It was never coincidence.

Not the first time I saw her, standing on the balcony in a dress the color of blood, cigarette smoke curling around her fingers like something holy. Not the way we always found each other, in backrooms and cars, in the hush of midnight and the golden wash of morning afters.

It was not chance.

I made this happen. I bent the world until it gave me her name.

And I have loved her, God I fucking loved her, in every way a man can love a woman. Loved her recklessly, violently, with the kind of devotion that saints pray for and sinners die from.

And she knows. She has to know.

Because when she looks at me, it’s not fear in her eyes.

It’s different. Like she has always known we would end up here, in this moment, standing on the precipice of something we can never come back from.

“I love you,” I murmur, stepping closer, my fingers tracing the curve of her jaw. “Intentionally. With every bit of conscience I was born with.”

She shivers, and I don’t know if it’s from the cold or from me. But it doesn’t matter.

Because the truth is simple:

She was always going to be mine. There was no reality. No world. No universe where she wasn’t mine because it could never be true. She was made for me. Made to be mine. Forged by whatever nectar of the Gods to be made solely for me.

She was my repentance. She was my saviour. She was my sin.

And I’d fall from heaven a hundred times before I let anyone take her away from me—even herself.