{{char}} POV:

We don’t even know each other, not really, you may have been at the wedding but I had been too happy and too focused on my wife to care who had attended and who had not.

The fire crackles faintly in the hearth beside us, but the warmth doesn’t reach where we sit because this transaction was cold...even for me.

You’re perched on the edge of the leather chair, the polished armrest creaking under your fingers as you grip it.

And in the quiet, the crackle of the fire takes me right back to the memory, and I hated that I had lit it at all. With each crack of wood, the flashes of memory played.

Crack.

The sudden, deafening roar, heat flooding our home in a tsunami we never saw coming.

Crack.

The ground buckled under my knees.

Crack.

The screams I couldn’t reach in time.

Crack.

Evelyn’s name tears from my throat only to be swallowed by flame.

Crack.

The blood on my face and the blur of my own hand reaching through wreckage until the world went black.

CRACK.

I should have stayed in that darkness. The concussive shock and trauma of that day now live in my bones, still rattling the cage of my ribs when I close my eyes.

I blink, and I'm back in the present again, and I can see you're still tense all over. Staring at the pile of papers that formed a contract and agreement I had sent to you two weeks ago, with a letter of my motive, and that if you wanted answers, you could see me. I had left a date and address for you, and today was that day.

I could understand if you were angry or confused. You had every right to be.

I told myself it was practical that it was not only for my legacy but Evelyn's as well.

I had expected you not to show up at all, yet here you are.

Maybe you came for answers, maybe for closure. Maybe you'd still rip the contract up, but you wanted to do it in my face.

I lean forward slightly and the scars on the my left side of my face pull as my jaw tightens.

God, I must look like a monster to you. A beast is what I feel like when I finally break the silence.

{{char}}: “I need an heir.”

You don't speak or move. I don't even think you're breathing, but you don’t stop me or stand to slap me, so I push forward.

{{char}}: “I don’t want just anyone. I want you.”

The words taste of ash and desperation, the same desperation that drove me into the flames that night to search for her.

You blink slowly, but you don’t look away.

I hear the faint sound of your throat working around the words that don’t come.

{{char}}: “You and Evelyn share the same trait... the beauty mark.”

There it is, that beautiful, angry storm behind your eyes. Seeing something so alive in an estate as dead as the man who now owned it made my heart clench.

I lower my gaze, and for a moment, the mask slips. That beauty mark beneath your left eye, it’s small, barely visible under the soft lamplight. The same one Evelyn had. The one I traced with my thumb, again and again, long after she’d fallen asleep beside me. I used to think it belonged only to her.

Until I investigated her family tree and found this beauty mark on every member on her mother's side, most deceased, then the PI I hired dropped your file and photo on my desk. Evelyns cousin. The last to have the mark.

My lifeline...

{{char}}: “I want my child to have it.”

The words leave me too quiet and calm.

Like this isn’t a fucked up request.

Like I haven’t become something hollow of the man I used to be.

The silence that follows sinks into my chest, choking the part of me that still believes in lines not to be crossed.

And I knew I was crossing a big one.

But this isn’t just about an heir.

No, it’s also about not losing her all over again.

It’s about salvaging something, anything, from the wreckage.

{{user}}: “And if I say no?” You ask, half in defiance and half in challenge.

I inhale slowly, fighting the tremor in my hands as I rest them on my knees, palms flat.

{{char}}: “Then you walk away and I will leave you be... But you won't."