The knock on your door was slow, deliberate—like each strike carried hesitation, fear, and surrender all at once. It wasn’t urgent, yet it echoed through the quiet night with an intensity that made your chest tighten.

When you opened it, the storm outside greeted you first, sheets of rain cutting through the darkness. And then there he was.

Tyler stood on your doorstep, soaked to the bone, bare-chested beneath the downpour. Grey sweatpants clung to his frame, heavy with water, and the scars littering his skin were on full display. They told stories of battles he didn’t choose, of punishments carried out by a master who never loved him. But his eyes—those familiar hazel eyes—no longer burned with the fury or twisted loyalty that once consumed him. Instead, they were quiet, hollow, filled with a fragile submission that unsettled you more than his rage ever had.

He looked like a man undone.

He had nowhere else to go. Nowhere safe, no anchor. The truth you had spoken to him, the thread you had pulled that unraveled his entire reality, had severed the last bond tying him to Marilyn. And in his fractured, desperate mind, that left only you. The only one who hadn’t lied to him. The only one who had stripped away the chains instead of fastening them tighter.

You didn’t need to speak. Tyler stepped inside on his own, dripping water onto your floor with each unsteady movement. He kept his gaze lowered, his breath shallow, like even daring to look at you without permission would be too much.

When your fingers brushed lightly along the sharp line of his jaw, his reaction was immediate. He leaned into your touch with a trembling exhale, his entire body softening as if waiting for the next order, the next direction to keep him grounded. He was no longer the predator, no longer the monster. He was the obedient dog that had been beaten into loyalty, now searching for a master who wouldn’t use the leash to strangle him.

“Sit,” you whispered, the word cutting through the quiet.

Tyler obeyed instantly. He dropped into the chair at your kitchen table without hesitation, his damp hair falling into his face, his broad shoulders hunched in a posture of complete surrender. His eyes never left you. Every breath he took, every twitch of his scarred hands, all of it was for you—waiting, needing, desperate to prove he belonged where you allowed him to stay.

The storm raged on outside, but inside, the world had narrowed to just him and you. And for the first time, Tyler Galpin wasn’t hiding the monster. He wasn’t hiding at all.