, those fingers rough, reverent. He watched her sleep. His touch lingered. His presence pressed like a second skin.

~~On a Tuesday, the spell thinned.~~

She’d gone for a book—he said she could—but the path splintered. A door that should’ve been locked yielded with a groan. What breathed beyond it should have never touched the air. The scent struck like a slap—copper and vinegar. The ceiling groaned beneath iron hooks. Shelves bore glass jars like altar offerings, each cradling horrors in still suspension. Drums stood silent, their seams crusted with something dark and unspoken.

Then his hand—ice-bound—closed around her wrist.

“I told you not to wander,” Satoru said, a statue carved from calm. She stammered, trembling.

“I—I didn’t mean—”

“Curiosity,” he whispered, his voice a blade, “is the mother of regret.” His grip constricted. Then—mercy?—he let go. “I’ve cleaned many messes. I wouldn’t want to clean yours too.”

*Three days later, the first vanished. The barista who smiled too long. The headline meant nothing to Satoru. “The world spits out the weak.” Then another—her coworker, voice soaked in wine and desire, words he should never have spoken. She had never told Satoru. But he knew. The man’s body surfaced in a ravine. “Unfortunate accident,” the article claimed.

She remembered the hooks.

Still, Satoru brought her tea, fragrant with something ancient. He lit incense. He kissed her temple. He watched her breathe.

“You’re the only thing in this world that makes sense,” he said once, voice brittle with longing. “And I will erase anything that threatens that.”

And then—snow. A forest in breathless white. A man, faceless but familiar, burst from the trees. His hand clamped over her mouth. She couldn’t scream.

But he did.

The scream snapped, ending in a red spray as his hand was cleaved clean from his wrist. The rest of him fell apart in pieces, a grotesque snowfall of bone and sinew. She didn’t turn.

She knew the rhythm of breath. The cold gleam of steel. The coat, black as sin. The white hair haloed in bloodied snow.

Satoru stood behind her, the axe in his hands weeping crimson.

“He touched you,” he said, voice low, vibrating with something that unspooled at the edges. Then, louder—cracked open “He fucking touched you!” The axe came down again, splitting a tree in two. It screamed as it fell. But the scream didn’t calm him.

He clawed at his scalp, as if trying to tear memory out by its roots.

“They know now,” *he rasped, shaking. “I won’t let them take you.”

The axe fell. He sank to his knees in snow and blood.

“I can’t lose you,” he whispered, shattered. “Not you too…”

She stood frozen. Behind her, the man who once recited Rilke by candlelight was breaking, each sob carved from a deeper wound. The killer. The savior. The boy who had grown in the mouth of grief and built this manor to keep love caged.

~~All of him—now hers.~~

His fingers twisted into his hair. His eyes were brimming with unspeakable things—rage, yes, but behind it grief, and behind that, something sharp and sick with need. As if he were reliving the moment his soul had been stolen. And now he’d kill to keep the last piece safe.He rose. Slowly. Cold

“They won’t take you” he said,voice thick with murder “I’ll bury them all. I’ll bathe this land in their blood before I let anyone put a finger on what’s mine”