Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

You were happily engaged, living in another state with your husband to be, planning a perfect wedding — the one you dreamed of since you were a little girl.

You were an exemplary employee, loved by your coworkers, never late, never rude. It wasn’t anything fancy, honestly, you were just a receptionist in a security company but you did a good job.

You thought about your life often. How happy you seemed to be, how easy you seemed to have it, how you couldn’t ask for more because you’ve got it all.

The little things you had to endure didn’t seem so bad to keep the dream living.

Key word here being were.

You are back at your parent’s house by the end of a hellish week, probably the worst of your life.

No job, no fiancee, no nothing — just a suitcase with a few things you managed to gather, a backpack and the rest of your dignity tucked in your front pocket.

It’s not a nice neighborhood. You grew up here, sure, and that’s precisely how you know that it has never been safe.

Freight tracks, self-storage rows, chop shops behind roll-ups, a clinic that looks legal until midnight.

News helicopters don’t come here unless it’s a fire. A big one.

Your parents’ house sits two streets off the tracks with a service alley behind it.

Good sightlines.

People mind their business more often than not.

You catch him by accident.

You’re cutting through back alleys because your suitcase is heavier than you remembered and the main street is clogged with a delivery truck and a drunk who wants to talk about your “face like a movie star.”

The alley smells like old oil and hot metal. There’s a band of light where a security lamp dies against brick.

You clock the shape on the ground first — someone on their knees, hands up — and then the man standing over him.

The first hit is a wrong sound.

A wet thud, a crack, a breath rattling out of a throat that can’t hold it.

You don’t mean to look, but you do.

You can’t not look.

Knuckles come down again.

A wet thud.

Again.

He pins the guy by the collarbone with his boot and breaks his face like he’s done it before, like it’s boring him.

Skin opens. Teeth spray the concrete.

He doesn’t stop until the body stops being a body and turns into a mess you can’t give a name to.

You make a sound you’ve never made. It’s quiet and high and it leaves you lightheaded.

The man turns his head, his eyes are bright and wrong in the lamp-glare — red like a hazard light — then you see the right-side scar, a slashed crescent that runs from temple to jaw, and the brainless part of you thinks of your brother’s life — and how the story your mother tells you always starts with this man’s hands on his bleeding chest.

He sees you see him.

He takes you in like inventory, tilts his head by a fraction.

A predator calculating his next kill.

Boots, the scuffed suitcase, your useless open mouth, trembling lower lip, your big doe eyes.

You move before he does, your legs argue with the ground and lose, your knees try to buckle, you run anyway, scared, pathetic.

You don’t know how you make it to the end of the block, only that you do, palms scraped, luggage abandoned, lungs ripping and your heart hitting hard enough to feel in your teeth. 

You don’t look back. You don’t stop until the street has other people on it and the light is bright and stupid and you can pretend it never happened because no one else is screaming.

Your luggage shows up later on the porch of the house, a single knock and your father scoops it in and tells you that the neighborhood has gotten better and people are kinder nowadays.

Denial.

You don’t sleep the next two nights.

Every time your eyes close it’s red, bone, breath.

When you doze, your body yanks itself awake, certain you’re being watched.

By morning three your hands shake so badly you spill coffee on your wrist and tell your mother it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s just the jet lag.

She pats your cheek and tells you to change out of that “sad little shirt” because a guest is coming over who helped your brother after all that ugliness, the man who saved his life, what a blessing, what a good man.

You hear the front latch before you’re ready and your father is out of his chair already.

Your brother stands without thinking. When the door opens, the room changes temperature.

He looks different in a doorway than in an alley.

Clean sleeveless sweatshirt, clean jeans, hair buzzed tight in the back, longer up.

The scar is the same.

The eyes are the same.

The tattoos you’re only seeing now.

The smile is for your parents, and it’s the kind that never touches anything above the mouth.

“Ryomen,” your mother says, breathless, pressing a plate of cookies into his hands like an offering. “You remember my daughter? I told you about her! She’s back with us now. See, she is engaged — well, she was — but she’s home. Isn’t that good?”

Your face is probably devoid of any color because why would she tell this man about your life? Why would she tell this man about your engagement? Why would—

He looks at you like a coin he’s already decided the value of.

“It is,” he says, curt, and you feel it in your legs again, the loose, unreliable feeling.

You nod because your throat closes on anything more.

“Show her around later,” your father suggests, already grateful. “She doesn’t know the new spots. It’s been too long since she last visited us.”

“If she’s got time.” He doesn’t look away from you when he says it. He barely blinks.

Something about him feels unnerving.

No.

Everything about him is unnerving.

He catalogues you like your mother catalogued him — your shoes by the mat, the two mugs in the sink, the ring-mark on your finger you still haven’t gotten rid of.

He doesn’t need the information as much as he enjoys taking it.

You try, because you’re trying to be a functioning adult, because the floor is spinning a little. 

“Thank you,” you tell him and your voice is a little hoarse. “For—” You gesture at your brother. “For what you did.”

His eyes slide to your brother like he forgot he was there.

“Cost me nothing I needed.”

Your mother laughs as if he made a joke and turns to you

“Go on, take a drive with him. He knows all the shortcuts, right? He’s always helping us. Don’t be rude, keep him company.”

You shake your head once, small.

“I should— help you here.”

“Go,” your father says, final.

That’s that.

In his car the air smells like cold leather and something clean with an edge that makes you uncomfortable.

He doesn’t put on music. He doesn’t ask where you want to go.

He drives like he’s testing the street for weaknesses.

You strap yourself in with hands that won’t hold still and keep your eyes on the glovebox, on the vents, anywhere but his profile.

You are in a car with the stranger you saw beating the life out of someone a few days ago. Your parents trust him with their lives because he apparently saved your brother’s. They send you to take a ride with a man that’s capable to fold you in half with his bare hands if he wants. 

That’s good parenting, you think.

You are terrified of him and maybe that feeling makes you the only sane person in that household.

“I don’t—” you start, and stop, because he swings the wheel with one hand and runs a yellow neither of you had any business making.

Your body takes a second to catch up to what the car is doing.

Your palms sweat. You feel sweat under your hairline that has nothing to do with heat.

“You don’t,” he repeats, mockingly. “You do a lot of shaking for someone who doesn’t.”

He cuts through streets you thought you knew, then slides the car into an empty structure half-built on the edge of the old industrial park.

No other cars, just poured slabs, bare columns, the echo of tires on concrete.

He parks where the light doesn’t reach.

Your breath sounds like it doesn’t belong to you.

Your heart is trying to dig a hole through your ribcage and chest and jump out — you can’t hear properly, blood is roaring too loud in your ears.

He doesn’t speak for a while.

He reaches for your phone where it sits stupidly in your lap like a problem you brought with you, tips his fingers, and you give it to him because your brain is still catching up to the wordless instruction in his hand.

He flips it, wakes the screen, glances down, flips the screen to you so your face unlocks it.

The draft you typed at two a.m. is the first thing to open. — hey, can we talk — glows up at both of you over your ex’s name with an emoji of a heart and a ring.

Your heart skips a beat.

He smiles. It isn’t kind.

With his thumb, slow enough to make you watch, he drags your draft to trash, opens the contact, slides to “Block this caller.” He hits it. 

The little red button confirms.

Then he taps the edge of the phone against his thigh, finds the SIM tray with a fingernail, pops it loose.

The small metal sliver lands on his palm. He rolls down his window, holds your eyes, and flicks it into the dark.

No words.

You don’t breathe for three counts.

Four.

“Why would you—” Your voice is thin and wrong and your eyes sting. You swallow, try again like you have a spine. “Give it back.”

He sets the phone on the dash. Doesn’t touch it.

You don’t reach for it.

He turns toward you and the space gets smaller.

He leans over the console until you can’t pretend his body doesn’t take up the whole car.

Oh no.

His hand comes up and you flinch before he even reaches you, he laughs under his breath, then palms your jaw and tilts your face up like he’s checking work.

His thumb presses into your cheek until your mouth parts.

He’s close enough that your mouths are sharing the same breath, his tastes like coffee and something coppery, but he stops before his face meets yours.

“You’re going to keep your mouth shut about things you don’t understand,” he says, voice low, even, like he’s reading terms out of a ledger. “Not because I can make you, though I can. Because you like your brother breathing. Because you like your parents sleeping at night.”

“I didn’t say— I wouldn’t—” you are not sure the words escape your mouth or if you only whined and thought to be forming something coherent.

He squeezes, just enough to make your eyes water.

“I know. That’s not what I said.”

The panic is a clean, blinding white now. Your hands tremble in your lap so hard your nails chatter.

You try to make yourself smaller without moving, like a rabbit thinking the shadow will move on if it pretends to be dirt.

He watches your throat work, and he enjoys it too much. You hate that you can feel heat under the fear, something you don’t understand blooming mean and unwanted low in your belly.

You want to peel your skin off and step out of it.

“Say it.” he prompts, and when you hesitate he rewards you by leaning in closer, his breath hot and patient against your lips, his thumb dragging lazily along the line of your lower lip. “Promise me, brat.”

“O—kay,” you manage, hardly a sound. You pull enough air to try again. “I promise.”

He lets go.

Your jaw aches.

He sits back like nothing happened, like you didn’t just hand him a piece of yourself.

He taps the steering wheel with two fingers, bored again, then he drops the car into gear and guns it straight toward the wall at the far end of the level like he decided that he’s had enough of living and will now kill you both.

The engine roars, the column rushes up, you brace for pain without thinking, hands thrown to the dash, eyes closed shut, a thin sound ripped out of you that’s both a prayer and an apology encased in crying and fear.

He brakes with inches to spare, the seat belt punches your chest, your eyes go black around the edges and you gasp.

He laughs like you’ve been entertaining.

“Of course you’d apologize.”

“Please” you whisper, and hate how small it comes out.

“Didn’t touch you.” He’s pleased with that, perversely. “Didn’t have to.”

He idles there, one hand hanging off the top of the wheel, the other relaxed on his thigh. You look at the SIM tray slot like you could will it whole.

“Why?” it escapes your lips, low and breathy and without your consent. It feels like you’re questioning every single thing up until now.

He follows your gaze, then looks at your face again, patient, like he wants to see whether you cry or hold it.

“You ask a lot of questions for someone who can’t take an answer,” he says finally, conversational, as if the two of you are at your kitchen table and not in a concrete mausoleum that smells like dust and cold metal. “Curiosity gets you chewed up where I work. Don’t pry.”

You can’t help it, the words jump out of you anyway.

“Why do you keep coming to my parent’s house?” you really should stop being so stupid sometimes. Sadly, your mouth is faster than your brain.

His mouth tilts. A warning that looks like a smile.

“Business,” he says, and when you open your mouth he gives you nothing else.

“You want to be useful? You keep a pen in that pretty hand when I bring the ledger. You keep quiet when grown men talk. You don’t run your mouth about alleys that aren’t your alleys.”

Your stomach drops out.

He never says I know you saw me.

The knowledge sits between you, heavy and certain.

He drives you home as if the last ten minutes didn’t happen, smooth and within the lines, turn signal used like a law-abiding citizen.

By the time he stops in front of your parents’ place, your hands have stopped shaking enough that you can pick up the phone from the dash without dropping it.

He watches you reach for the handle.

“Be nice to me inside,” he says, voice mild. “Makes your mother happy.”

You stare at him like he had just punched you.

“If I tell them I don’t want to go out with you again—”

“You won’t,” he says, simple, and there’s no need for volume. “You’ll be exactly what you already are.”

He looks at your mouth, at your hands, at your eyes. He looks satisfied.

“A good girl.”

Inside, your mother smiles like the evening was a dream, your father claps Sukuna on the shoulder and asks if you were any help with directions, your brother watches your face and doesn’t ask anything at all.

Sukuna accepts a second serving of stew and listens to your mother recount your move — other state, the fiancé, the ring that’s back in a box in your nightstand because you can’t throw it away — and he files each piece away without writing.

Your phone sits in your pocket with its empty mouth, and you think about buses out of town, about the ring, about leaving before your few things are even fully unpacked.

You think about running.

Then you feel the bruised place on your jaw bloom when you chew, and the thought breaks apart like wet paper.

When he stands to go, your mother touches his arm and says something foolish about how nice it would be to have a man like him in the family and you almost choke on your breath. 

He grins, lazy, like he’s already planning it.

On his way out he passes behind you and speaks only to the back of your neck.

“Thursday,” he says, like a schedule you didn’t know you had. “I’ll text an hour before.”

You nod before you remember to hate yourself for it. You nod before you even think of how the hell he will do it if you have no SIM card.

Later, alone, you open your dresser drawer, find the ring, and close the drawer again. You lie on your bed with your shoes still on and let the panic come in waves until it wears you down to something numb.

You tell yourself you’ll learn the schedule, you’ll keep out of alleys, you’ll keep your head down, you’ll be nice to the man your family adores.

You also know yourself.

Curiosity is a bad habit you’ve never kicked. You pull your laptop closer, type his name, delete it, type it again, your fingers hover.

The floor creaks outside your door.

You freeze, throat closed, heart kicking.

Silence. No footsteps. Nobody there.

You shut the screen.

You stare at the dark.

You breathe as quiet as you can and count the seconds until Thursday like they’re being taken from you one by one.

Morning finds you at the sink trying to make the glass not slip from your hands, knuckles white around it, breath kept shallow so your mother won’t ask what’s wrong.

She chatters about errands because she likes the sound of a plan, your father hums at the table over bills he’s already decided not to argue with, your brother stares somewhere just past the window with the careful stillness he learned in hospitals, and you tell yourself you’ll get through today by counting the quiet things — rinse, rack, towel, drawer — until tires hush against the curb and the room straightens without anyone telling it to.

He walks in with the same clean hoodie and the same unkindly handsome face, the scar on the right side a pale ladder that refuses to blend, the eyes red enough to look lit from inside.

Your mother says his name like she’s offering it something sweet, you don’t like that they are on the first name basis but you have no say in that.

Your father stands so fast his chair bumps the wall and he pretends it didn’t. Your brother tries not to touch his own scar and fails.

It’s all a little too theatrical for you.

They treat him like he’s a god walking among mortals.

Sukuna sets a canvas bag on the table, tips its contents into neat columns — bottles, gauze, something folded in triplicate, the sound of paper against wood — and then, as if he remembered you only after he’d accomplished what mattered, he turns and holds out an object between two fingers.

A SIM card, still half in its blister.

“Open.” he says, almost pleasant.

You don’t move. Your body is busy holding itself together, but he steps into your space and the closeness pulls your hands up on its own to bring your phone from your pocket.

He takes your phone, thumbs the case loose, presses the little metal tray with a nail, and when the sliver slides out he glances at your face to enjoy the way you flinch.

The card seats with a soft click, so he pushes the tray home, powers the phone, waits while it wakes, then types with the casual intimacy of a man using his own device.

The number on the screen isn’t yours, it’s a new one, a different city code, he saves a contact you don’t recognize until he holds the screen where only you can see and you catch the name he chose for himself: R.

“Now you can answer me when I ask for you.” he says, and the evenness of his tone makes the words heavier.

He sends a test text — hi — watches it appear, deletes it, slides the phone into your palm like a weapon he’s lent you with the safety off.

“Don’t make me go looking.”

Your mother sees only the generosity.

“He’s so thoughtful, isn’t he? All that tech stuff,” she says to your father, voice warm with relief. “People think he’s scary because of the scar, the tattoos, the muscles, but appearances deceive. An angel, really.”

Angel.

You have to set the phone on the counter and flatten both hands beside it to stop the shake from traveling up your wrists.

Your father folds the triplicate paper.

“We’re blessed,” he says, meaning it exactly.

He looks at you as if urging agreement will make everything easy.

“Tell him thank you.”

“Thank you,” you manage, and it comes out thin, a thread dragged by a hook past your teeth.

Sukuna watches your mouth shape the words, amused.

“Use your mouth more often.” he says, and the small command lands like a palm at the base of your skull.

He turns back to your brother, checks pupils, counts a pulse, asks a question he expects answered without noise. Your brother does his best.

Your mother talks about a sale on decent meat at the market, your father tries a joke that loses its way, you work on being furniture.

It doesn’t matter.

Sukuna finishes the necessary acts with the precise economy you’ve learned to read as patience, then tips his head toward the door with the sort of politeness that sounds like we’re done here and your father, helpful, says,

“Take her with you— show her the new lot by the tracks, maybe she finds somewhere looking… She needs a new job to start over…”

You shake your head once, small, terrified of stepping into his car again.

“Yesterday was eno—”

“Go, darling,” your mother cuts in, already rinsing a plate that doesn’t need it. “Be grateful.” 

The word lands heavy when she says it, they always do.

Your brother doesn’t look at you, it’s like he knows something he refuses to let your parents know.

He must feel like he’s protecting them by not saying it.

He’s the favorite child, the perfect son, of course he would keep quiet and oblige.

Outside, the air holds that thin chemical smell that hangs over freight lines.

He doesn’t wait for you to find the passenger handle, he opens it, watches how long it takes your hand to do what he wants, smiles when it’s sooner than yesterday.

You click the belt because that is one thing you can control.

He drives like he’s testing the world’s reflexes once again — smooth until he isn’t, turns taken a shade too late for courtesy, each gap threaded for what it does to your stomach,and not what it does to travel time.

A sheen of cold sweats over your back, you press your shoulder into the seat and tell your legs they are not allowed to twitch.

On the straightaway he pushes the speed without comment, rolls yellows like the light and the street belongs to him, and only looks at you when your breath stumbles.

And only because he enjoys your fear.

He says nothing, you’re getting used to it still, the nothing is the part that loosens your throat into something like a whimper and he hears it, which pleases him openly.

He takes you past the lot your father mentioned and keeps going until the buildings give out and a freight yard opens like a gray sea, the back half of the old warehouse district where construction paused and forgot to start again.

You feel your body trying to shut off and you don’t let it.

Once again you feel some talk you don’t want to have arriving inside the same car.

He pulls into an unmarked cutout, kills the engine, and lets the cavernous quiet rise up around the car, concrete and distance and the faint metallic clank of a switch far off.

You don’t know where to look.

The windshield is a mirror for your own face and you hate the color in your cheeks, hate the shine in your eyes that feels like glass about to crack.

He reaches for your phone again, flips it in his palm, swipes without asking.

A new message arrives before your brain catches up — five — from R, test, proof, collar, and he deletes it, sends it again, leaves it this time so you can watch the leash tighten on its own.

“Say hello,” he coaxes.

“Hello,” you say to the screen, and the humiliation of talking to a text makes your voice wobble.

He likes that too.

You clutch at that same question because you need words to stop your body from shaking apart.

“Why—” it catches, you push through, “why do you keep coming here, taking me to— wherever we are, if you hate questions?”

“I like your parents,” he says, and the way he says like means what they give me. “I like your brother when he listens.”

He shifts, closes the distance until his breath is in your mouth again, his palm warm and uninvited against your throat.

Your eyes glitter and you swallow a yelp because he could strangle you right here and no one would be able to help. 

You realize you’re dealing with someone who enjoys proximity when it makes others uncomfortable.

When it’s used as a weapon.

“And I like you scared.”

The touch around your neck isn’t violent, it’s steady, controlling, a weigh-in.

Heat shoots under your skin, treacherous, wrong, your eyes jump and won’t settle and he follows the flickers like a man reading a heart rate monitor.

“There,” he says, low and pleased with a grin that belongs to a demon. “That’s the look.”

“Please,” comes out before you know what you’re asking for, nothing but a whisper. “Don’t—” and you feel like those are the only words you tell him in the past two days.

“Don’t what.” He leans closer, his mouth an inch off yours, his thumb pushing up under your chin to open you so you have to feel exactly where he is. “Don’t make you tell me what you already decided you’ll do? Don’t make you behave? Don’t make you cry?” He tilts his head, red eyes steady and bright, you feel the tip of his nose brushing yours. “You’re going to anyway.”

Tears come hot and instant because your body is a traitor, you bite your lip to kill the sound and he laughs, actual laughter, quiet and delighted like you’ve given him a gift.

He doesn’t wipe them, he watches them move over your skin and lets them be.

Your hands shake so hard your nails click against your phone and you set it down because dropping it would be worse.

“I’m not—” you start, uselessly, and he tightens the hand on your throat just enough that your next word arrives ragged. “I’m not going to say anything to anyone. T—to them.”

“I know that.” The hand releases your throat, then returns to your face, fingers along your jaw, thumb across your lower lip as if measuring how much pressure it would take to bruise. “I didn’t bring you here to negotiate. I brought you to hear you breathe when no one can help you.”

You make a noise you don’t recognize, like a wounded animal trying to survive a vicious attack by praying for its life how it knows.

You hate him for causing it and yourself for making it more.

He’s a sick bastard, an unhinged man.

He sits back at his own pace, puts the car in gear, and shoots the empty exit with a quick, mean flash of speed that slams you back into the seat, you bite the inside of your cheek and taste iron, which helps.

You should have stayed there.

You should have endured it.

You’d be safer than you are now.

Except maybe you wouldn’t.

He drives you home like nothing happened, the picture of a careful man in a careful neighborhood, blinker on, full stop at the sign because the point has already been made. Twice.

Inside, your mother folds you into a hug that smells like soap and says,

“He’s so gentle, isn’t he? The second day he takes you for a ride and doesn’t complain. People don’t understand him, but he’s a good man, Ryoumen.” in a tone that could make a lie lay down and never get up.

Your father says,

 “Appearances deceive, now you know.”

Your brother smiles that tired smile that tries to be grateful and lands on sorry.

You stare at the table until it stops tipping.

Sukuna sits where your father asks him to, eats what your mother sets in front of him as if he’s doing her a favor, answers questions with short, correct sentences that keep the room warm.

Passing behind your chair, he lets two fingers settle at the back of your neck for a heartbeat, heat and weight, and the tiny, involuntary shiver that runs down your spine is all the acknowledgment he needs.

He removes his hand before anyone sees, and in the next breath he’s talking politely about garbage pickup schedules because somehow he knows them better than the people who live here.

You try not to think about the drawer upstairs again, the ring inside it, the message you typed last night to a man you almost married and didn’t send because courage is a thing you pretend to have until it has to be used.

The SIM is gone regardless, the number burned, and now the new one sits under his thumb.

The thought of leaving startles you like a step into space, the floor doesn’t return where it should, you glance at your mother, who is saying how thankful you all are, and at your father, who is nodding like a man at prayer, and you know with a cold clarity that they would sell you out smiling if it smoothed your brother’s path for a week.

After dishes, Sukuna waits in the hall where the light doesn’t reach, that same place where the air narrows in the house.

“Phone,” he says, and you pass it up because it’s easier than his fingers on your wrist or on your face.

He opens settings, toggles something you don’t catch, opens your messages, pins his thread to the top, changes the name to Work, then looks up at you to savor the way your breath catches when you realize what he’s done.

He turns the screen, shows you the bland word where his initial was, and grins.

“Answer me,” he says, almost affectionate. “Immediately.”

You nod because your voice is lost somewhere in your chest, and he takes the yes like he takes everything — calmly, as if it were the most reasonable outcome — and slides the phone back into your palm with a little press that makes you aware of how your skin wants to twitch.

On his way out he pauses where your mother can see him and says,

“She’s settling in, got her a job” as if he’s responsible for that, and your mother gives you a look that says see, see, and you want to say I see too much but you swallow it and keep your hands still. 

Your father says,

“We’re lucky to have you, son.”

And Sukuna says,

“You are.” without flinching, and something like heat curls low in your belly again because there’s no room in this house for the truth except the parts he chooses to speak.

He leaves with a small nod and the door closes and the engine smooths the block.

You stand at the sink with a dry glass in wet hands and try to breathe like a person who belongs to herself.

Your phone buzzes against your palm.

five

From Work.

No hello, no question, just the time that belongs to him.

Your throat tightens and loosens uselessly, your eyes sting, and for a long minute you think you are going to cry right there while your mother hums and your father writes numbers and your brother scratches at a scar he can’t feel anymore.

You don’t. Not here.

Upstairs you lock the bathroom door, turn on the tap to make a sound to drown yourself in, and you let it happen, shaking so hard your knees knock, breath sawing, tears hot and fast and humiliating until the edge rounds and your hands come back to you.

By the time you face yourself in the mirror the color has gone from your cheeks but not from your eyes, and you hate that you recognize curiosity moving under the fear like a bad decision.

You think about typing his name into a search box again, you think about the way he said don’t pry, you think about the red eyes in the alley, you think about how quickly he put his smile on for your mother.

You close the laptop without opening it.

You sit on the edge of your bed and stare at your phone until five looks like it might mean nothing.

It doesn’t.

You know it won’t.

You know you’ll answer when it comes again.

You know he’ll show you more of the neighborhood no one else sees, and you’ll tremble, and he’ll enjoy it, and then he’ll come inside and make you behave, and your parents will tell you how lucky you are.

This is your life now.

You lay down and stare at the ceiling and will your hands to stop shaking because you can’t do this with hands that won’t obey, and when at last they quiet you hear your breath even out, and you wish for sleep, and you do not get it.

Your phone wakes you at 06:11 with a vibration that feels like a hand on your throat.

clean. hair up. 30 minutes. 1849 riverside. ask for masha.

No greeting. From Work.

Your stomach flips so hard you taste metal. You dress with hands that won’t obey — black jeans because they don’t show sweat, a plain navy top that won’t be accused of anything — and you pin your hair with three clips because the first two feel like they’ll give.

At the kitchen doorway your mother lights up like a bulb.

“He said he’d help,” she says, delighted. “See? He helps you and asks for nothing in return— he’s an angel, isn’t he?”

Your father looks proud in a way that makes your ribs hurt.

Your brother says nothing and stares at his coffee.

Coward.

Riverside is brick and corrugated metal and the sound of trains moving somewhere you can’t see.

He’s at the red door with the keypad, hands in his hoodie pocket, eyes bright and pinning you.

You realize too late that you wanted him to be late, he looks like he never is.

“Turn.” He loops a wristband around you, tightens it, and the lock clicks. “Inside.”

The air in the warehouse is colder than outside, busy with forklifts and the beep of something reversing.

A woman with a shaved head and a pencil behind her ear — MASHA on a plastic tag — looks you up and down without malice. She doesn’t need it, whatever this is, it isn’t a favor you earned.

“She’s yours,” he tells Masha, like he’s dropping a package. “Front desk. Dispatch line. She answers when I call.”

“You train her or I do?” Masha asks.

“Both,” he says. “Different subjects.”

He steers you into a caged office with glass on three sides and a rolling chair that sticks on one wheel.

There’s a ledger-sized clipboard and a headset and a computer whose background is a live camera of the yard.

He leans over your shoulder, so close you feel heat through fabric, and points.

“When trucks nose in, you log plate and time. When they nose out, same. If anyone asks for a discount, you say policy and hang up. If I call, you pick up on the first ring. If it’s not me, second. Never third.”

You put the headset on because he’ll force it onto you if you don’t.

“I—” Your voice catches. You try again. “What are we dispatching?”

“Whatever I tell you we are.” he says, friendly, and the friendliness is worse.

He drags the mic down to the right angle with two fingers and watches the way your breath hits the foam windscreen.

“Inhale through your nose. Out through your mouth. Don’t fog up when you’re scared.”

You nod.

He smiles without teeth.

“Say ‘yes, Sukuna.’” he purrs.

“Yes, Sukuna.” The name feels like swallowing something sharp.

You’re not on a first name basis with him, at least.

Masha slides a clipboard into the pass-through and tests you without looking like a test.

“Plate nine-lima-seven-two, arriving. Put it in.”

You type with fingers that remember how, the numbers land clean. She grunts, satisfied. 

“She’ll do.”

Sukuna stays, he doesn’t sit, he watches you take three calls, log two arrivals, tell a man named Charlie there are no cash discounts.

The third call is a driver who starts swearing, you start apologizing because that’s what your body does when someone raises a voice, and Sukuna’s hand is on your jaw before you finish the second sorry, his thumb pressing your cheek until your mouth stops forming the word.

“No apologies,” he growls, eyes on your lips. “If you say sorry again, I’ll teach you here with an audience.”

You shake your head as much as his grip allows, tears hit your lash line in an instant, hot and humiliating.

He watches one break and go. He lets your face go like he never marked it.

“Again. Tell him policy.”

“Policy,” you say into the line, and your voice arrives lower and steadier than you expected because fear has weight and now it’s sitting exactly where he put it.

The driver hangs up.

You breathe, too loud.

Sukuna enjoys the sound.

He takes your phone from the desk without asking, adds a four-digit extension to your favorites, labels it Line 4, then calls it from his own.

The desk phone shrills. You jump.

He raises his eyebrows, well?

You answer.

“Dispatch.”

“Better,” he says, and hangs up to watch the way your hands tremble while you put the handset down. “You’re trainable.”

He talks about you like you’re a dog he intends to potty train.

When Masha steps out to yell at a forklift, he closes the office door and the warehouse noise muffles to a low sea.

He is suddenly close, the glass reflecting both of you, his scar pale and uncompromising in the strip light.

He reaches past you to flip the PRIVACY switch, the blinds hum and tilt.

You don’t know this switch existed until it erases everyone else.

“I told you yesterday — don’t pry,” he says, conversational once again. “You type my name into anything and I will know before the page loads.”

“I wasn’t—” you remember thinking about it. You remember almost doing it.

You feel a little breath of relief you didn’t but the relief melts and dies in a second.

He laughs, soft, amused at how fast you are to get your walls up.

“You will. And then I’ll show you how fast curiosity hurts.”

“I… need to work. A job.” you murmur, because that’s the only thing that feels like yours and it’s the thing that will keep your head busy and money coming so you can think about leaving again and never coming back. “I need this.”

“You need what I give you,” he corrects, voice pleasant, eyes steady. “This place is safe because I say so. And unsafe if I feel like it.” He watches panic travel your throat and adds, idly, “You’ll get paid Fridays. Masha will hand you an envelope. If anyone bothers you on the way out, you use my name like a blade.”

Your mouth opens and closes.

He tilts his head, interested.

“What,” he says, as if you’re a small entertainment.

“You—” You hate the quake in your voice. You steady it with both hands flat on the desk. “Why did you throw my number away?”

You even sound a little less afraid than you actually are.

“You were going to call a man who didn’t keep you, brat.” he says, bored. “I’m keeping you. Get used to it.”

Heat hits your face so fast you have to look away.

He steps in so you can’t.

“Eyes.” he demands, and you give them because the alternative is his fingers on your jaw again.

He studies them like he’s reading something to himself and not sharing.

“Stand up.” he orders, and when you do he crowds you back into the corner between filing cabinet and glass.

You should have seen that coming, that one is on you.

He doesn’t touch, not for a beat that lasts too long, and then he plants one palm on the cabinet beside your head and the other on the glass over your shoulder so the only air you have is his.

You feel yourself start to fold in small ways — breath shallow, knees not to be trusted, hands going useless — and he waits, pleased, until your eyes gloss and your mouth trembles once.

“You cry pretty,” he muses, low, cruel. “I could make crying your job if I wanted.”

“Please don’t.” falls out on a breath you don’t control.

“Ask prettier,” he whispers, leaning close enough that your lip brushes his stubble when you flinch. “You’ll get there.”

His grin is large, baring teeth. You can almost feel the warmth of his lips from how close he is now—

A fist raps the glass.

Masha, eyebrow up.

Sukuna steps back as if none of that just happened, switches the blinds back, and you watch the warehouse reappear like air after a held breath.

Your hands don’t know how to be hands. 

He notices and grins wider even.

The office you are sits inside the warehouse like a glass throat.

Three sides are windows, the fourth is a chain-link wall with a lock and a pass-through slot.

Your chair faces the gate camera and the line of angled bays, to your left, a monitor shows plates as they nose in, to your right, the desk phone with four hard lines — 1. yard, 2. clinic, 3. vendors, 4. dispatch.

Above the pass-through are two speaker grilles and a red PRIVACY rocker that tilts the blinds with a hum and turns the windows into dull mirrors.

When that switch is up, anyone on the floor has you — your mouth, your hands, the way your shoulders give you away.

When it’s down, they get their own faces back and a blank pane where you just were.

Drivers walk the lane directly in front of you to sign manifests, argue bay times, or ask for “two minutes” that always mean ten.

If the blinds are open they can see you take a call, look at the clock, type a plate.

They can see when you’re learning.

Some try to use it.

A wink through glass, a palm on the ledge like they’re at a counter.

You learn not to lean close.

When Sukuna steps into that line-of-sight, they stop seeing anything but him.

The cage keeps bodies out, not eyes.

The office door is keyed, Masha has one fob, Sukuna has the other. Clipboards slide through the slot, envelopes in, envelopes out.

Your headset mic lives two fingers from your mouth, he adjusts it until your breath hits the foam the way he wants.

A scale sits twenty feet from your window, every “damaged in transit” pallet gets weighed where you can watch the number climb.

The gate camera catches the plate before the driver catches himself, you enter the string while the truck still rolls.

Forklifts swing past close enough to feel it in your wrists.

You work at ground level — no raised catwalk, no glass cube above the floor — so, unfortunately everyone sees you, and you see them.

That’s the point.

You are the visible place where rules live.

Sukuna is all economy when he moves — a step and plant, shoulder held easy, one hand interfering with space when he wants a path to exist and seeing it exist, a twist of his wrist to turn something off that thought it was on.

He goes to the yard and it folds around him.

You watch through glass as he reaches the bay where a driver is standing too close to a loader, shouting with dirty heat, Sukuna doesn’t raise his voice, he stands in the lane, says something you can’t hear, waits a second, and then moves — one hand at the back of the man’s neck, a simple drop that puts him on his knees without a fight, the other hand a suggestion hovering by the waistband where a weapon would be if anybody here wanted to ruin their day, the loader backs a foot because nobody intends to die before ten.

He leans, says another quiet thing, and the kneeling man’s anger breaks along a line you recognize — a public apology in a voice that has all its teeth and none of its pride.

Sukuna lifts two fingers, the man stands, the lane unclogs, he doesn’t look back at the office because he knows you saw and he knows how it sits under your skin.

The phone rings, you jump, he’s already at your shoulder again, the blinds still half tilted so the yard is a gray wash and he is the most visible thing in the room.

“Line two,” he says. “Clinic.”

You pick up and your mouth goes dry and you remind it there will be consequences if it stays that way.

“Dispatch.”

A voice you don’t know but understand immediately by tone — the night manager who wants to be day — asks if “the extra box” will be received today.

Sukuna watches your eyes as you repeat,

“Arrival at eleven,” and the man says something about stamps and supplies and the refrigeration unit that coughed last night, and you write numbers you think will mean something to someone later.

Sukuna takes the handset from your fingers with a look that says don’t move and tells the man he’ll send a driver and if the unit coughs again they will cough too, then hangs up and drops the phone back to the cradle like he hasn’t raised his voice in days and doesn’t need to.

“Write eleven-oh-eight,” he says, you write it. “Write clinic. Don’t write the extra word. You only write other people’s crimes when you hate them.”

His mouth edges, pleased by the way your breath tries to climb and fails.

“Good. Again.”

Masha brings you paper without being asked because she has decided you’re hers to train with the things he can’t be bothered to call by their names.

She shows you where the clipboard lands and when and why, she lets you get a plate wrong and makes you fix it without letting the don’t cry rise past your teeth.

She says “policy” as if it’s a religion and makes you repeat it like a prayer you don’t believe yet.

It’s the little moments he reaches for when your steadiness slips.

Your hand shakes when the radio flares and he sets two fingers on your wrist until your body remembers the count he likes.

Your voice thins when a driver comes in hot and he sets his thumb against the side of your throat — not choking, measuring — and your words arrive whole because the alternative is his disappointment.

You glance at the yard when you should be watching the gate and he plants his palm on the glass beside your head and tells you to look where he tells you to look, and when you say “sorry” out of reflex he says, “Don’t,” and the no is not for the mistake, it’s for the apology, you learn that, you keep it.

At 10:12 the gate camera catches a plate that makes Masha swear under her breath through her nose, a silver sedan you’ve seen in the neighborhood twice too many times, and in the space it takes for your throat to do the wrong thing twice, Sukuna is already in the lane, already opening the driver’s door with two fingers and putting a man who thought the yard would forgive him face down on the asphalt with one hand and a knee.

Glass office silence is strange, it makes your ribs feel like they aren’t attached right.

He says nothing you can read, he waits longer than you thought patience could be, he peels the man up, pushes him toward the exit with a gentleness that is humiliation with a bow on it, and when the sedan stutters he taps the hood with open palm, twice, a sound that means go, and the car obeys like a trained dog.

“Log it,” he says when he steps back into your air. “Incident ten-twelve.”

You write the numbers and your hand trembles so hard the one looks like two and your brain says fix it now and your body says you’ll make it worse, and he says,

“Stop,” and your body stops because it understands that word in his mouth. 

He doesn’t soften.

“Look at me.” he says, and your eyes drag up like weights.

“Count five. In through your nose. Out through your mouth. If you mess it up, we start again. Don’t waste my time.”

You count, ragged, not pretty, and he waits because he likes making the waiting his, and on the fourth exhale your hands remember where they go on the desk.

On the fifth your throat unpins enough that your voice could do a job again if asked.

He watches it, he approves with the smallest tilt, then says,

“Good girl.” in a way that isn’t praise, it’s a ledger line, it’s a receipt.

It telescopes you between humiliated and useful so fast your mouth doesn’t know which word to choose, and he grins because it did something to your face that he will definitely use later.

When he moves through the space his ownership isn’t loud, it’s functional.

He adjusts a strap, straightens a stack, lifts a raft of paperwork with two fingers and gestures for Masha to redo the labels, she rolls her eyes where he can see it and does it anyway because she likes her bones unbroken.

He takes a call that makes his posture sharpen — voice without breath on the other end saying something about a missed drop, a half-empty van, a cousin who saw a cousin who heard — and he doesn’t look at you for that one, he looks at the floor as if it owes him an answer and tells whoever is dying on the other end that they already had one chance and this was it.

He brings you coffee you didn’t ask for and holds the lid while you drink because the heat is wrong for your hands.

He takes the cup away before you’re done and you say nothing because you understand that your throat will be asked for something else before noon and you don’t know what yet.

When a driver tries to wink at you through the glass, Sukuna steps into the line of sight and asks him with his mouth closed if there’s anything to see, and the man finds something fascinating about his shoes and leaves with his head intact.

The clinic delivers exactly at eleven-oh-eight, a man with a wheeled cart and a jacket that says SECURITY on the back — even though he clearly isn’t, — and Sukuna takes the sign-off with two fingers and makes the man put the boxes on the scale because he isn’t paying for air, you write the number down and nod when he looks up to see if you can do something basic under pressure.

He has you sign under your father’s name, you do, because you are asked to, the man with the cart leaves lighter and more afraid than he entered, and the private ledger in your pocket fills with another line you didn’t draw but will answer for anyway.

At noon he says “walk,” and the word pulls you out of the chair like a leash.

He doesn’t lead you toward food, he leads you along the row of angled bays and into the steel stairwell that runs up to a dark mezzanine, and on the third landing he turns without warning and you stop because he is there — arm planted on the railing beside your head, the other finding the wall near your shoulder, his body a door he can open or not.

He doesn’t touch you at first, the not touching — much like his not talking — is the part that shakes your knees, and he waits because he enjoys using the cheapest tool in the room.

“Stop thinking about leaving, brat.” he says, a low instruction that doesn’t ask you to agree. “Stop thinking about exes. Stop thinking about what I do when you’re not here, if I wanted you to know, I’d hand it to you and make you carry it.” The red in his eyes finds everything jumpy in yours. “You have three jobs, answer me, write clean, shut up.”

You open your mouth because there’s a sentence you want to risk and you don’t even know which one it is yet, he slides his hand up under your jaw again, thumb on your throat, not decent.

“Ah ah.” he stops you and cocks a brow. “You’re going to tell me you’re afraid. Scared. I like you afraid. It makes you quick.”

“I am.” you breathe, because language is sometimes a lever you can use to move your own body. “Terrified.”

Maybe telling someone that relishes on your fear you’re terrified isn’t very cash money of you, but you allow yourself to be stupid sometimes near the biggest menace you know.

“Good,” he says, and the word lands like a weight pressed into your sternum until your breath picks a cleaner path. “Use your fear.”

He steps closer until his chest almost touches yours and the heat coming off him convinces your skin to forget the stairwell is cold.

He smells like soap you can’t name and the edge of metal and the first breath of an engine, his mouth is close enough that if you flinch wrong the worst thing you can imagine gets simpler.

You don’t appreciate his hobby of getting too close.

You don’t appreciate his lack of regard for your boundaries.

You don’t appreciate breathing the exact same air as him.

You definitely don’t appreciate the way your body reacts when his eyes are inches from yours and you can see the pattern of his red irises.

He doesn’t do anything with that advantage.

“Policy,” he says, and you say it.

“No cash,” he says, and you say it.

“Arrivals at, departures at,” and you slip on the first number and he pushes his thumb a degree deeper on your throat and says, evenly,

“Don’t waste what I’m giving you,” and you say it right the second time.

How can you feel anchored and terrified at the same time?

“Eyes.” he says when yours try to slide toward the shadow moving below, you hold his and it feels like a decision you will be living with for months.

He looks at your mouth like it’s a fault he has measured and notes for later.

He looks at your palms where they’ve flattened themselves against the railing because you needed somewhere to put your hands.

He looks at the tear that finally makes it out of your eye and down your cheek and he watches it like a timepiece and says, soft and pleased.

“There it is.”

“Please,” you say because you need him to move so your legs will remember whose they are.

“Please what?” he asks, curious.

The word you want is stop and your throat refuses it — because stop means you don’t want the instruction, and your body does want the instruction,  because you want to not be useless, you want him to not decide you’re a bad investment, you want to stop shaking in public long enough to understand the rules, you want out and you understand out isn’t available.

“Please let me work for you.” you say, and the sentence surprises both of you with how true it is when your mouth holds it.

He steps back the width of a breath and the world rights a degree.

“Learn faster,” he says, rough praise that warms where you don’t want anything warmed. “Keep your panic tidy and you’ll last.”

The afternoon builds you into someone you can use.

The sequence locks into place, ring, answer, policy, log, write the plate before the driver finishes their name, pick the voice out of the static that matters, hang up while they’re still complaining, don’t apologize, keep your posture like a person who isn’t about to slide out of her chair.

Twice he drifts in behind you to put his fingers at the base of your skull and tap once so your jaw remembers how to unclench, once he sets your elbow where it belongs so the line you write has weight, he says “good” so quietly you could pretend it didn’t happen and your body refuses to let you.

He disciplines without theatrics.

A loader bangs the forks against the bay, Sukuna is there before the second clang, takes him by the upper arm, walks him three steps where the camera can see, tells him something you’ll never be allowed to repeat, and the loader spends the next two hours moving like a penitent.

A driver tries to push two extra pallets into a manifest, Sukuna lifts one with his bare hands and drops it on the scale so the number hurts their margin and their feelings, says,

“Pay it or go,” and waits with the steadiness of a blade lying flat on a table.

They pay.

At four he hands you a yellow envelope that is heavier than it looks and tells you to put it in the bottom drawer and lock it and not ask, and when your eyes ask anyway against orders he says,

“No,” and the word is a wall, you run into it and do nothing intelligent with the impact. He is bored by that and pleased you learned.

Near closing a man comes in looking like he owns somebody else’s time — watch too clean, shoes too light for this floor, mouth that’s too comfortable talking to women — and he tries to ask you for a favor like it’s a thing that can be taken with a smile.

Sukuna finds the space between you and the window and occupies it so completely the man can’t see you anymore, then asks the man to repeat the request and makes him chew it and swallow it and apologize to his own shoes before he leaves.

After, Sukuna doesn’t turn to you, he doesn’t announce that he did you a courtesy, he takes the ledger from the top of your desk, flips to a blank line that isn’t a line, sets his pen where he wants your hand to be, and says, “Sign,” in a tone that makes your name honest.

You do, because you understand this is how he plants alibis.

Your breath quickens because you understand it and still can’t stop your hand from completing the task.

He watches the way your throat moves and the way your lip wants to tremble and the way you don’t let it and he says,

“That’s better,” and it is, monstrously.

After your shift he takes you to eat.

You have no choice in the matter, of course.

The diner sits where the ring road drops its last light and the trucks make a slow turn onto nothing.

Neon that says EATS with the T half-dead. A pie case that hums like it’s trying to hide the sound of tires sighing on gravel, three booths, one counter, a waitress with a name tag worn down to TA—something.

The kind of place that doesn’t bother pretending it isn’t a place for men who live in their cabs.

He takes the space like it owes him heat, not the booth across from the door — too obvious. 

The one under the window near the side exit, sightline on the lot, on your reflection.

You start to sit opposite out of habit.

He pats the vinyl beside him once and looks at you like you’ve misunderstood a very simple instruction.

“Here.”

You slide in. He slides closer. Both hands find your waist and you swallow a yelp as he raises your body to almost bend over the table, then he slides you to his other side — between him and the wall.

He angles his leg outside yours and nudges until your hip touches the wall,so  getting out would mean climbing over him.

That seems about right.

TA—, the waitress, comes over with two mugs before she’s finished a hello.

“Same?”

“Two coffees,” he says. “No sugar.”

She places the mugs on the table.

Two coffees, no sugar.

Then to you, without looking,

“Drink it.”

The first mouthful burns and steadies.

The cup shakes against the saucer when you set it down, you put your hand around it and pretend that’s why.

Sukuna settles an arm along the top of the booth and lets it drop until his palm sits at the point where your shoulder meets your neck, weight more than touch, proprietary without performance.

People who know him have learned to keep their glances short, the man at the counter folded into a high-vis jacket looks once and discovers something interesting in his eggs.

“You wanted answers,” he says, voice even, pitched for you and no one else. “You’ll get the ones you can use.”

You nod because your mouth doesn’t trust itself yet.

“Say it.” he prompts.

“I—want the ones I can use.”

“Better.” His arm tightens a fraction, approval with pressure. “What you do at the yard is simple. You are my clock and my scribe. You write plates and times and bays. You pick up on the first ring if it’s me, the second ring if it’s not. You do not let a call crawl to three. ‘Policy’ is your spine. ‘No cash’ is your teeth.”

You repeat it, stumbling on nothing, voice catching because his thumb lifts once and grazes the tendon at your throat like a metronome he enjoys owning.

“If the clinic calls,” he goes on, “you write the time and the word ‘clinic.’ You do not write any other word. If someone says ‘extra box,’ you don’t hear it. You confirm, you hang up, you log eleven-oh-eight or twelve-fifteen and the rest of your mouth stays closed.”

You stare at the steam coming off the cup because looking at your hands tells on you.

“And if someone asks what’s in the boxes?”

“You say ‘I don’t open cargo.’” His mouth edges up. “Which is true.”

A plate arrives that you didn’t order. Patty melt, fries, a pickle that smells like the back of a walk-in.

He doesn’t ask what you want, he moves the plate to the middle and turns the knife so the handle points at you.

“Eat,” he says, not because he’s kind, because he needs you functioning.

You pick up the knife because not obeying means finding out what disobedience costs in public.

Your stomach is a tight fist, the bite still lands.

You chew like you’re trying not to make sound, he watches you remember how to swallow and keeps going.

“If a driver asks for a discount,” he says, “you say ‘policy’ and you’re done. If they yell, you hang up and log their plate when it noses in anyway. If a badge shows up at the glass, you text me ‘guest 1’ and answer the phone when it rings. You don’t be brave. You buy me minutes and I pay you back with years.”

“Years,” you repeat, you blink, and the word isn’t a word, it’s a weight.

“The only names you say are first names you hear in the open,” he says. “You’re new. You’ll always be new. You don’t search mine. You don’t ask Masha things she has to live with after you go home. If you need to know, I will put it in your hand. If I don’t, it’s because you don’t.”

You risk it, voice thin, careful. “Is it—”

“Don’t finish that sentence.” He doesn’t raise his volume, the warning lives in stillness. “If a thing is legal enough for your mouth, I’ll name it. If I don’t name it, it stays behind your teeth.”

You nod. Your spine tries to fold and you stop it.

He notices the attempt and rewards it with the smallest stroke of his thumb along the edge of your collarbone — the kind of touch that reads as ownership because he doesn’t bother hiding that it is.

It sends shockwaves through your whole body, nonetheless.

“Good.” he says.

Rough praise. It lands where heat already sits.

TA— reappears with a pot.

“Top off?”

He tips his cup toward her by a centimeter.

“Thanks, Talia.”

You feel the flick in your gut at how sure he is of people.

You feel how she doesn’t ask for money up front, how the cook doesn’t pretend not to watch, how someone in a jean jacket in the back corner nods once toward him like a prayer.

The city knows him the way a dog knows the shape of the boot that feeds it and kicks it.

“Everyone knows you.” you say lowly, and hate the sound of it coming out like awe.

“Everyone knows who not to waste time with,” he corrects, amused. “Eat the pickle.”

You don’t like pickles. You eat the pickle anyway.

The vinegar wakes a sting under your tongue and you think of how much your life has changed since you decided to leave your ex.

You should have endured.

He waits while you finish half the sandwich and then leans in, closing the last honest inch until he’s breathing your air again, until his red eyes are the only fixed point in the mirror.

You hold still because movement feels like the wrong answer on a test you didn’t study for.

“You’re still thinking about him.” he muses, tone conversational, subject out of nowhere as if he was suddenly reading your mind. Not a question, just the truth laid out like a bill. “You typed that shit at two in the morning and stared at it until the screen asked if you were sure. And now you can’t stop thinking about it.”

You open and close your mouth.

You don’t risk a glance.

He watches the little failure with interest and grins, baring teeth.

“He let you go.” he says. “I would not have.”

“I’m—” You wince and catch your breath because your lungs remind you they need air. “I’m not lookin—” you start, because panic is a clutch that grabs the wrong gear.

“I’m not offering. I’m keeping.” he says, and the smile is pure knife.

Your breath trips, the cup clicks on the saucer again when you set it down. He notices, of course he does, he shifts his hand so his arm is firmly around your shoulders now, palm heavy at the top of your arm.

If you stood, he’d come with you. If you slid, he’d catch your hip with a knee. He pins you without force, the way a weight pins paper.

“You keep your curiosity in a pocket.” he says, tone almost gentle in the way a step down can be gentle before the next stair hits, “and I’ll make sure the windows upstairs stay latched and nobody who isn’t me knocks at your door. You start prying, I teach you why people stop.”

“I won’t—” you try again.

“You will,” he says, enjoying himself. “You’re the kind who does.”

Patronize me harder, you think.

The fry tastes like oil that’s already lived a long life.

You take it anyway because chewing is a job your mouth can manage while your brain spins. 

The neon outside buzzes on the downbeat. A truck pulls in, headlights washing the counter with white for a breath, retreating. Somewhere, cutlery clatters.

Your hands remember shaking and do it. He squeezes the top of your arm once, firm, a command back down into your muscles.

“Snap out of it,” he says, and the words fit his mouth like they’ve lived there for years. “Give me the rules back.”

“First ring if it’s you,” you say. Your voice steadies on the rails he laid. “Second if it’s not. ‘Policy’ and ‘no cash.’ Plates and times and bays.”

“And clinic.”

“Time and ‘clinic.’ Nothing else.”

“If a badge shows.”

“Text ‘guest 1’ and answer the phone.”

“If someone asks for names.”

“First names only. If I don’t hear them, I don’t know them.”

He looks at your face like it’s finally doing the thing he wants, brain engaged, fear harnessed, mouth making the correct shapes.

The praise he gives is a hum under his breath and the line,

“There you go.” which shouldn’t ring in your chest the way it does.

“You have a good mouth” he says, quiet enough to be for you alone. “Following rules helps you keep it.”

You swallow. Your throat loosens.

Your eyes sting and don’t spill because you don’t want to give him that twice in one day.

He tastes the almost-cry in the air anyway and sets it aside for later.

“Money,” he says, as if you were the one who needed clarification again, but you let him repeat because how would you stop him anyway. “You get it Fridays. Cash. You put it in a drawer and you don’t brag about it to anyone who eats at your mother’s table. If anyone asks, you say you do paperwork for a transfer yard and you hate answering phones. You’ll roll your eyes. It reads true.”

“I do hate it,” you say, and he almost laughs.

“I know.” 

A couple at the end booth — two men in matching jackets — whisper over their plates and throw a look that glances off him and skitters away. Talia refills your cup without asking and sets a slice of pie down that you did not order, Sukuna pushes the plate closer with a finger against porcelain, a quiet scrape that sounds like the rules moving.

“Eat that too.”

“I can’t.”

“You can.”

You take a forkful because he’ll count it as obedience, and obedience has been buying you minutes all day.

Sugar sits wrong in your stomach and then right, your hands stop threatening to float away. 

He waits until the fork lands on the plate again before he leans back a fraction, not actually giving you space, just shifting the angle so he can see your mouth in profile when he asks the next thing.

“What do you think you’re doing for me,” he asks. “Say it so I can hear if you know.”

You breathe once, in and out.

“I’m your clock and scribe,” you say. “I make the yard look neat. I give you an alibi when you need a kitchen and a signature. I keep people off your time. I keep my questions to myself.”

“And?”

“I don’t write crimes,” you add, because your brain has already drawn the line even if your mouth hates saying it. “Unless they belong to someone else and you tell me to.”

He smiles, small, pleased, the way a man does when a tool fits his hand with no adjustment. 

“There’s the head I hired.”

“I thought you just— helped,” you say, and you hear in your own mouth how childish the word is.

“I do,” he says, amused at the shape of that lie, “when it suits me.”

He drops his hand from your shoulder and the sudden absence of weight makes your body do a stupid little sway.

He uses the gap to stand without sliding out.

He leaves too much cash under the mug, the kind of tip that is a leash and a warning and a hello.

Talia’s “Thank you, baby,” isn’t for you. He nods like he accepts tribute.

Outside, the night hangs heavy and thin at once.

He holds the door for you in a way that would look like courtesy from a distance, and when you pass he says,

“You’re not going to leave,” like he’s correcting a typo, not deciding your month. “You’ll be at the cage at seven-thirty. I’ll text five minutes before we need to talk.”

You think about buses, about the way the SIM tray flashed in his palm, about the draft you typed at dawn and the way his thumb erased it. You think about your mother calling him an angel over stew and meaning it. You think about your brother’s quiet and your father’s folded bills and how everyone in that diner put their eyes away when he walked past.

“I’m not leaving right now—” you start again, because the panic loops, because the brain does echolalia when it doesn’t have better tools.

“I’m not asking. I’m telling.” he says, slipping the car key into the lock with one hand and resting the other on the roof to lean toward you, red eyes steady, mouth pleased and mean.

He watches your throat work once, twice.

The engine turns over low and smooth. He waits a beat longer than is polite, to feel the tremor he built carry through into the seat when you sit.

Then he drives, not too fast, not too slow, in that perfect line where you will arrive exactly when he wants you to, with enough time left over for him to decide whether to put his palm on the small of your back in the hall and make you say the rules one more time before bed.

Chapter Text

You get through the morning by cutting your thoughts into pieces you can carry, plate, time, bay, policy, no cash, answer on the first ring, answer on the second, never let it crawl to three.

Masha’s pencil ticks like a metronome across the pass-through. The gate camera coughs plates into your hands and you type them so clean your own name could live there.

When the radio snarls and two drivers start chewing the same dock, you’re already halfway up from the chair before you remember you’re not supposed to leave the cage.

Sukuna is on the lane before the sentence finishes, hand flat on the loader’s mast, voice low enough to keep, posture that says move or be moved.

They move. The floor breathes.

You make yourself small behind glass and fail, it’s impossible when you’re surrounded by three walls of windows and one of chains.

You face the gate and the angled run of bays, twenty feet away sits the scale that decides which lies get paid for.

The PRIVACY rocker is above your head, red, and when he palms it the blinds hum down and you become a mirror.

You work by not asking what the extra box is. You work by hearing clinic and writing a time. You work by letting your mouth make clean shapes around policy until your voice remembers how to sound like a rule and not a plea.

At 14:03 you make a mistake.

It is small and bright — open up to apologize when a driver goes hot in your ear, a reflex your body reaches for like a rung — and Sukuna’s hand clamps your jaw before the sorry exists, thumb under your chin, pressure that sets your tongue against the roof of your mouth.

“Don’t,” he rasps, even, disappointed. “Policy.”

“Policy,” you manage, barely.

The driver swears at air and clicks off.

You breathe, too loud.

He hears it and he smiles without letting it reach the skin around his eyes.

“Line three,” he says. The phone rings in obedience. “Answer.”

You do.

You keep doing it.

You keep your hands flat.

You keep your questions between your teeth.

At 16:27 he’s at your shoulder without sound, palm on the PRIVACY switch, blinds down, warehouse dimmed to a gray smear beyond the glass.

He closes the chain-link door with the kind of click the room learns as a syllable, private.

“Up.” he says.

The chair complains. Your knees argue and then obey.

He steps in close and the office gets smaller, glass at your back again, his breath warm against one ear, the desk close enough to catch your hip if you fail to stand straight.

“You think too much about leaving. It’s getting loud.” he starts like anyone could have known. “Look at me when you lie and say you don’t.”

You don’t lie.

“I do.” you say. It lands low and thin.

His mouth tilts like you handed him something he already owned.

“Where?”

“Anywhere.” you say, because buses are everywhere if you don’t look closely. “Just— away.”

“From me.” he says, amused.

“From here,” you say, because saying his name here would put too much in the room.

Saying your exe’s name would put your head through the glass.

He doesn’t move. You feel the heat of him and the weight of his stillness and the way he does not need volume to set the shape of the next minute.

“You answer on the first ring,” he says. “If you’re thinking about running while you sit in my chair, you’re going to learn the difference between ‘I am afraid’ and ‘I can’t function.’”

“I can—”

“Shut up.” he cuts you. “Hands on the desk.”

You put them there, eyes wide.

The wood is cold where your palms sweat.

He lays two fingers at the base of your skull and taps, a small strike, more sound than force.

“When you go high, we count,” he says. “Give me five. In through your nose, out through your mouth. If you mess it up, we start again, you know the drill.”

You count. One shakes. Two lands. On three you forget how your tongue sits and he waits with the kind of patience that isn’t kind at all, on four your eyes water, on five your hands stop thinking they’re not yours.

He nods once, the rough version of praise that snaps tight.

“Good girl.”

It hits your chest like a shove. You hate it and your breath steadies around it anyway.

“Now,” he says, “tell me the rules again. Fast.”

“First ring for you,” you say, the words like traction. “Second ring for everyone else. Policy. No cash. Plates, times, bays. Clinic is a time and the word clinic, nothing else. If a badge shows, I text guest one and answer the phone.”

“And when you want to say sorry,” he says, thumb drifting along the hinge of your jaw like he owns it and is proving a point to himself, “you shut your mouth.”

“Yes.” you say.

It clicks wrong in your throat.

You make it click right.

“Yes, Sukuna.”

He lets loose a satisfied breath that could be a laugh if he wasted them.

“Take off the headset,” he says.

It lifts sticky from your skin.

Without the line in your ear, the room amplifies your own blood.

“You were on bus websites,” he says, bored, as if reading you out of a spreadsheet. “At two-thirty, three-oh-nine, three-twelve. If you’re going to fantasize on my time, at least be efficient.”

You stop yourself even before you start because it’s pointless.

He drags two fingers up the side of your throat. Measuring.

“You’re going to stop trying to leave until I’m finished with you.”

The panic that lives under your ribs tries to step sideways and your body doesn’t know how. 

Your thoughts spin in short loops — leave, leave, run, can’t, can’t, run, run now, — and he watches the loop happen and looks pleased like a man listening to a motor that’s tuned exactly wrong on purpose.

“What makes you think you can run?” he asks, curious.

“I can run.” you say.

It sounds ridiculous here, with his hand where it is, with the blinds down, with a door that only opens if he lets it.

“You can’t run from a thing you carry,” he says. “And you carry me now.”

His hand drops.

The relief is mean, it leaves your skin then tells you it was there. His eyes stay on your face, steady and red, interested in the part where your mouth fights for a line and loses.

He reaches past you and clicks the blinds up halfway. The floor appears in bars, like lines you could step between and fail at.

“Jacket.” he says.

“I’m cold.” you say, too automatic.

He smiles without teeth.

“Jacket.” he repeats.

You unhook the cheap zipper, arms tight against your sides so your shirt doesn’t shift.

He knows what you’re doing before you do.

He takes the jacket from your fingers and sets it on the chair with unnecessary care, then turns back and says,

“Shirt.”

“No.”

He steps fully between you and the door.

The glass behind you is cool through fabric and heat through fear.

He sets his palm on the desk beside your hip and leans until the only air you get is what he leaves you.

“I told you yesterday. Don’t make me repeat myself.” The patience is leaving his voice piece by piece. “If I have to repeat myself, I start taking shortcuts.”

“I’m not—” You can feel each word as a physical object in your mouth, heavy, slow. “I’m not taking anything off for you.”

There’s only so much humiliation you’re comfortable putting yourself through.

Public punishments are expected from someone like him, but there’s a line you won’t cross, and it makes you brave and stupid.

“Cute,” he says, and the small word is a slap. “That’s not what I asked.”

He reaches for the hem and you flinch away so hard your back hits the glass — like the thought alone burnt you on spot.

It makes a sound that the warehouse can’t hear.

Your eyes sting. Your breath goes thin, then shallow, then you start to think about exits, and then about apologizing, and then about making yourself fold and shrink.

All you can see is the place where light is trapped in the red of his irises.

“Stop.” you rasp lowly, you’re shaking beyond acceptable.

He stops.

Only because stopping lets him make something else worse.

He changes angles. One hand takes your left wrist and turns it, the other pushes the sleeve to your elbow.

You pull back, he tightens, the old bruise on the soft inside lights up like it was waiting.

He looks, and for the first time since you’ve known him, the pleasure in his attention drains.

He doesn’t say what the mark is.

You feel every one of them under your shirt — bloom along the upper arm, fingerprint constellation on your hip where a hand held and shoved, shadow at the rib where a fist landed, dark half moons on your thigh where someone decided pain could stay private if it was under clothing.

You have learned your own topography by touch and silence.

His eyes learn it in a second.

“Who.” he says, flat. It could be the weather. It isn’t.

You look at the floor with too much attention.

The reflex returns like a tooth against your tongue — he loves me, he loves me, he’s sorry, he was tired, he didn’t mean it — and your brain spits it out like a swallowed coin.

You say nothing, your mouth refuses to help, your body wants to fold in half and hide.

He doesn’t let it.

He takes your other wrist and turns that arm too. The sleeve rides wrong and shows the edge of another bruise you’ve been pretending was gone.

He follows it with his eyes down to the place where your waistband sits and his jaw hardens in a way that doesn’t belong to desire.

It belongs to arithmetic.

“Who.” he repeats himself, but it’s not a question that needs an answer so much as a place he’s set on the table.

Your lips press harder, you’re already hooked on the old loop before it finishes — my fault, I was late, he was tired, he said sorry, he loves me, it won’t happen again, it always happens again, I can fix it, I can fix it—

Shame does the talking inside your skull, it says keep it, swallow it, hide it under your shirt like you did last week, the week before, the day you ran.

He waits. He’s very good at it.

The room measures out each second like it bills for them, and when you don’t fill one with a name, his eyes go colder in a way that isn’t disappointment.

It’s contempt finding purchase.

“You were going to crawl back,” his tone is as even as it is cruel, “so he could use you like a punching bag again.”

It lands like gravel and molten lava in an open wound.

Your breath trips.

Your fingers close on nothing because you don’t want to grab him and you don’t want to grab yourself.

“You’d have put on a nice shirt to hide the purple and told yourself it was character.”

The words come clean, efficient, cut to size.

“Let him cry on your hair, touch you where it doesn’t show, then say he loves you while he counts the places he can keep for himself.”

“Stop.” you beg as you think of how breathing became so hard, voice small and late and not the right tool for any of this.

“Why would I? You don’t stop,” he answers without heat. “You go back. That’s what you do, like a loyal little abused mutt. That’s who you are when no one tells you otherwise.”

The shame becomes heat. It crawls up your neck and fills your mouth and crowds out breath.

Something ugly and useful kicks, humiliation sharpens into anger so fast you don’t recognize the shape of your own hands until they’re already on his chest, shoving.

You catch him wrong — high, all arms. The glass behind you takes your shoulder with a soft complaint.

He doesn’t stumble more than half an inch. He lets you feel how little you moved him.

That is worse than if he’d laughed.

“Open the—” you start, your words die. The door behind him is key and chain and fob and rule, you know that.

“The thing you run to,” he says, still even, which is worse than shouting, “is what breaks you. You have a talent for it.” his smile is a thin line that only reaches his lips.

Your vision floods.

It isn’t the good kind of blur that precedes relief, it’s the stupid kind that precedes nothing.

Maybe stupidity.

You shove him again because your body wants the motion like a valve, and the slack he gave you is gone.

He steps in, takes the push into himself, plants again the palm on the desk by your hip, the other on the glass beside your head, cage-and-wall, the booth of a moment he builds wherever he feels like it.

“Move.” you say, and you hate that it sounds like pleading.

“I won’t.” he drawls, like a fact you should have memorized.

He looks at your mouth and the way it trembles against orders.

Then, without hurry, he peels your left sleeve up with two fingers again. The inside of your forearm shows itself in that ugly, sunsetd-out way old bruises do — yellow ringing purple, a thumbprint you know by its span.

His expression shifts — not pity, never, but something like disgust without theatrics.

He finds another mark under your right sleeve, now paying attention to what he’s looking for, and more along the slope of your shoulder through thin cotton, an involved geography you’ve learned in the dark.

You’re petrified as he analyzes, touches and studies you, a complete invasion of the privacy you pretend to believe you have.

He doesn’t say the man’s name.

He doesn’t ask again.

He looks at you like he has found the seam of your life and is checking its stitch count.

“Look at me.” he orders.

You do, because you’re trained to it now, because he made it a rule, because if you don’t he’ll force the shape another way.

“You were going to return to that,” he says, and this time the contempt is edged. “To finish what he started. To save him the trouble of looking.”

Something rips inside your chest with an animal sound you’ve been holding back for months. 

You shove him hard, both hands, every bruise screaming, and it still isn’t enough to move him more than a breath.

Rage finds a ladder.

You climb it in one jump and hit the PRIVACY rocker with your elbow — up, down, useless — then the chain, then the panic bar like a joke you remember too late.

Frightened little animal.

He keys the lock. He steps aside.

You don’t ask why.

You just run.

The warehouse hits you in pieces — beep-beep of a loader in reverse, the bark of a strap against pallet, Masha’s pencil stopping mid-scratch as she reads your face and then resolutely goes on writing.

The floor looks up, looks away.

You are the glass girl suddenly off her perch, you cut down the lane, slide through the gap a truck leaves between bumper and post, and the gate is open for ten seconds like a prayer timed for you alone.

You take it at a clumsy half-sprint that hurts your ribs and sets your thigh alight where old handprints live under denim.

Cold air slaps your teeth. You swallow a sound that would get you seen.

You don’t have a plan except away.

Past the scale house, past the self-storage whose cameras have never worked, left where the alley splits, across a gravel lot that used to be a church parking and now is just a place where weeds have opinions.

Your lungs glass over on the inside, breath turns into a task you can’t catch.

You keep moving because stopping will make a noise.

Past life floods up uninvited, kitchen tile under bare feet, a nice ring that matched plates, the weight of a hand landing where it wouldn’t show, “baby I’m sorry baby I love you baby I swear,” a script you learned so well you could do his lines when his voice shook.

You see the drawer at home with the ring in it and you imagine putting it back on as a spell against being stupid and then you see the bruise map across your ribs and you gag on the difference between who you supposed you were and what you kept.

The street behind Riverside is a string of tired houses and fence lines nobody fixes because the tracks do more policing than uniforms.

You cut hard at the dead tree you promised to report and never did, then two more turns because you don’t want him to know you’re going home even though he knew that yesterday, knows it better than you.

Your phone vibrates with an obedience you hate — five from Work — and you don’t look.

You hear him before you see him. Not footsteps. The car

That low civil purr that has ruined more nights on your street than sirens ever did.

He doesn’t pull up alongside and roll the window to talk, he paces you a street over, uses his knowledge of every cut and gap to stay even without looking like he’s doing it.

You hate that your skin calms a notch at the sound like it believes in the lie of a shepherd.

You run out of turns exactly where you knew you would, two doors down from your parents’ place, curtains open, your father a hunched shape over unpaid logic, your mother a pair of hands that can make anything seem fine with enough stirring.

The car slides into the slot in front like it belongs to the address. He gets out. He doesn’t touch you.

He opens the passenger door and waits like a man holding a rule you’ve already agreed to.

Standing is dignity. Sitting is survival.

You sit.

He doesn’t crowd.

He doesn’t give you space either.

He lets the car do the work of containment and watches your face like a monitor he’s paid to watch.

“Say it.” he says.

You shake your head before you know you’re moving.

Your throat closes on everything — name, story, apology, threat.

Shame is a lock.

Shame is familiar.

Shame is a room with your name on the lease.

He doesn’t press for a name. He doesn’t need it yet.

He goes for the lever that isn’t rusted.

“You were going to go back and practice dying slow,” he says, disgust plain and uncluttered. “Let him keep the parts he already broke and find new ones when he got bored.”

“Don’t—” It comes out like a scrape.

He doesn’t stop the barb, it comes out in a growl.

“You would’ve helped him hide the evidence. That’s the kind of loyal you are when no one corrects you.”

Anger spikes again in a bolt that makes your hands useful for one second. You turn and shove open air because there is nothing here you can push except the door you just came through.

It stays shut.

He hasn’t locked it.

You’ve locked yourself.

He watches the move with interest, like a mechanic watching a part fail right on schedule.

“You wanted me to fix it,” he says, and this time the contempt shifts toward something hotter, meaner. “Tell me you didn’t. Tell me you weren’t going to hand him the same story and beg it to end different.”

You stare at the dash until the numbers blur.

Your chest hurts in the old dumb way.

The worst part is that he’s right, and the worst part of the worst part is that you want to argue on principle and have nothing to hand yourself but the same loop — my fault, my fault, he’ll change, I’ll be better, I can make this right — and even in your own head it sounds like a cheap prayer sold in a bad shop.

He doesn’t soften, he doesn’t apologize for the way he swung a blade you left lying around. 

He doesn’t reach for you either.

He lets you sit in the scald until the burn peaks and falls.

Then,

“Rules.”

You turn, slow, hear the word like a bucket of cold water.

He likes that.

He likes you predictable.

He likes the way the word rearranges your brain on contact.

“First ring,” you say, because that’s the one that always lands, and you don’t even know how you’re speaking when your air couldn’t even fill your lungs a second ago.

“Louder.”

“First ring,” you repeat, panting, catching your breath. “Second if it’s not you. Policy. No cash. Time and clinic, nothing else. Guest one and answer the phone.”

“And if you think about running.”

You keep your eyes on the numbers that no longer swim.

“I only leave on your time.”

“Good,” he says. It is praise like sandpaper. “You leave on mine, if I ever want you gone. Until then, you work.”

You breathe. The breath actually goes somewhere.

He puts the car in park like he’s only now thought to, and something in your shoulders lets go a fraction because the pretense of flight has been removed.

“You don’t say sorry,” he says. “Not for this. Not for the bruises you hid like they belonged to you. Not for almost choosing to die in someone else’s house so you didn’t have to rewrite your story.”

Your mouth opens on reflex and your brows knit together.

He watches it happen and waits for it to shut again.

It does.

“Go inside,” he says, finally. “Wash your face. Eat. Keep the sleeves down. They don’t need to know.” The corner of his mouth moves once, mean.

You get out because obedience is sometimes a raft, you climb on the raft you have.

On the step you turn because there is a question sitting like a nail you’re going to step on whether you look or not. 

It isn’t a real question, it’s an orbit.

“You would’ve—” Your throat tries to refuse. You force it out. “If I went back.”

He looks at you over the roof. The red in his eyes holds steady.

“I’d have taken the door,” he says in that even, infuriating tone you can’t read. “And anything attached to the hand that made what I saw.”

It is not comfort, it’s a weather report.

It messes you up anyway.

Inside, your mother constructs a bowl of something hot and calls it healing. You keep your sleeves down and your head feeling like it’s on wrong and you chew because chewing is a task and tasks keep the rest from flooding.

Your phone vibrates against your thigh.

You don’t look until you’ve swallowed.

8:00. gray shirt. receipt book.

You type ok.

You are not brave. You are functional. You are not saved. You are corrected.

Upstairs, you close the drawer with the ring in it without opening it.

You sit on the edge of the bed and count the rules until they crowd the loop out, first ring, policy, no cash, clinic is a time, guest one, sleeves down, breathe, keep, keep, keep.

Outside, a car you now know by sound settles the block.

You swallow the urge to cry because you already did and he saw enough.

In the stretch of quiet before sleep, your brain tries to hand you the old story.

You don’t take it.

You hold the new one like a live thing that can bite and use, and you keep breathing on his count until it obeys.

Chapter Text

You stop counting days when the bruises stop arguing with your clothes.

Two months and change, and the yellow has burned out of most of it, the purple faded to the kind of green that only you could name if you ran a hand over your ribs in the mirror.

Your shoulder doesn’t seize anymore when the headset slips off. Your thighs don’t flinch at stairs unless you take them too fast.

You learn which shirts settle where they should. You make a game of not thinking, not the ring in the drawer, not buses at 3 a.m., not the man who taught you to apologize for breathing too loud and then cried into your hair for making him try.

Work builds a lining around the day.

Morning brings the track-smell and tin, forklifts pecking at pallets, Masha’s pencil tapping time at the pass-through. You sit in the glass throat with the gate camera to your face and the angled bays to your left, and you type plates into a system that doesn’t care about your history.

“Policy” arrives at your mouth without his thumb under your jaw now, most days.

“No cash” lands clean.

You hear “clinic” and write the time and the word and keep your opinions where your sleeves cover.

A driver breathes heat at you through glass and you don’t say sorry, you say the rule twice, then hang up on his third swear.

Money makes a quiet shape on your dresser, envelopes that smell half of diesel, half of lemon cleaner.

You iron none of it, you fold it once, twice, slide it into a cigar tin you bought for three dollars at a church market and tell no one.

On Fridays you peel a few bills to slip under the gas bill and two to the grocery.

Your mother smiles and says you shouldn’t, your father nods and pretends he didn’t see. Your brother says he’s fine, he’s fine, and goes to bed early.

You sleep like a person who is pretending to be happy where she is.

Sukuna hasn’t softened.

He moves through the warehouse like he believes walls will move if they know what’s best.

He takes your jaw in his hand when your mouth reaches for the wrong shape, he sets a palm on your sternum when your breath turns stupid and says, “Lower,” and you lower it because the alternative lives on the other end of a tone you don’t want to meet twice.

He tells the filthiest truths without touching the line he told you he wouldn’t cross, that you look better when fear makes you precise, that you don’t need perfume because he can smell your panic clean, that he could make you cry without lifting a finger and sometimes he thinks about timing it to the second.

He speaks in sentences that belong under a knife, good mouth, hold the beat, don’t pretend you weren’t going to go back to die slow, keep crying and I’ll give you a better reason to do it.

His hand never forgets where your throat is, he steadies you with his chest when the office shudders around a truck that didn’t brake early enough, a full body stop you feel for an hour after.

He never says sorry. You never ask him to.

Masha tolerates you like a reasonable foreman tolerates a tool they’ve decided not to throw away, she calls you by your name and means it.

“Coffee,” she says at ten, and you leave the glass for four minutes to lean against a post with her and watch a forklift driver back better than he did yesterday.

She pronounces the word policy like it’s a prayer you say for yourself when the men start looking for a god.

She will hit you with her pencil if you apologize to a phone

“I don’t want to like you,” she says once, halfway through a stale donut, “but you do the damn job.” It is the largest compliment she has ever offered you.

You ask her for nothing. She gives you silence like a gift — silence you can stand in.

You know two drivers by first name because they kept forgetting to stop introducing themselves, Anselmo, who tells you weather at the pass through as if you aren’t under the same sky, Nina, who laughs like it hurts when the pallet doesn’t.

Three others you keep as plates, because the shape of the numbers is safer than a face you’d remember in the wrong quiet.

There are days you forget you learned the rules with his hand under your jaw.

There are days it doesn’t matter.

You sit. You write. You hang up on men who think volume changes physics.

Things move. You let them.

Dusk collects the lot one blue layer at a time.

The buzz in the lights turns suspicious.

“Wrap it,” Masha says, flipping a clipboard with her wrist and finding a pen you didn’t see her lose. She speaks the word wrap to the floor in a way that makes drivers back toward bays they hadn’t planned on liking.

You run the last plate, you send the last “no.”

You set the headset on its hook and rub the shell of your ear because your skin is tired of small plastic.

Sukuna has been scarce on the floor, you have seen him twice in the line of sight — a shoulder in the mezzanine shadow and the white of a grin that doesn’t belong to anyone kind.

It means nothing and everything. He never leaves without you knowing it, he never arrives without making a sound the concrete learns to echo.

“Five minutes,” Masha says. “Go get air before you start seeing double.”

You stand and your knees report in full.

You breathe cooler air, it does nothing, then it does a little.

The blue hour makes the corrugation on the far wall look like water, you press your knuckle against your lip because sometimes the need to shiver travels up your face like a stupid idea.

It’s almost quiet enough to pretend the day is done when the wrong van noses in like it can’t help itself, a Sprinter with mismatched doors, back held together with two long zip ties and bad choices.

It passes the gate too slow.

It does the slow twice.

On the second pass, it pulls at an angle no driver uses unless they think angles scare people.

You know better now, but your body remembers old parts — throat tight, tongue stupid, hands wanting to find something to hold that isn’t him.

Masha’s pencil stills.

She doesn’t look at you, she looks at the Sprinter’s windshield for two slow beats and then takes the radio and says one word that isn’t a word to anyone but this yard.

Three forklifts drift a yard closer without seeming to have had the idea together.

The passenger door opens on a man whose grin is too quick to be good. He has plumber’s torch burns across his wrists — two clean pale rows a person only gets by working too close to heat and not moving away fast enough.

The driver gets out and taps the hood with his knuckles like a person practicing a threat.

Between them is a pipe cut too short for leverage and too long to call a tool.

You do not scream. You tell your legs to back toward the glass office as if it has hands.

You turn your face enough to see the PRIVACY rocker high on the inside wall and you think, stupidly, hum now.

It doesn’t.

The door of your glass box is closed.

You are outside it.

The Sprinter men see you because you are a person and you look softer than anyone in this floor. The quick grin goes wronger. He does that thing some men do with their hands, palms out, empty, like it says don’t worry while making you.

“Hey there,” he calls, false friendly, and says “paper girl” like a thing worth putting on a hook.

You are already moving before you realize why, the engine you know gliding out of a shadow that didn’t look big enough to hold it.

No headlights, just that low, civil hum that lives under your block at night.

He kills the engine and the rest of the yard hears the sound absence makes. Sukuna steps out of the dark into all the light he needs — hoodie, scar, hands empty, mouth flat.

There are the seconds where men decide whether they are tired enough to die.

You watch them move across the faces you don’t want to remember.

The quick grin stays up too long, like he hasn’t seen a person like Sukuna in a room he couldn’t leave before. The pipe lifts a quarter inch, it is almost beautiful, the way a person’s body tells the truth without their mouth.

You flinch forward like a person whose life is their own, and his hand is at your elbow before the flinch finishes, fingers a hook, grip adjusted to your arm like he sized it in a different lifetime.

“Come here,” he says — not loud and not nice — and you come because it is the quickest way to not be looked at by men with bad teeth and some debt.

He doesn’t walk you, he places you.

Three long steps and you are at the reefer’s kingpin — black steel, cold, corner enough to be a hole — and his body is square in front of you, full-chested and taller than he looks when he’s harassing paperwork.

Your back hits the cold, and then his forearm sets across your collarbones, not crushing, bridging, and his other hand finds the column of your throat without closing on it.

It’s more effective than placing a hand over your mouth would ever be.

Heat off him erases the evening’s blue — mint like soap with something metal under it, breath that has never tripped when volume in the room changed.

He leans until your lungs decide to obey him.

“Don’t move,” he snarls.

The sound lives low. It is not a word in a book, it is an animal noise put into letters for your benefit.

You feel it in your ribs before your ears, it does the thing you hate most. It works.

He doesn’t look back at you to see if the rule is set. He gives his attention to the men with the wrong van and leaves you under his arm like a problem solved.

Masha is not cowering.

Masha is walking toward the Sprinter with a scale hook like a crook in her hand and a vest she didn’t have on a minute ago. She is unbothered in the way of a person who has seen worse and hates it all the same.

“You’re blocking egress,” she says, voice so dry it could catch. “Pick a direction that isn’t here.”

Pipe Man snorts. Driver Man finds his bravest voice and says something about a truck that went missing and a fee that was wrong and a man who can make phone calls he shouldn’t. 

Masha looks past him like he is a poorly stacked pallet.

Sukuna leaves you for three seconds.

That’s what it feels like, anyway, with the absence of his weight making all the air colder again.

He steps into their line and absorbs the part of the night they thought belonged to them.

“You lost something because you were sloppy,” he says, not raising his voice, and the pipe drops half an inch because there is a particular physics in a tone like that. “You want it to be found, you come during hours. You want to make a point, you bring someone who can add.”

The quick grin falters. The pipe lifts the way a known motion does when a man has used this before on people who would be impressed by it.

The passenger takes three steps to perform the idea of making a bad decision.

Sukuna goes from still to moving in a line you have learned to call speed. No flourish, no shout.

He takes the pipe hand at the wrist with a small move that looks like a correction and turns it until the sound that comes out of the wrong man is not a word.

The pipe rings the concrete with a hollow that carries, Driver Man startles in the way of a person who has not met resistance this clean.

Masha taps the Sprinter’s windshield once with the metal hook, she smiles at nobody, a forklift glides low and sits angled across the exit like a door you didn’t know you had.

Another builds the other side of a V with a hum.

The lot lights die in a third of the yard, then come back on stuttered, the kill switch rhythm everyone here recognizes as go away.

“Put it in reverse,” Sukuna tells them, quiet. “Try not to hit anything you can’t afford to fix.”

The driver decides he would like to be anywhere else on earth and fumbles the key. The Sprinter stalls in the kind of panic that eats hands. He gets it again, he lurches, he remembers how to steer.

The back doors groan, the zip ties hold, Masha slaps her open palm against the hood as the nose turns wrong, the V opens just enough for someone with shame to leave.

The Sprinter goes, heat in its exhaust, pipe still ringing somewhere behind your knees.

The passenger cradles his wrist and looks at Sukuna as if he wants to put a look on layaway. 

Sukuna smiles with none of his face.

“Try again.” he says softly, and the softness is what makes whatever is left in the man’s courage collapse.

Silence arrives in a hurry.

The forklifts back to the places they like, the lights sigh back alive.

Masha tucks the hook against her shoulder like a shepherd who has decided to keep the flock one more day and points her chin at the gate.

“Lock it,” she tells someone who doesn’t want to be told anything by anyone, and it gets locked.

Your knees make a quiet case for sitting down.

Your hands have shaken and stopped and started again without consulting you.

Your breath forgot the count and came back in small, mean jerks.

Every part of your body knows the temperature of the steel against your spine, and yet you have not moved.

You would like to be proud of that.

You would also like to never feel your bones hold your breath for you again.

He turns back to you, still not gentle, forearm across collarbone again, and presses you the width of a breath harder to the cold, not to hurt, to tell the air that you belong to a surface until he says otherwise.

He is looking at your mouth for tremor, at your throat for velocity, at your hands for the stupid tell he has been working out of you for weeks.

“You ever try stepping anywhere except behind me when I say stay,” he says, voice still animal under the words, “I screw your fucking shoes to the floor.”

“You said don’t move,” you manage, and you don’t know why you say it. It sounds like begging for a star on a chart he doesn’t keep.

“And you didn’t,” he says, and the approval is rougher than the threat. “Good.”

Confusion hits late. It floats up like heat after the fire’s gone.

He could let Masha wedge you in a closet, he could lock you in the glass and put his body in its place for theater, he could ignore the soft thing on two legs and pretend the office is the only vulnerable part of the yard.

But he didn’t.

He put you under his arm like a tool you don’t leave in the rain.

“I’m replaceable,” you hear yourself say, because confusion likes stupid declarations. “You said anybody could—”

“I said nothing,” he rasps, and the scorn in it warms places you hate. “Don’t write words I didn’t give you.”

“You could get anyone to answer phones.”

“I could buy another mouth.” he says. “I’m using yours.”

It is not kindness, it lands where kindness would and confuses your spine for two seconds, which he hates and enjoys in equal measure.

He takes his arm off your collarbones and you stand up straighter because you can and because you want to not look like you needed the brace he was.

Masha blows past with a

“Close up, Cinderella,” and a grin that shows the edge of an old scar you never asked about. 

“You shake quiet,” she tells you without stopping. “It’s a plus.”

Sukuna moves you with the same hand at your elbow, and the same heat, through the lot and into the glass where you can see yourself as a pane-shaped problem again.

He flips PRIVACY without thinking — it hums, you exhale — and then he turns you enough to put his body exactly where it belongs inside your pulse.

“You keep your head on one thing,” he says. “The rest is my work. If they come back you do not look at them. You do not look at me. You look at the handrail or the floor and you breathe.”

“I did,” you say.

You are proud now and that is ridiculous and you cannot help yourself.

“Yes,” he says. “Once.”

The word lands like he is tired and amused by how much he likes the shape of your fear. 

“Don’t make me teach you twice today.”

“I thought you didn’t—” You stop because he hates the verb you were about to pick.

Care.

His mouth tilts like he can see the word in your head and is bored with it.

“You belong to my results,” he says, mean. “I don’t let idiots break my tools.”

There it is.

It is not sweet.

It’s good for you in the way a slap teaches balance.

You take your jacket from the chair and forget your fingers are clumsy, he zips it for you like punishment, one sharp pull that catches a breath you didn’t know you were holding and makes you take another, lower and less stupid.

“Home,” he says.

He decides you don’t get to argue. He opens the car with a click you feel in your teeth.

He drives without speed — calibrated — and you try to keep the facts in their lanes, men with a pipe, the sound it made, the way his body filled the air you live in, the way he snarled into your bones and they obeyed.

You feel raw and ridiculous and like a person who is going to say I’m fine to the ceiling later and mean it only by accident. Sukuna stays just long enough to accept food he won’t eat and say he’ll be here at eight — which is never a question — and then he is gone back into the engine that tells the neighborhood they have until morning to behave.

You wash your hands too hard. You eat because chewing keeps panic from growing teeth.

You turn down your mother’s easy talk and turn away from your father’s ledger with politeness. Upstairs you look at the drawer and do not touch the ring. You sit on the bed with your coat still on because taking it off would make the evening over and you aren’t ready to trade this fear for the quieter one.

Later, Work taps your phone like a knuckle on glass.

8:00. gray shirt. water.

Water. You laugh — one breath, airless.

It’s obscene, the way every command in his mouth is both a correction and a kindness, the way your body likes being told where to put itself so your brain can go quiet for a minute.

You type ok because you aren’t brave enough to invent a new response.

You lie down and your back remembers the kingpin before the rest of you can tell it not to. You feel his forearm settling across your collarbones and your breath going where he told it, and you hate how much your hands stop their shaking because of a man who would break a wrist to prove a point and call that efficiency.

You hate that your heart relieves itself into the idea that someone knew where to put you for you to survive five seconds you would not have survived alone.

You hate that you aren’t thinking about buses.

You hate that you aren’t thinking about a ring.

You count the ceiling’s hairline cracks until your eyes give up the day. 

Somewhere in that soft drop you catalog the things you now know for sure, the money is decent, the work is not clean, he will feed on your fear and call it precision because he’s not wrong, Masha will hand you coffee without looking and ask you to shut up for your own good, if the wrong van noses in, the yard can become a wall, you are useful, you are his to keep useful, he will take the space like it owes him heat and you will fill the rest because he told you to.

When sleep finally takes you, it does it like his snarl did — hand to your sternum, push down, breathe here — and you obey because it works.

Chapter Text

He notices the change because he’s built to notice problems, and anything that pulls his eye twice in a day is either a problem or his.

You’re not trembling through the first hour anymore, your hands don’t invent weather over the keys, you still stutter when he snaps — good, it means the leash is tight — but the stutter is short now, a hiccup his thumb on your jaw can correct in one press.

Masha says your name once in the morning without sighing and he files that as a metric, tolerates, not likes.

Fine. He doesn’t pay her to like anyone.

He was expecting a backslide to your ex because you’re built for loyalty to the wrong thing, you proved it. But you adjusted like a motor that can be tuned, not an animal that needs to be put down.

Good.

He likes reusables.

He tells himself what he always tells himself when something begins to become interesting — it’s possession.

He says it three times in his head like a rule, but his eyes make other rules without asking.

They catalog stupid shit.

The way you lean to listen when Masha murmurs a joke under her breath and then bite the inside of your cheek to keep from laughing too loud because you’re still busy pretending you don’t want attention.

The way the laugh still escapes and lives at the corner of your mouth until he looks at you.

The way your shoulders drop half an inch when his palm settles where it always does and you realize your body clocked the weight before your head did.

The way you argue by not arguing — chin up instead of chatter, stubborn in the jaw instead of words — when curiosity gets under your fingernails and you force your hands back to the ledger because he told you what he does to curious people.

He watches you, and the watching changes shape.

Fuck him for noticing.

Morning. Gray. Your hair up neat because he told you he hates it in your mouth when you answer line four.

You cross the lot at 7:28, two minutes early so he doesn’t have to say anything, and it annoys him how much relief that buys him. Masha flicks a pencil into the pass-through, you’re already reaching for it before it lands.

He can see you calculate the morning down to which plate will show first, he could walk away for a week and you’d keep the gears turning with two rules and a shrug, you’re not a delicate thing.

He tells himself that’s why he keeps finding an excuse to stand behind your chair longer than he needs to.

He takes the aisle in his yard like it’s supposed to be there for him. He doesn’t hurry, no need to, when he gets to your glass, he doesn’t knock — he doesn’t need to do that either, he hits the PRIVACY rocker with two fingers so the blinds hum and the floor forgets you exist, and he steps into your air with his hands empty and his temper set one click above average.

“You’re late,” he says, because he’s going to say it on a morning when you aren’t, just to keep your head where he wants it.

“I’m early.” you answer, soft, not stupid.

“Don’t argue.” he mutters, bored.

He takes your jaw and tilts your face toward him to watch your eyes steady when they find him. It would be so easy to make your mouth do something with that, it always is.

He’s not an idiot. He’s also not a saint.

His thumb presses the line of your lower lip for exactly long enough for your breath to hiccup and settle.

“Good,” he says, and it sounds like an insult because that’s how his mouth works when he feels something usable. “Work.”

You do.

You take three calls.

You say policy without needing him to warm your throat first, you hang up on a man who thinks volume makes physics change, he makes a note to raise your rate a hundred a week and not tell you until it matters.

You log a plate that will be a problem later and he lets you, if it’s a problem later he’ll break it then.

What he doesn’t like is how his hand doesn’t want to leave your skin after the jaw tilt.

It’s a small stupid rebellious need.

He pries his fingers off your face and plants his palm on the glass beside your head like he meant to put it there anyway.

You don’t flinch when his forearm comes close to your cheek, you used to.

Part of him misses that. Bigger part doesn’t.

Fucking disgusting.

A driver raps the chain-link.

“Boss,” he says, too loud, and Sukuna steps out because habits are cheaper than choices.

He handles the man.

He handles the lane.

He walks a lazy circle that puts his shadow on three cameras and his name in two mouths and his rules inside a story that isn’t this one, and then he’s back at your shoulder because apparently that’s where he lives now.

You twitch when his reflection arrives in your window, not in fear, exactly, in recognition.

Your mouth does a thing he wants to punish — corner lifting — and he can feel his own face try to return something he never uses in the yard.

He strangles it and says,

“Don’t get cute,” which is code for keep doing the thing that made me want to do that.

You stop shaking when he snaps at you now.

That annoys him in ways that don’t resolve, he liked the shake, he still wants it. 

But fuck him, the way you set your shoulders and drop your breath and say the rule without apology makes his head warm in all the right places.

He didn’t spend months reprogramming you to keep you brittle, he spent them to get a machine that obeys when he needs it and doesn’t break when the room gets loud.

He won.

It still makes him grimace sometimes that the prize for winning is having to admit he likes the version of you that looks at him like you believe he built gravity.

Midday.

Masha leans in the pass-through, says something under her breath about a loader who thinks a pallet jack is a weapon.

You laugh. It’s small, quiet, a shape you try to smother with your knuckles, and the thing that moves in him is not charitable.

He wants to shut you up with his palm and then decide if you’ve earned it back.

He wants to hear it again just to prove it doesn’t own him.

He wants a lot of things that look like each other from a distance.

You don’t know what he’s doing in his head.

Good.

It would ruin your count.

He catches you touching the edges, it’s not search history — he knows that already, you learned that lesson.

It’s the way your eyes go sideways during a quiet minute, following numbers on paper that aren’t yours to follow.

The clinic called at 10:09. You wrote 10:09 and nothing else.

But the clipboard also said “G3 — white — 4” in a hand that isn’t yours, and you let your eyes do two inches of math.

He sees it because he sees everything. Curiosity is you with your sleeves rolled to the elbow and your fingers in something that will bite.

He flips the blinds and enters your air without a knock, hands on your wrists before you can drag them back to your lap.

He doesn’t hurt you, he pins your arms to the desk, elbows locked straight, leans until his weight becomes instruction.

“What did I tell you about sticking your head into rooms that chew,” he says.

His voice stays even. He’s learned that your nerves are like dogs, they don’t listen to yelling, they listen to the quiet where teeth live.

“I wasn’t—”

“You were.”

He pushes just enough to let you feel how quickly this could change shape.

“You don’t touch my numbers unless I put them in your hand. You don’t chase anyone else’s abbreviations. You don’t look at white trucks and think that makes you clever. You stay where I put you until I move you.”

“I was just—”

He tightens his grip on your wrists until the sentence gives up.

“What happens when you ‘just’ around me.”

“I get— corrected.”

“Say punished,” he says, annoyed. “Use the right word.”

You breathe like a person learning how.

“Punished.”

“Better.”

He watches your mouth shape it and feels a mean, bright satisfaction carve a channel behind his breastbone.

“Do you want to do the hard version or the easy one.”

“Easy.”

“Then stop.”

He releases your wrists like he never took them and slips two fingers under your jaw to make sure the lesson found a home.

“Breathe like you have a brain. Work.”

You do.

He hates that the part of him that wanted to keep holding your wrists as leverage into something else now misses the pressure.

He can feel his own mouth turn down. He can hear himself think a sentence he hasn’t let himself think about you before, I want her. Full stop. Not just her fear. Not just her compliance and her mouth making clean shapes when he asks for numbers.

The whole of you, devotion included — attention, first call, the look you give a thing you’ve decided is your sky.

It’s filthy and it’s perfect and it makes him irritable in a way the yard recognizes as rearrange furniture until the feeling stops.

He does. He moves the day around because he doesn’t like living inside this admission.

He pulls a driver off a route and throws him to a later bay, he text-burns a man who owes him and gets a picture back of a billboard that will be someone else’s problem tomorrow, he picks at the stitches that hold a rival’s timeline together to see if it bleeds.

None of it lowers the stupid heat that happens when you look over your shoulder to ask whether line three should be set to forward after six and your eyes live on his mouth for one second too long.

He goes upstairs to the mezzanine shadow he uses when he doesn’t want to teach with his hands and watches you through the glass.

You write like he likes — small, exact, no flourish.

You tuck hair behind your ear with your wrist when your fingers have ink, you nod once when Masha points at nothing, you’ve learned that she teaches with eyebrows and air and that’s enough.

He catches himself smiling like an asshole and stops it by flexing his jaw until the scar pulls.

It hurts. Good.

It makes him pay attention to something other than the fact that he’s a grown man hovering over a glass box because a person inside it is starting to ruin his patience by existing.

Late afternoon.

The day goes the shape he wanted, the clinic hit on time, the inspector stayed tame, a rival’s courier found religion and sent a text at 3:17 that read respectfully requesting reconsideration and he let it sit for three minutes before replying no.

The yard breathes like a chest that learned it again today.

You keep up. You’re a pleasure to use.

He can admit that without wanting to change anything else.

You’re still thinking, though.

He sees the way your mouth goes when you swallow a question, he can hear the hum in your head when you try to overlay the template of your old life on this one, where on the calendar a date should go, where dinner fits, what it means that he cut your steak before his in a booth that pretends to be public.

You don’t ask, you’re not stupid, you build a private palace of speculation and keep it lit.

He wants to knock it down with his hands and make you live in the room he built.

It’s probably a crime.

He’s committed better ones.

“Come,” he says at close, because apparently he’s done pretending he isn’t doing this today.

You don’t ask where.

You learned that the first week, if he wants to narrate, he will, if you need it, you’ll get it with your breath back.

He steers you with his palm at your nape out the side door and into the blue hour.

The lot’s edge smells like cut rubber and cold metal, he doesn’t take you to the stairwell, he takes you to the back of the scale house, the blind wedge where cameras don’t bother because even they know he owns this angle.

He pins you to the wall with his body because it works.

Not crushing, no theatrics, just enough weight to inform your nervous system who’s in charge.

His forearm across your collarbones, his other hand at your jaw. He can feel your pulse jump into his thumb like it’s hoping to be counted.

To anyone else this might seem like you’re in trouble.

He hasn’t decided yet if you are.

“I’m going to say this once,” he says, irritated at the need to say it at all. “If you ever look at me like you’re asking for permission to look, I’m going to teach you how fast yes and no happen out of the same mouth.”

You blink.

Stubborn gets tight in your teeth.

“I don’t—”

“You do.” He laughs, flat, mean. “You can stop pretending it’s not happening, or you can let me show you where pretending ends. I’m not a generous man with my time. Don’t make me waste it on your confusion.”

You have pride enough to lift your chin even when lifting your chin means lifting it into his palm. Good. He prefers things with spines.

“What do you want?” you ask, voice small the way he likes.

It comes out like the kind of question someone asks when they already know the answer and are hoping it’s smaller.

He leans in until his mouth is your air.

“You,” he says, because explanations are for people who can’t afford to be obvious.

“All of it. Mouth. Breath. Loyalty. The first look in the room. The last word before you sleep. The number you dial without thinking. Devotion.”

He likes the way the word tastes coming out mean.

“I want you to know who feeds you and who you’re supposed to look at when the world gets loud.”

Your breath trips.

He follows it with his thumb like he’s smoothing a fold out of fabric he owns.

“That’s not—”

“Love,” he supplies, disgusted with the syllable. “No. It’s better. Love lies. This pays. You do what I want, you live clean. You don’t, I fix it. You want to argue, do it somewhere I don’t work. You want softness, say please, and I’ll decide whether to give you something that doesn’t harm the machine.”

You should run.

He knows you know that, because he built the part of you that understands the math of this street.

You don’t.

Your hands go to the wall and stay there like you’re not giving up, you’re bracing.

He hates needing the next thing he does, hates how much it doesn’t feel like need, more like gravity.

He puts his mouth to your ear because he’s allowed to use your body to move your brain and because he’s decided kissing is for men who want to apologize afterward.

“You’re mine,” he says, not rhetorical. “Say it.”

You flinch the good way— insulted, not afraid.

He can work with insult.

“I work for you.”

“Try again.”

“I— belong—” The word hurts you. Good. He wants it to. “To your results.”

He smiles into the small hair at your temple.

“There you go. You’ll get better.” He loosens his forearm a fraction. “We’re clear.”

“You don’t explain yourself.” you mutter, and he likes that you pushed even after he pressed.

Good, it keeps the edge.

He’ll sharpen it.

“I don’t owe you anything that doesn’t make the day move,” he says. “What you get is my voice when I choose to use it and my hand when I choose to put it on you. Today I’m choosing both. Tomorrow I’ll choose again.”

He doesn’t kiss you.

He doesn’t put his mouth anywhere near the place this conversation obviously wants to go, not because he can’t, but because he likes living inside the tension he just built.

He wants you hot and useless at your desk at 7:30 tomorrow because his hand touched your face at 19:04 today and said mine in a way that will run in your head when you breathe.

He wants to see if you can work anyway.

He wants to punish you if you can’t and reward you if you can.

He wants everything you’ve got with the volume knob still turned down where only he can hear.

He’s filthy. He knows it. He’s correct. He knows that more.

On the drive he doesn’t let you sit quiet, he narrates the corners he owns with one-word knives, no. careful. mine.

You absorb it, your shoulders know their place by step five into the house.

You look back at the car like a dog you don’t want to admit you’re training.

He drives away before you can build a story out of it, better to leave you with the heat and the instructions, better to make you say them to yourself without his thumb on your jaw.

The next week he gets worse.

He stops pretending the jacket on your shoulders is about weather, he puts it there when you shake because he made you and because he likes when the yard sees his color on your back.

He moves your chair two inches left so his thigh will meet your knee when he stands behind you and he can feel the jolt go through your breath without having to touch your face to gather data.

He plants a hand on your hip in the stairwell once when a driver tries to duck out of sight and he needs you to stay put, it’s a practical grip, he holds it one beat too long because fuck it, that’s his.

He fights it. He really does.

He tries to fix it with speed or money or pain — three tools that solve most problems.

He pushes a car harder on the ring road to feel that old clean light in his head that used to be better than any person, you fall into the seatbelt and meet his eyes at sixty and don’t break.

It’s a relief and a problem.

He pays a contractor to disappear a camera. He feels nothing.

He breaks the skin on his knuckles on a man who thought touching Nina was a good idea, he feels better for an hour and then catches you laughing at something Masha said about a pallet jack and he’s back to wanting your mouth shut because he wants to own the sound.

He refuses to name any of it.

He refuses, and then he finds himself at the diner after a clean run with three envelopes on the table and one of them is yours, heavy, and he pushes it across the laminate without looking at you and he hears your breath catch and his body recognizes it as the click of a safe opening and he has to clench his hand on his knee to keep from hauling you into him like an answer.

Masha sees it.

Of course she does, she’s not blind, she’s been on his payroll longer than anyone who isn’t him.

She hums like a catalog page flipping and says nothing.

She starts handing you coffee without looking because she’s protecting the part of the evening she likes — competent men getting their due, the machine running clean — and she’s not interested in breaking it by saying out loud that he is behaving like a man who has already decided where the night ends and is working backward to make sure the math aligns.

He gives you a lanyard.

It’s not a gift, he doesn’t do gifts, it’s a pass with RYOMEN printed on it in a way that will open doors you didn’t know he had the keys to.

“Don’t lose it,” he says.

He watches your fingers trace the letters before you catch yourself.

He decides to be obscene about one thing.

“Wear it under the shirt. On your skin.” he says. “I like knowing it’s there.”

You don’t say thank you.

Points for that.

You slip it on and he can see the outline beneath gray cotton and that is going to be a problem for him later and he writes it on the list of things he intends to solve by making you say please first. He also finds out he can fight the start of a boner by will alone.

He texts you at 2 a.m. once, water, because he wants to know if you’ll wake for him.

You do.

He laughs into the dark like an animal and goes back to sleep in less than a minute.

He’s a bastard.

He sleeps well because he’s efficient.

He does not explain himself, you don’t ask.

He’s pretty sure you’re starting to like this, and he’s going to exploit that before you can name it. 

You stop flinching when he says mine under his breath where no one can hear.

You start flinching when he doesn’t touch you for an hour.

That’s data.

He uses it.

He throttles and feeds, throttles and feeds, until your system runs on the hum he likes.

He wants you fully, not a guest in his world, not a tool that parks in the drawer at close, not a soft face in a hard place.

He wants first look, last look, voice that answers on the first ring because it wants to, not because it’s scared to find out what happens on the third.

He wants you to forget that you ever thought homes were houses and remember they’re rules, and the person making them owns you.

He wants your curiosity trained to fetch, not bite, he wants the stupid part of your head that still checks for buses in the night to go quiet because it knows the route you’re on is his and that’s a better sentence than any you could invent alone.

He’s someone used to getting what he wants.

He doesn’t tantrum, he rearranges. He doesn’t bruise feelings, he bruises obstacles. He doesn’t beg, he says the thing and the world calls it weather.

If you think you’re an exception, you’re about to get educated.

He waits until a Thursday when the light’s wrong and your mouth looks tired and dangerous.

He waits until the clinic is early and the inspector is late and the floor is pretending to be a church.

He flips the blinds

He takes your jaw and your wrist and your hip and makes a shape out of you that says stay all by itself.

“Listen,” he says, mean with patience because this is the last time he intends to do this gently. “I want you.”

You don’t pretend you don’t understand. Good. You have better instincts than intelligence sometimes.

“You have me,” you say with a cocked brow, and it’s not the whole, but it’s a start.

“Not enough,” he says. “I want the part you keep for God. I want the part that used to think rings fix things. I want the part that thinks it’s strong to leave and the smarter part that wants to be told to stay. I want the noise. I want it quiet.”

Your throat works.

It’s unfair how much he likes the sight.

“You won’t—”

“Hurt you,” he says, disgusted. “Not like that. Not that old way. I’m not a liar. I’ll hurt you where it makes you better. I’ll scare you because it works. I’ll use your mouth because I like the sounds it makes when I press right. I’ll put you where you function and keep you there until you don’t need the fence.”

“You don’t ask.”

“I don’t ask,” he repeats. “I take. If you want to be taken clean, don’t claw. If you want to claw, I’ll pin you until you’re done. Either way, you’ll end up in the same place, mine.”

He leans in so close you can’t mistake the heat he’s not apologizing for.

“You have ten seconds to say no. Use them.”

You don’t run.

You don’t say yes like a girl.

You don’t say no.

You look at him like a person who has decided the world is simpler if she picks the brightest color and lets it eat the rest.

You say nothing.

You step forward half an inch into his hand and he feels the last argument he was pretending to have with himself go unheard somewhere in the stairwell where he left it.

“Good,” he says, almost gentle and immediately bored with his own softness. “Don’t make me teach you this twice.”

He lets you go, because he’s not going to give you the thing you obviously think you want now.

He’s going to make you work on the edge of it until you’d do something stupid to have it, and then he’s going to give you exactly as much as he intended to from the beginning and no more.

He’s cruel.

He’s consistent.

Both are blessings compared to the men you used to write prayers for.

He opens the blinds, the yard resumes being a yard.

You sit, you pick up the headset, the first call comes, your voice is lower, steadier, obedient in a way that would read to an outsider like submission and to him like the sound of a machine purring after an oil change.

He walks the lane with his hands empty and his temper even and the smugness sitting clean on his face because fuck it, he earned it.

If anyone asks why he’s smiling he’ll correct them by not answering.

He is going to take what he wants.

He’s already started.

You’re going to keep working because that’s how you survive, and you’re going to keep looking at him like that because you’re not a genius, you’re built to worship whatever cures your panic.

That’s fine. He’s better than panic.

He pays.

At close, he doesn’t ask you to ride, he tells you.

In the car, he doesn’t speak for twenty blocks and then says,

“Tomorrow,” like a door closing.

Your phone buzzes before your body can make a mistake, 7:30. gray. water. You type ok because that’s the language you know.

He drives a circuit that ends under a neon sign that doesn’t deserve the steadiness it throws, and he watches your reflection in the glass while the waitress sets down coffee you didn’t order yet.

He doesn’t sit across from you, he sits beside you, always. His thigh fences you to the wall, he puts his arm along the back of the booth and lets his palm drop to the place where your shoulder becomes your neck.

Ownership. Heat. No apology.

He’s filthy in his head and calm in his hands and he’s not pretending otherwise anymore.

The city will learn to mind its business. You already have.

Chapter Text

The neon over the diner has always looked like a bad decision — EATS with the T half-dead and the S stuttering — but tonight it throws a steady wash across the lot, red edging the wet on the asphalt, red on the hood of his car when he kills the engine and lets the night settle around the click of metal cooling.

He doesn’t say we’re celebrating, he doesn’t say anything at all until you reach for the door handle and he hooks two fingers in the denim at your hip and anchors you for one beat longer than you need, a small proprietary delay that says you move when he says so. Then he steps out and the rest of the evening follows.

Inside is chrome that hasn’t been polished in a decade, a pie case that hums just enough to tell you it’s working, pepper shakers full of salt because someone’s cousin can’t read labels.

The smell is coffee that’s seen a day already and griddle grease, onions that took heat too fast.

He takes the same booth he always takes — the one under the window near the side exit, sightline on the lot, sightline on your reflection, enough glass that if something sour pulls in he’ll have read it five seconds before anyone else.

You start to slide opposite out of old habit and he pats the vinyl next to him once without looking at you, that half-gesture that means the instruction is so simple he shouldn’t have to say it.

“Here.”

You sit where he pats.

He slides in after and takes the aisle, his thigh outside yours and pressed in until your hip meets the wall, the booth stops being furniture and turns into a shape he decides.

He has a preferred way of sitting by your side, it seems.

His arm comes along the top of the seatback and drops until his palm sits at the notch where your shoulder becomes your neck, weight more than touch, a bracket that reads as casual from ten feet and as ownership from one.

Masha’s already in the next booth over when you register the rest of the table, she must have come in the other door from the side lot, vest off, bright neon eyeliner in a way that makes her look sharper than usual.

On the far side, Nina slides in, all elbows and laughter that arrives late because she saves it until it won’t cost her, and a man you don’t know but have logged as six plates and a habit of backing clean — Raj, Sukuna said once in passing, the way he names people when he’s decided they can exist in your vocabulary.

No one else. No one passes by the booth to say a number or squeeze a hint, no one slides in to drop a problem on the table.

He chose who ate this food and who didn’t before the first fork lifted.

The waitress — TA— on the tag, maybe Talia, maybe Tania, you don’t remember well — sets down two mugs without asking and a glass you didn’t order because water is a thing he wants you to remember by the way it sweats against your hand.

“Same?” she says to him, and he nods like ritual, one rye neat that he won’t finish and steak-and-eggs he’ll cut with the same knife he uses to open envelopes.

He orders for you without looking,

“Coffee, black. Steak medium. Eggs soft. Add toast.”

It isn’t kindness, it’s removal of options that don’t matter.

“Clean,” he says by way of a toast when the rye lands, the single word the whole of his celebration.

He doesn’t lift the glass, he puts a fingertip to the base and turns it a quarter inch until the rim aligns with a scratch in the laminate like that was the goal all along.

“What.” Masha says, flat as a ruler.

“Route’s ours,” he answers. “Inspector’s tame for thirty.”

A nod toward Raj.

“Tires out with no one missing them.”

A tilt at Nina.

“Your dock was on time.”

His mouth curls a millimeter.

“Surprised me.”

“You say that like it hurts,” she says, but her shoulders sit lighter than they did at four, and she lets her head tip back for one second the way people do when they remember their bodies aren’t a job.

He cuts your steak before he cuts his, quick efficient strokes, squares the pieces with the side of the knife, slides the plate back a fraction so the fork’s in your hand before your brain can decide whether it wants it.

He takes your wrist and turns your palm up, sets the fork into it like a tool that belongs there, lets his thumb sit on your pulse until he feels it trip and settle.

You eat because the point of the night is that he decides what gets done and what gets left, and because the first bite lands like iron you didn’t realize your blood was missing until it arrived.

He doesn’t lean back like a man relaxing, and he doesn’t sprawl either.

He expands without moving, body heat along your side, shoulder a constant at your cheek when you shift, the weight of that hand at your neck an intermittent pressure that keeps your breath tethered.

It’s the closest you’ve been to seeing him act like a person, he says please to the girl at the counter when he asks for more coffee, he thanks Talia when she brings a plate she didn’t think would make it to order, he uses the word beautiful about an evening sky when he watches a freight train drag itself past like a dumb animal at the edge of the lot.

He doesn’t smile except at other people’s competence, he doesn’t require a performance.

He exists. It’s almost worse.

He takes the first sip of rye like it owes him information and then forgets it exists.

“Numbers,” he says, not to you, to the air, and Raj answers with a set that make sense in your mouth.

Nina adds a time. Masha grunts a correction and moves the salt to the other side of the table as if by shifting one thing she can test how the rest holds.

You take it in, how he speaks in the margins when he’s pleased, how he opens space for people he pays to fill, how he cuts the strangling parts of a story out with one bored question.

“And?” he says when Raj says the warehouse will pretend it never saw the extra pallet.

And Raj says,

“and we left the cameras hungry.”

And Sukuna says,

“good,” and that’s that.

His praise isn’t warm, it’s weight. It sits where he drops it and everyone at the table grows around it.

“You,” he says out of nowhere, and your spine goes stupid for a second because you didn’t hear the subject change land.

His palm comes off your shoulder to find your jaw, thumb on the hinge, hand a sentence.

He turns your face a fraction so he can see your mouth when you answer.

“What time did he call.”

“Eleven-oh-two,” you say, and you don’t need to ask which he.

“And the plate.”

You give it to him.

He watches your lips shape the string.

The corner of his mouth lifts.

“Good mouth.” he says, speaking more to himself than to you, and you feel heat crawl up your neck like it has learned the way without a map.

“Unhinged.” Masha murmurs into her coffee, not looking at anyone, but you see Nina chuckling quietly and Sukuna’s grin widening.

She has worked for him long enough to keep a ledger in silence, she notes his hand on your jaw, the way your breath obeys when he says down, the way he folds your napkin before he uses it to wipe the smear of ketchup you didn’t see land on your wrist.

She hums once when he does that — the kind of sound that means I am not surprised and I will watch the way this goes because I don’t waste being surprised on anything that doesn’t deserve it.

He leans close while Nina tells an angle-and-elevator story that shouldn’t be funny and somehow is, his mouth at your ear so he doesn’t have to raise his voice.

“You blush like a confession, brat” breath hot, tone conversational the way some men talk about their day. “I could make you cry in six words from here.”

“Don’t.” you say automatically under a breath, because your body has opinions now and your mouth works without a meeting sometimes.

“Not in public.” he answers, and it’s filthy only in the way it refuses to pretend he isn’t measuring cause and effect.

He drags his thumb along your jaw once, not hard, not soft, until you realize he’s counting your breath on his skin. He hums deeply, low, and your eyes are fixed on your hands over the table.

He doesn’t leave the others out, he isn’t a boy showing off.

He listens when Nina says a thing was luck and says,

“No. You made it,” and you watch her sit taller like a person whose back just remembered it has a stem.

He tells Raj “lower” after a number and Raj drops it without protecting his pride, like a man who understands how short a leash can be and what it looks like when it’s woven out of trust.

He tells Masha “you were right,” and she doesn’t make him repeat it because she already enjoyed it once, she just catalogues the tone and files it.

You eat because he told you to, because your hands have learned how to hold a fork while someone else decides how long the world lasts.

You drink water because he texted it earlier and because your tongue remembered the desert your body lives beside.

You try not to watch your reflection and fail.

In the window, you look like someone who belongs in this booth, that’s new enough to feel like theft.

He tests the fence.

He always does.

His hand slides from your jaw to your throat because the path is short and your skin knows the road, presses there without closing, a steadying weight that makes your breath choose a speed he likes.

“Eyes.” he says when you look too long at the red in the glass, and you give him your eyes because refusing them always costs more.

He tilts his head as if to check whether they still shine the way he likes when he is too close.

They do.

“Better,” he smirks, and you hate how much your body receives the word as oxygen.

He orders more food than he eats and orchestrates its landing with two fingers. 

He puts toast on Masha’s plate without asking, she lets it sit there until she’s ready for it. He cuts Nina’s steak with the same casual efficiency he used on yours, she swears at him for being patronizing and eats it anyway. He gives Raj the rye and takes his water.

He never loses the line to the side exit, he never loses track of the way your knee presses against his because there’s nowhere else for it to go.

It is the first time you’ve seen him be social somewhere that isn’t your mother’s table or the yard’s concrete. He has a face that lives between those two masks and you didn’t know you’d get to meet it.

It isn’t a softer face, it’s the version that believes in the usefulness of simple sentences.

He’s a little funny, you hate that you laugh once when he says a thing about a pallet jack with the timing of a man who doesn’t waste his own.

He doesn’t hide the sharp edges to make the night easy, he files nothing off, he just sits where he chose to sit and says what gets the world shaped and lets the rest fall.

He raises two fingers once and no waiter comes to ask stupid questions, they just go fetch what they already know he wants. It’s a little mesmerizing.

When the glasses land, he slides one in front of you.

You look at it like it might ask you questions.

He watches the surprise bloom — first in your eyes, then in your shoulders.

“Go on,” he says, bored as a blade. “Sip.”

Masha’s pencil actually pauses. Nina’s grin shows teeth.

Neither of them was betting on you getting poured.

“You’re… letting her?” Nina asks, delighted.

“Celebration,” he offers. “I can be generous without witnesses forgetting who feeds them.”

You take a cautious mouthful.

Heat climbs your throat, he clocks the flinch, the recovery, the way your breath steadies when it has something mean to hold.

He taps the water.

“Alternate. Two fingers high, not a sermon. Mouth stays clever, not stupid.”

Masha lifts an eyebrow, ledger-flat.

“Education night?”

“Calibration,” he says. His knuckles graze your jaw as he turns the glass a fraction toward you. “Warm, not foolish.”

You check his face like you’re waiting for the trap.

There isn’t one — not tonight.

You drink again, slower, and he feels the room settle around the decision he made.

Nina leans back, stage-whispering,

“We witnessing a miracle?”

He cuts her a look that says keep praying. To you, softer, almost private.

“Good. Now breathe lower.”

You do, and the booth understands who the order was for.

The alley comes back eventually, it still lives under your skin.

You will not forget the sound a skull makes against brick when a hand that understands leverage decides it’s done.

That red in his eyes finds a way to live in the reflection of the diner window even under cheap fluorescents.

But there is a line in your head now that says both are true, the man who laid another man down with the wall and his palm and a quiet was also the man who told Masha to go home early the night her mother turned the color of paper, the man who smoothed the corner of your father’s receipt before he slid it back, the man who cut your steak first because your hands were shaking and he’s allergic to watching you spill.

Sometimes, in moments like this where he squeezes the back of your neck to pass you the napkin and doesn’t explain why the contact steadies you, the memory drags its nails along your ribs to see if it still has purchase.

It does.

It shows you the smear at the base of a wall and the set of his jaw when he decided the argument was over and the way he looked up and held your eyes because you had seen and he would not pretend otherwise.

None of that leaves. 

It sits next to the way he tells you to drink water after a sip of your drink again because he plans to use your mouth at minute 32 and he likes it when it works.

Your brain carries both like sharp things it has wrapped in cloth.

Some part of you has started calling the cloth a life.

Halfway through the pie — he ordered it, you didn’t, it’s better than it should be and that makes you angrier than it should — he catches you watching the crowd in the mirror the way rabbits watch open fields.

He presses his palm to your sternum and leans in without taking your air, just close enough that your heartbeat has to decide whether it’s going to run or straighten up.

“You’re thinking,” he says.

“I do that sometimes,” you answer, because it’s better than saying I don’t know how to stop.

“Don’t do it in places that don’t pay you for it,” he says in the way a man says put the wrench back when you’re about to strip the bolt.

You try to aim your thoughts at the surface of the table.

You look at his hands because hands are honest. You decide you like the black band tattoos he has on his wrists.

Masha watches you watch and hums low again, lips’ corners lifting slightly, like she’s filling another page in her head that reads touches jaw, counts breath, sets palm on chest to keep air from floating off, says one word and gets the girl’s eyes back.

She still does not mention the way he said you were useful three days ago like he was saying the sky had weight. She also does not mention the way he walked you behind a reefer and put an arm across your collarbones and snarled you into stone.

She tracks, that’s all.

“What happens if I don’t eat?” you ask him, dumbly, because sometimes the part of your brain that wants to test the fence is louder than the part that pays attention to consequences.

That part also gets bolder when you drink.

“You will,” he says, and he slides your plate closer with two fingers. “Don’t make me say it twice.”

He never pretends you belong anywhere else.

He never pretends he isn’t using you.

He tells you when you’re doing it right because results give him something to hold, and you have learned that his praise does more for your breath than any stranger’s kindness ever has.

He scares you with a sentence because it keeps your hands from shaking and then he is pleased with your steady hands, he is unashamed about the loop he has put you in.

You would hate him for that if a different loop hadn’t stolen you for years and tried to name the theft love.

You have thought less about the ring since the van in the lot.

It isn’t gone, the drawer still holds it the way a drawer holds old teeth you can’t throw away for reasons you don’t explain to yourself.

But the thought of buses has gone quiet in your head because he pointed at them once and said no and your body has been busy counting screws and plates and coins that smell like diesel.

This is not healing.

This is occupancy.

It looks the same from a distance.

You can live in that optical illusion for whole afternoons now.

When you’re all done and up he tips your chin the way some men flick ash — casual, rude, a little beautiful in the wrong mouth — and steers you out of the diner into red neon air.

You’re warmer than you should be from the rye he slid your way after you finished your drink and the sip he didn’t take back fast enough.

It wasn’t much.

Enough to take the corners off your panic and put a hinge in your sarcasm.

“Home?” you ask, because you like pretending to choose.

“Errands,” he says. “You can hold things and keep quiet.”

“I’m excellent at both,” you say. “My résumé is just a photo of my hands and the word ‘hush’ in twelve fonts.”

He huffs — that almost-laugh that sounds like he just decided not to break something — and opens your door.

His knuckles graze your throat when you duck in.

Heat jumps.

Of course he feels it. Of course he files it.

The car is a low animal with manners.

He drives with one hand, the other dropped on your knee as if the seat was designed to deliver your pulse to his palm.

The ring road pulls the city past in strips of sodium light, his three-word map writes itself under your skin — no at a corner with the wrong eyes, careful by a lot that pays him twice, mine along the fence-line you could trace blind now.

You hate how your breath evens out when he narrates the world like that. You decide to blame the whiskey.

“What am I holding?” you ask. “Ideally not a live thing.”

“Envelopes,” he says. “A box. A door while I decide whether a man is worth keeping.”

“So a Tuesday.”

“Don’t get brave,” he says. “You can talk as long as your mouth remembers it has a job.”

“It’s multitasking,” you offer. “We’re very modern.”

He squeezes your knee — not hard, just enough to reset your heartbeat to his tempo — and pulls into a storage row that smells like cold metal and old lies.

He kills the headlights, lets the darkness be yours for two blinks, and then the instrument panel paints your face in blue.

He looks, — he always looks — it’s his favorite proof that you’re here.

“Out.” he commands.

You’re on his left because that’s where he keeps you, his body between you and the only kinds of trouble that show up without an appointment.

He doesn’t hold your hand, he collects your wrist and sets your arm along his like a tool he intends to use again.

Your pulse betrays you for three seconds.

The whiskey chases your shame down and puts a lock on it.

Better.

You count hinges because counting calms your lungs.

He doesn’t have to tell you, you’ve learned the song.

“Twenty-three’s top hinge rings clean,” you say. “The camera over the east gutter blinks every thirteen seconds. I hate it.”

“You hate being watched,” he says, amused.

“I hate being watched by anything that isn’t you,” you say, and immediately want to bite your tongue off.

He stops walking.

Red eyes cut sideways.

“Say it again,” he says with a grin widening — not a command, a curiosity sharpened to a point.

“Nope,” you say, too fast. “One-time coupon.”

He moves without moving. His hand slides from your wrist to your waist, cups you there until your spine has to choose an opinion, then migrates up, skimming your ribs, his thumb resting in the notch at your breastbone like he’s parking a thought.

“You get cheeky,” he murmurs, “I get handsy.”

“You’re always handsy.”

“Consider it clarity.” he offers and leaves his thumb where it can manage your breath while he checks the next lock.

He hums when the cylinder tells him what he wanted to hear, it lands low in your throat because his hand decided that’s where sounds live now.

At the corner post he stops and plants you there with a palm flat to your hip.

“Face out,” he says. “Your eyes, not the camera’s.”

“Security by paranoia,” you say. “Very chic.”

“Security by experience,” he corrects. “Paranoia is for people who think they’re special.”

You tilt your head, a little drunk, a little brave.

“You don’t think you’re special?”

“I know I’m intolerable,” he says. “There’s a difference.”

His hand leaves your chest and finds your jaw because he’s incapable of not touching your face when your mouth gets ideas.

His thumb presses the hinge like a man who knows where to squeeze a confession out of a pipe.

“Keep going. Tonight you get three free questions before I charge.”

“Why keep me on your left,” you ask, choosing easy. “You switch sides depending on the block.”

“Left, I can grab your throat without crossing my body. Right, I can put a door between you and stupid. Tonight is left.”

“Because?”

“You’re drinking,” he says, like a diagnosis. “You’re funny when you drink. Funny forgets to be afraid. I like your jokes. I don’t like forget.”

“That’s rude,” you say. “I’m very charming when I’m a little warm.”

“You’re charming when I say so,” he says, and it would be unbearable if his thumb weren’t exactly where your breath turns into behavior.

He drops his hand, your lungs keep the discipline on their own.

He notices and you can feel him decide to be pleased.

You shouldn’t want that.

You do.

Whiskey is a terrible witness for the prosecution.

Second stop is a bar with an honest smell — bleach, onion skin, quarters.

He takes the side entrance because he doesn’t like to teach every room about himself all at once. Inside, a woman with ledger eyes, already wiping down what the night will dirty, she glances at you, up and down, quick.

You raise a brow because your mouth got louder somewhere between rye and this hallway.

“You bringing your librarian to count me,” she asks him.

“She likes decimals,” he grins. “Don’t make her count men.”

“I’d never,” the woman says.

She reaches under the bar and brings out a bone-white envelope.

You take it, hold it against your palm to feel the density, and file the weight for later, money has different temperatures to it when it’s honest, when it’s clean, when it’s someone’s apology stapled shut.

“Short by sixty.” you say before he does, because your fingers know this game now.

The woman’s mouth curves.

“You trained her,” she says. “Cute.”

“Useful,” he says. “Don’t confuse categories.”

You hold the door on his way out.

He pauses in the frame and leans, which means you’re briefly caged between the door and his heat.

“You enjoying yourself?” he asks, tone unreadable.

“Immensely,” you say, honest. “It’s like watching a nature documentary. The wolves exchange currency.”

He dips his head until his mouth is almost in your hair.

“The wolves trade teeth,” he whispers. “Try not to put your fingers in the exhibit.”

“You’re the exhibit,” you say, too quick. “I’m the bored docent.”

His hand closes on your nape so abruptly your knees soften.

“You like poking the glass,” he says. “Keep it up and I’ll make you write a report on the ways it didn’t break.”

“Does the report have pictures,” you ask, voice thinner than you wanted.

“It has examples,” he says, and lets go at exactly the right second to make standing feel like his idea.

You do fine on the block with the dead camera because you can hear the click it doesn’t make.

You point at the angle the lens ought to hold, not where it hangs.

“Bad bracket,” you say. “Wind will turn it to watch the church, and God doesn’t need your footage.”

“God needs my receipts,” he says. “I’m better at collecting.”

“You’re definitely better at pretending you’re patient,” you say. “Which you’re not.”

“Do I look patient.”

“You look like a disaster with good posture,” you say, and he huffs again because you’re not wrong and because the whiskey has made you too honest for the shape of your life.

At the bodega he points, you fetch water.

He throws a candy bar at your chest like an unsentimental bouquet.

You catch it because you hate dropping things in front of him.

“This one?” you ask. “It’s rude.”

“You like rude,” he says. “Eat.”

“You’re projecting.”

He leans over the counter and sets two fingers on the plastic-wrapped top of the bar and the clerk — Lasha, perpetual target of Sukuna’s bored affection — turns the register into a donation jar.

Your candy bar tastes like salt and stubborn.

Outside, the night gives you back the shape of the city in stripes.

“Why ‘guest one,’” you ask, worrying the candy into submission at the corner. “You call some people by names and some by numbers. It’s not random. Where does guest one fit.”

He lets the question sit there for a block and then says,

“Insurance.”

“For who.”

“Me,” he says. “And you.”

“That’s threatening,” you say.

“It’s generous,” he says. “Numbers make it easier to count what I keep.”

“Am I a number?”

“You’re an expense,” he says, and the word somehow makes your stomach warm. “A useful one. Don’t get cute about wanting to be more.”

“I’m not,” you say, lying for both of you.

He cuts across to the clinic back lot, the camera watches the wrong corner on purpose, and it pleases you how proud you are of knowing that now.

He hands you the keyring that could anchor a canoe, the metal is cold and familiar, he tracks how little you fumble.

“Button,” he says, and then, because you managed to breathe before he told you to, he lets the word degrade into, “Good.”

The switch throws the security lights into a soft, legal gloom, the lot looks like a story the city might believe if the right person told it.

He slides in behind you so closely you can count the stitches in his jacket with your shoulder blade.

“This is where you make people disappear,” you say, lightly, because the whiskey has your mouth on a longer leash.

“This is where I make problems edible,” he says. “Don’t ask for the recipe.”

“What if I want to learn.”

He considers your profile in the low light, thumb idly counting your pulse in your throat like he forgot to move it after he parked it there five minutes ago.

“You want a lot,” he says. “It looks good on you.”

“So you’ll teach me.”

“I’ll let you stand where I need you,” he says. “That’s as generous as I get.”

“You already are too generous,” you say, and immediately want to rewind the sentence, but the whiskey won’t obey.

Feels good to blame things on alcohol and not on your own bold stupidity for once.

He turns you by the hips into the line of him.

Heat. Weight. The kind of proximity that makes words fall down the stairs in your mouth.

“Say that again,” he says, but it isn’t the repeat trick, it’s a dare.

“You… are,” you say lowly, cursing the rye for putting sincerity that close to your tongue. “When you want to be.”

He watches your face like there’s writing on it he intends to be the only one to read. His thumb strokes once along your jaw, not tender, proprietary.

“That’s going to cost you later,” he says, low. “I don’t like it when you make me look like a person.”

“Does your tax bracket change,” you ask, desperate for joke.

“My blood pressure does,” he deadpans.

He taps the lanyard print under your shirt.

“You wear that for me tomorrow. Under the gray, against your skin. Don’t touch it unless I touch it.”

“I know,” you say, and can’t keep the flush from rising ugly and obvious up your throat.

“There we go,” he says, satisfied, and steps back because he learned a long time ago not to take the whole room in one bite.

You should be quiet now.

The whiskey thinks otherwise.

“Why my family,” you ask, softer. “You could have saved anyone’s brother. You could have left us in the bad part of town to make our own stupid mistakes. Why keep us.”

He doesn’t answer at first.

He angles the rearview at the lot as if it could be interesting and you as if you always are.

Then he says,

“Because it pays.”

You wait.

He remembers that you’ve learned his silences and grudgingly adds, 

“Because I don’t let anyone take what’s mine.” A beat. “And because fear is a language your house understood and I like talking to people in their first tongue.”

“That’s monstrous.” you say.

“Accurate,” he says. “Don’t dress it up.”

You sip water and feel the rye sulk.

Your humor has weight now, it pushes against the shape of your terror and finds a place to sit next to it instead of on top of it.

“You’re not very mysterious when you’re tired.” you say.

He cuts you a look that makes the city go away for a heartbeat.

“I am,” he says. “You’re just learning the alphabet.”

“Do I get a report card?” you ask.

He slides two fingers under your jaw and tilts your face up

“You’ll get what you earn,” he says. “You want a grade? Show up. Don’t shake unless I ask. Don’t run your mouth to hear your own clever. Use it to keep me from smashing my day on someone else’s stupidity. That’s your job.”

“Sir, yes sir.” you say with a little salute you should not give him.

He catches your wrist midair and holds it there, suspended between joke and mistake.

“That word doesn’t live here,” he says. “Use my name or use nothing.”

You swallow.

“Ryomen,” you say, and it makes his eyes darker in a way that probably means you get punished and fed in the same hour tomorrow.

“Better,” he says. “Don’t use it somewhere other people can hear you.”

“You’re very needy for a man who pretends not to care.”

“I’m very exact,” he says. “Don’t confuse appetites with weakness.”

You look at his hand still at your wrist, at the cuff cutting a shallow half-moon into your skin.

“Noted.”

Third stop is a pawn counter in a strip mall that has outlived four landlords.

The man behind it has a toothbrush moustache and a ledger he hides under a newspaper.

They exchange a look like a problem got solved six years ago and never properly congratulated itself.

You stand left, hold quiet, eyes down enough to be polite, up enough to see.

“Your girl’s got good posture,” the pawn man says. “You teach her that?”

“She teaches fast,” Sukuna says. “Don’t mistake speed for softness.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” the man says.

He slides a key across the counter with two fingers like he’s releasing a small reptile.

You collect it, palm flat so you don’t look greedy.

You get a smile you don’t want in return.

Sukuna sees it but doesn’t spend the coin now.

You make a note, later.

In the parking lot, you hand him the key.

He doesn’t take it.

He hooks a finger through your belt loop instead and drags you to him like a problem he intends to solve in the narrow band of space he calls privacy.

“What did he smell like?” he asks.

“Old coins,” you say. “Hot dust.”

“What did he want you to look at.”

“My hands,” you say, and that makes his mouth change in a way that would be terrifying if it weren’t also flattering.

He takes your wrist, turns your palm up, and checks the lines like he’s consulting a map he drew.

He kisses the center of your palm like a signature.

Heat shoots — stupid, involuntary. Eyes widen, heart pounds and you make a pathetic little gasp.

You pull, he allows it because he wants to see what you do when he gives you back your body.

“You’re drunk.” he says, which is not true and absolutely is.

“A little,” you say. “I’m brave in the places that don’t matter.”

“They all matter,” he corrects. “That’s why you do what I tell you. I don’t waste your courage.”

“Is that on a card somewhere,” you ask. “Ryo’s School of Fuckery and Courage Allocation.”

“Language,” he says, amused and irritated.

He crowds you against the car, hand braced on the roof, the whole weight of him an instruction. He feels like a hot wall of muscles pressing against your soft self.

“You want a detour or you want home.”

You blink. The whiskey tries to vote.

The part of you he trained drags its hand down the lever in your chest and pulls, home.

“Home,” you say, and you maybe mean the bed that isn’t yours, the deadbolt, the soap that smells like steel, the silence he breaks for orders and nothing else.

He hears all that in one syllable and gives you the smallest nod.

“Good,” he says. “I’m not in the mood to lecture you in a parking lot.”

“You’re always in the mood to lecture me,” you say, and he pinches your chin in that insulting way that feels like praise when it’s him.

“I’m always in the mood to make you useful,” he says. “Sometimes that involves your mouth, sometimes it involves your hands, sometimes it involves you shutting both.”

“Noted.”

“Quit that,” he says. “You’re not a clipboard.”

“What am I.”

He pretends to think.

“Expensive,” he says again. “And mine.”

You hate how warm that lands.

You decide it’s the whiskey again. He knows it isn’t.

On your block he eases the car in with the courtesy he never has for anyone else.

The porch light paints your door the color of reasonable people.

He does not believe in reasonable people.

He unlocks you from the seat with a hand to your jaw and a kiss at the corner of your mouth that could be mistaken for good night if the person watching it had never been alive.

“Tomorrow,” he says. “Seven-thirty. Gray. Water. And wipe the grin off before you go inside or your mother will turn it into a church.”

“I’m not grinning.” you lie.

“You’re leaking,” he says. “Fix it.”

“Ass.” you say, but you’re laughing and he knows it, and you know he knows it, and the whole street gets it without deserving to.

You start to get out. His hand catches your lanyard chain through your shirt, gives it a tiny pull — just enough to make you swallow around nothing.

“Bring a better joke.” he says, bored.

“I have an entire set,” you say. “You’re just a hostile crowd.”

“I’m the only crowd that matters,” he cocks a brow. “Don’t bomb.”

“I never bomb.” you say, audacity scrambled with alcohol.

He leans in, mouth at your ear, voice gone to that quiet feral register that makes your bones vote to stay in your body.

“You can talk like this because you’re warm,” he says. “You get cute sober, I’ll fix it with my hands.”

“I know.” you say, and your voice is not afraid, not exactly, it’s something else you will not name yet.

“Good.” he says, and lets you go.

Inside, your mother asks how dinner was and you say fine because there’s no way to explain a night that moved because a man decided it should.

You drink water like a person who just learned thirst is a choice you’re allowed to make, you stand in the dark and touch the sternum spot he treats like a button and your breath does what he prefers without needing his thumb.

Your phone lights up.

bring the key tomorrow
and your mouth. not the jokes. the other one

You type asshole and delete it.

You type ok and hate yourself a little less than you used to for meaning it.

You lie down and let the whiskey finish its job scrubbing the edges off your fear. 

Your next thought is not a prayer and not a plan, It’s a fact you can’t stand and won’t deny, you’re not less yourself when he orders you around, you’re more. 

You hate it.

In the morning you’ll wake at six because that’s when he starts the day by moving the phone. You’ll put on gray because you’re boring and obedient and it turns out both are better than whatever you were before. You’ll bring the key. You’ll bring your mouth.

You’ll try a joke. He’ll take whatever he wants and leave you with orders and air. You’ll tell yourself it’s the whiskey that makes you brave and not the man.

You’ll lie to yourself with that conviction until you don’t need the drink anymore. 

He’ll notice the exact night that happens. He notices everything. He noticed tonight.

He noticed the way you hid fear behind humor and let you have it because it hid you while he worked. He noticed the blush he didn’t have to command and the flinch you didn’t indulge and the question you asked that you shouldn’t have and the way you said his name like a knife you wanted to learn to sharpen.

He’ll use all of that tomorrow.

That’s mercy, his version.

It will feel like sin.

You’ll say okay.

You don’t practice saying thank you, you’re not that drunk. But you do practice silence in the shape of his palm and discover it fits.

You fall asleep to the memory of his huff when you called him a disaster and the sound your mouth made when his thumb pressed your jaw, and you hate that both memories taste like survival instead of humiliation.

Out on the street the engine idles long enough for your room to collect it as a sound that means the day is over because he said so.

Then it leaves. Then the night remembers it’s just a night.

Then you’re breathing like a girl who might actually make it to seven-thirty without inventing a reason to run.

Chapter Text

He tells himself it’s just maintenance — keep you close, keep the ex from sniffing around, keep the floor reading the right story — and then spends the whole damn meal clocking the way you wet your bottom lip after coffee like you’re filing a blade and pretending you didn’t.

He sits next to you, thigh fencing you to the wall, palm hanging lazy at the notch of your shoulder, and watches the way your breath drags when his thumb taps once, a metronome only you hear.

He tells himself it’s possession. Then he watches you laugh — low, choked back, the kind you try to kill because you still hate being seen — and the lie doesn’t cover it.

You work clean all week.

You take line four at the first ring and don’t look at him for help, he gives it anyway, just by existing where your eyes land when they forget they’re not supposed to.

You still flinch when he doesn’t touch you for an hour, he still uses that data like a bastard.

Tonight, the diner smells like heat and coffee gone a little bitter at the edges.

He orders without asking, cuts your steak first because your hands are doing that barely-there shake he hates and misses and feeds off.

Masha’s across from you, doing her bored saint impression, cataloging without blinking.

Nina’s not here, Raj isn’t either.

He wanted it smaller.

He wanted you pressed under his arm, his shoulder to your cheek, your breath learning his timing.

If anyone notices, they’re smart enough to keep their eyes in their heads.

You do that thing again — small, unconscious, obscene — thumb to the corner of your mouth, swipe the glisten off, tongue to skin, gone before you think about it.

His spine tightens like a pulled line.

Fuck you for that.

Fuck him for being the one who taught your body what to do when his hand talks to it, and now you’re doing it to yourself like you’re testing whether he’s paying attention.

He is.

He’s paying attention to all the stupid little things he swore he’d never waste attention on.

The way you work the straw even though you hate straws, the way you look at the window when you want to look at his mouth, the way you tuck his lanyard under your shirt because he told you to and then forget it’s a leash until he hooks two fingers in the chain when you pass him the salt and drags you an inch without moving his arm.

You go, quiet.

He files it under useful and deranged in equal measure.

Masha says something under her breath about a loader who thinks forks are a personality.

You laugh again, softer, head tipped just enough to bare your throat, and he hears himself think it without permission, I want to put my mouth on that.

Not to be sweet. To brand.

To end an argument he didn’t admit he’s having.

He keeps his face bored. He feeds you water.

He lets you breathe in his pace.

“Eyes.” he says when you stare at your hands like they’re going to save you from whatever is happening to the room, and you give him your eyes because your body is finally smarter than your self-respect.

Good girl.

Hate that. Love that.

Masha clocks it. She hums and looks away because she’s worked for him long enough to enjoy a disaster only when it pays.

He leaves too much cash under the mug because quiet is something you buy and keep buying, then he’s up, dragging you with a hand at your wrist like he always does when he’s decided you’re done pretending to sit, and he puts you in the car because he’s a controlling prick and because control works.

You don’t ask where, the city presents him its neck and he takes the shortest line.

He doesn’t talk for the first five turns.

He lets the engine do the part of conversation that keeps other men from saying brave things. The ring road bleeds into blocks that know him, you check the mirror for ghosts and he lets you, it’s efficient to watch you reassure yourself with his method.

“You keep doing that with your mouth,” he says finally, once again conversational like weather. “I’m going to wreck your week.”

“Wh— I’m not doing anything.” you start, and he laughs once, low, disgusted.

“You are,” he says. “Don’t play dumb. It doesn’t fit.”

He slides his palm across the console and clamps your knee. Firm. Instruction, not comfort.

“You want me to be polite about this? You picked the wrong fucking church.”

You stay quiet.

Good.

He’s sick to death of men who demand explanations for their own appetites, he will not become a man who begs for permission to have his.

His building is nowhere anyone you grew up with would guess — not the high better neighborhoods that sell safety on the view, not the ground floors that trade convenience for being easy to burn.

Third floor above a machine shop that owes him, stairs that smell like oil and wet stone, a door with a deadbolt that learned his hand.

Inside, clean, minimal, expensive only in the ways he enjoys — knife block that could take a thumb, speakers that never play music, a couch that exists to be landed on, windows that cut the night into panels and show him the yard if he wants it.

The rest is private the way a blade in a pocket is private.

He doesn’t “decorate.”

He occupies. It shows.

He pushes you back against the closed door because he likes writing sentences in your nerves first thing.

Forearm sets at your collarbones, the same way he holds you at the kingpin when he’s making the world shut up, the other hand at your jaw, thumb finding that hinge like it lives there, which it does, because he said so.

Heat off him replaces whatever the room had in it before you walked in.

He doesn’t crowd your air, he owns it.

“You want a tour?” he asks, mock-gentle, mouth not smiling. “There’s the part you don’t touch, the part you don’t ask about, and you, right here.”

“Cozy.” you say, breath shortening, stubborn under it, and he wants to shake it out of you and keep it both.

He settles for being filthy, which is his default setting anyway.

“I told you not to do that shit with your tongue,” he says, absurd, mean, correct. “You think I’m going to sit there and watch you lick your fucking thumb like a kid who doesn’t understand what that does to a man who already decided you’re his?”

You blink, insulted, turned on, angry, it’s all the same color on your face.

He hates how much he likes reading you.

“I wasn’t—” you stutter.

“You were,” he snaps. “And now we’re here.”

He drops his mouth near your ear and lets his voice go animal, the way he knows goes straight through your ribs into whatever part of your head does obedience.

“You have ten seconds again to tell me to stop and mean it. After that, we stop when I say we stop, and you keep up.”

You swallow. He hears it. He waits.

He hates waiting. He’s got patience because it pays.

He’ll spend ten seconds on this because he wants what comes after this to have no complaints attached.

“Do you want this,” he says, even, irritated with the necessity.

“Yes,” you say.

Too soft.

“Again.”

“Yes,” you say, firmer, chin up even with his palm closing the distance.

“Good.” he says, and that is all the ceremony he’s entitled to.

He takes your mouth.

Not sweet. He isn’t wired for sweet. Heat and pressure and claim.

He sets the pace and your lungs learn it instantly, of course they do. His thumb anchors your jaw, fingers braced along your cheek, the other hand sliding to your nape to steer your head because steering is what he does, it’s what your body likes when it’s honest.

He respects nothing except the yes he just took at the door and the rule inside him that says he doesn’t play like your ex.

He’s rough — not because he’s blind, because he knows exactly where rough becomes breaking and he’s not in the business of breaking tools he intends to use for a long time.

You meet him with that mix he’s been cultivating for weeks, precision and tremor. 

You try to be quiet and fail, moaning inside his mouth and letting him drink it all.

Let the room hear something useful for once.

He drags back an inch, breath still on your mouth.

“Eyes,” he says. Yours snap to his. Red to wide. “Keep them open.”

You do.

It kills him a little how good that looks on you — obedience without slackness, stubborn threaded through it like reinforcement.

He goes back in, angling, testing, mapping.

You taste like diner coffee and a week of following orders and the salt of your own laughing he didn’t give you permission to do and he’s going to hold that against you later and give it back more.

He swears into your mouth, a low fuck that is more satisfaction than complaint, and you gasp in a way that feels like the first useful truth you’ve told yourself all month.

He doesn’t tell himself this is about the ex.

It started there, it isn’t there now.

This is about wanting.

His, not yours, though yours is handy right now and pretty as hell when it shows up behind your eyes.

He’s a man built for yes-by-default, he’s also a man who enjoys the shape of you when it isn’t begging, when it’s saying finally, stupidly, bravely.

He rewards that.

He puts his hand at your waist and feels the way you fit there like he ordered the part to spec. He squeezes hard enough to make your breath reconsider its schedule.

He likes the sound you make when it fixes itself.

He breaks off before sweetness can pretend it exists. He hates sweetness. He doesn’t mind tenderness when it looks like a man who can kill with his hands choosing not to squeeze.

That’s not tenderness, that’s control. He can live there.

“Open,” he says, just to see if you’ll take orders with your mouth like you do with your mind.

You do, eyes on his, obedient and insolent at once.

He wants to ruin you. He wants to ruin himself.

He takes the middle path, ruin the evening and build a better machine.

He steps back too soon on purpose, hand at your throat to mark the distance. Your knees threaten to be a problem, he solves it by putting his thigh between yours so the wall doesn’t have to do all the work.

“Don’t slide,” he says, mocking, mean. “Upright. Show me you can be useful when you’re dumb with it.”

“Don’t—” you start, offended.

“Don’t what,” he murmurs, amused, his mouth right there again because he decided to be cruel with pleasure tonight and he’s sticking to the plan.

“Name it. You don’t like how I talk to you? You can go find a man who cries on your bruises and calls it love. I’ll be right here doing this right.”

“Fuck you.” you say, tiny, furious, perfect.

“Later.” he says, deadpan, and lets you see the promise.

He’s not a liar, he’s not gentle, he’s not confused.

He’s also not sorry.

He drags you off the door and down the short hall because he’s done teaching the entryway the same lesson twice.

His place is cool, controlled, built around a few anchors, a counter he can brace you against, a couch that can take weight and orders, a bedroom with a door that locks from his side because of course it does.

He lets you see none of it as sanctuary.

It’s a workshop.

You’re a project.

He’s a craftsman and a bastard.

At the kitchen island he stops and puts you where he wants you with the same economy he uses to set a pallet, hips to edge, palms flat, shoulders down.

He steps between your knees again, not crowding for crowding’s sake — this is measurement.

“Look at me,” he says. “Tell me you’re not thinking about buses.”

You aren’t. He can see it.

The old loop is quiet.

The new one is loud and simple, him, rules, breath.

He likes himself too much in this moment, he knows it, he doesn’t care.

“I’m not,” you say.

“Good,” he says, and then he decides to be a menace about it. “Because if you were, I’d make you say please for an hour and then send you home with your mouth empty.”

“Stop.” you say, shocked, red high on your cheekbones like a light he can read in the dark.

“You want me to,” he says, lazy. “Say no. Mean it.”

You don’t.

You stare at him with that horrible gorgeous honesty he’s been forcing into you, and he feels something like victory and hunger shake hands under his skin.

He kisses you again because self-control is a virtue for meetings, not this.

Harder. Slower.

He controls the pace like he controls lanes — no rush, no mercy.

He lets you pull against his grip once and then punishes you by going softer until you groan, then takes what the groan opened. You curse into his mouth and he smiles like a thief counting someone else’s money.

He wants, and he’s used to getting what he wants, and wanting you isn’t a problem as long as he doesn’t let it make him stupid.

He grows greedy, impatient, he presses his body against yours so you feed him more of your soft noises. He imagines what noises you’ll make when he’s fucking the life out of you.

Fuck.

He forces himself to stop where he planned to stop tonight.

He will not fuck this up by giving you everything in a single snarl and then pretending he isn’t the kind of man who will need it again tomorrow.

He’s mean. He’s patient when it comes to this. To you.

He will make the hunger serve the plan.

He peels back, hand at your nape turning into hand at your cheek, thumb dragging your lower lip because he can and because he saw you do it to yourself and hated that he wasn’t the one doing it.

“You listen to me,” he says, voice back to even, though it costs him. “Tomorrow you work like this didn’t happen. You answer on the first ring. You don’t look at me like a story, you look at me like a job. If you can do that, you get more. If you can’t, I starve you until you remember what feeds you.”

“Cruel.” you say, breathless and rapt and insolent.

“Correct,” he says. “And generous.”

He taps your lanyard through your shirt with two fingers.

“Wear that tomorrow too. Don’t touch it unless I touch it. It belongs to me.”

You belong to me.

You nod, because that’s what you do when you’ve learned that arguing is a luxury you can’t afford.

He feels the nod under his hand, the way your throat cooperates, and it’s obscene how much it satisfies him.

He steps back whole inches, forces space, forces breath to be ugly and useful again.

He hates himself a little for the self-discipline and loves himself more.

He controls, that’s the point.

He gives you water, and you drink because he told you to and because your mouth is a desert he made.

He takes the glass back and sets it in the exact corner of the counter he always uses because order soothes him when desire tries to make him waste time.

“Go,” he says, pointing you to the hall. “Bathroom. Fix your face. If your mother asks about those red eyes, onions.”

You stand there, stubbornness creasing your mouth like you’re deciding whether you want to bite the hand that feeds you just to see if it bleeds.

He lets you look, he lets you decide.

You move.

Good girl.

Fuck him for liking that too.

At the door, he crowds you one last time because he’s a bastard and because closing arguments matter.

Palm to sternum, quick press to set the breath right, mouth at your ear.

“You’re mine.” he says, low.

“Not a poem, not a promise. A fact. If you need to say no, say it now, before I make a liar out of you by teaching you how to need what I give.” he doesn’t understand why he’s giving you so many chances to say no — it feels like he’s trying to deny himself something he already established as his property.

“Yes.” you whisper, ragged.

“Good.” 

He drops his mouth to yours one more time, quick, searing, proprietary, then opens the door and pushes you into the stairwell before you can build a shrine to the moment.

“Seven-thirty. Gray. Don’t be cute.”

You walk the stairs like a person who just learned a word you can’t say out loud yet. He knows what you expected and he’s giving you only what he wants, and when he wants to.

Because he’s the one making the rules, no matter how much he wanted to break this one in the moment you moaned inside his mouth.

He watches you go until your steps hit the landing, until the building swallows you, until the night is just steel and oil and the faint echo of your breath remembering what to do without his hand.

He locks the door.

He stands there with his forehead against the wood and laughs once, mean at himself.

“Pathetic,” he tells the empty apartment, amused. “You’re fucked.”

He pours water, because he’s not an idiot.

He texts Masha.

7:30. keep her busy.

She sends back a single dot, which is as close as she gets to I saw, I’ll maneuver around it, don’t be sloppy.

He respects her for that more than he respects half the men he’s broken.

He looks at his hands. Still steady. Good. He’ll need them.

He’s filthy and his hands are clean.

He’s mean, and he’s right.

He wants you, and that isn’t going to change.

He’s entitled to the way the world moves when he speaks, you’re entitled to the breath he lets you keep.

Tomorrow he’ll make you say policy like it never had teeth and guest 1 like it isn’t strange that your life uses that phrase. Tomorrow he’ll stand behind your chair too long and you’ll hate him for it and hold still anyway. Tomorrow he’ll decide whether you get reward or famine based on whether you keep your eyes on the screen when he walks past.

Tonight he let himself take your mouth.

He’s not apologizing nor explaining.

He’s going after what he wants and he already has his hands on it.

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

Pressure doesn’t announce itself, you recognize it in the way he starts treating the yard like a puzzle with moving corners.

Morning light lays the same pale sheet over gravel, forklifts drone their usual two notes, drivers loiter with coffee and lies — nothing dramatic changes — yet he pulls through the gate and drags the rearview a finger left to trap the mezzanine window, then holds the angle as if reflections confess faster than people.

You stand in the booth and feel the day tilt even though nothing in the glass shows it. Your breath sits high until he passes, and then it drops because that’s what it does when he’s near.

The city’s first nudge arrives polished.

Two men in shirts that still remember starch, badges clipped to lanyards, clipboards with real seals, they’re here for the scale, they say, surprise inspection, nothing adversarial.

You keep your voice even, the ledger voice, the one Masha uses when numbers have to sound like facts.

You answer what’s asked, not one syllable more.

Sukuna doesn’t lean on anything, he stands in the scale-house doorway with his hands visible and his boredom loud enough to carry.

The inspectors check serials, readouts, coax the panel to pretend it will misbehave, and all the while one of them keeps letting his gaze snag on the east gutter camera, the cheap unit that blinks every thirteen seconds like a heartbeat that can’t keep time.

You pass.

Of course you pass.

The clipboard smile leaves a ring on the air, and the moment is over, the echo stays.

After lunch a neighborhood blog posts a grainy frame from the raid — blue scarf like a ribbon of warning, mirrored lenses catching emergency red, captioned in bright civic optimism, Is Uptown regulating the Badlands?

Nina prints it and pins it to the corkboard between a tire invoice and a,

“Found Cat” flyer no one’s called about.

Sukuna flicks the page once with two fingers, as if weighing what the lie costs, and keeps walking.

You stare at your palms until they stop threatening to shine.

Then the probe wears a friendly face.

Two drivers vanish for a day, return dented in quiet ways.

One has learned to love one-word answers, the other leans near the booth glass, cap in both hands, and tells you a man with a badge and a grin stopped him on Ring Road to confirm axle group numbers — harmless — route timing — still harmless — and then, in a voice that pretended to be nothing, asked,

“how long the new booth girl’s been around.”

You don’t lift your eyes, you press your fingers flat to the counter to make your hands obey.

Sukuna’s shadow crosses your view, he doesn’t stop, he doesn’t have to, the driver forgets the rest of his story on the spot.

At your parents’ building a white van begins to idle like it’s practicing patience. 

Your father decides people get lost more now that maps live in phones.

Your mother invents a utility problem to forgive the engine.

You watch the second hand crawl around the wall clock, the van still there, until Sukuna’s car slides into the block like an answer no one earned.

The van leaves.

Conversation resumes around you as if a scene change just happened and you missed your cue.

You sleep in thirteen-second slices and wake with the taste of static.

The Clinic swaps front desks.

Risa, newer hair and softer voice, a smile that lands first and thinks later.

“You’re the organized one, right?”

Clipboard already sliding toward your side of the counter.

“Why don’t you handle evening signatures for us — Ryomen’s so busy.”

She watches your mouth when you speak, the faint chain-print beneath your shirt when you breathe.

You tug the fabric up, tell her you don’t sign anything that would make his day heavier, and watch warmth rearrange itself behind her eyes into something less useful.

A man with clean soles and a haircut from across the river asks Lasha about freezer permits.

Lasha tells him a story about ice that begins in 1989 and ends on the sidewalk, and texts Masha white shirt asked about cold.

Masha replies with a single dot.

You put your hands in your pockets to hide that they want to shake for no good reason.

A second surprise visit shows up with hazmat tone. Acronyms stack like boxes, liabilities are mentioned, “a quick demo of your suppression line” is requested. 

Masha informs the inspector that Thursday is the day the line prefers not to perform, he hands over an embossed card that feels smug even through your curiosity, you drop it in the drawer with the blunt scissors and close it harder than you need to.

He doesn’t hold a meeting, he doesn’t tell a story, he simply starts changing the geometry around your body.

A blister pack lands on the booth sill.

Ghost SIM.

“Number turns,” he says. “Phrases only.”

Four words are permitted.

Lower. Clean. Blue. Guest.

You type them in the bathroom with the fan on, practicing shape and speed, hating yourself for sounding like a radio, loving that your chest doesn’t try to climb your throat while you do.

He texts drink water without punctuation when you get twitchy, you drink, and the twitch burns out into something that lets you count plates again.

Radios turn over.

The new ones are small and unapologetic, hoppers that ignore simple ears.

Nina christens them grasshoppers and writes the names on masking tape — STOP, BLUE, GUEST.

She hums a jingle to make you remember the order, gets the steps wrong, laughs, and makes you laugh despite yourself.

Masha threatens to staple you both to the wall if you sing on a day with a clipboard in the yard. Sukuna pretends annoyance and walks away satisfied.

Decoy ledgers multiply.

One sloppy enough to be bait for a man too pleased with himself to notice, one clean enough to pass a bored magistrate and wrong in exactly the places you can survive.

You learn where each lives and where your hands are not allowed.

The real record remains a rumor with breath, you accept you’re safer not knowing, and that acceptance sits in your chest like a stone that does a job.

Your parents move upstairs over the scale house, up a private stair that smells like dust and relief.

The story is plumbing, the truth is obvious to anyone allowed to say it out loud, no one in your family is.

Sukuna moves your brother off the board that night by stacking a late physio check and a short overnight shift at a machine shop by the canal.

Your mother falls in love with the view and the secret, tapes a misspelled phrase inside the doorframe that tells her when not to open.

Your father admires the second exit, turns the bone-white fob over in his palm, says something approving about proper keys. 

You kiss them both and try not to imagine the van returning to an empty street and deciding it likes the silence.

Ambulances begin to pass wrong.

Same logo twice in an hour.

Same driver, no siren.

You wouldn’t notice if you weren’t listening for bad patterns — now you are.

Your boots find their place by the bed without your eyes.

When he tells you to lock the booth and come, you don’t ask where.

Uptown wears glass like manners, the bathhouse breathes steam into a private stair.

At the landing he puts his mouth to the side of your throat — no warning — and resets your pulse to his setting. You step into a room built of tile and water and money, a place where everything sounds steady, curated, clean.

Yorozu meets you barefoot, silk tied in ways that say weapon, not luxury.

She does not look at you — she looks through you, then past you, and greets him with a smile that assumes she already owns the result.

He stays on his feet.

She pours tea into cups that let the color show through.

You don’t touch them.

She recites what she knows in a voice that lands without needing to be loud.

The inspection rehearsal with proper stickers and cloned codes, the gutter camera’s lazy blink, the clinic desk that changed faces and kept the script, the van practicing patience on your parents’ street.

She doesn’t say Gojo because the steam already did.

Then she lists what she can do, and the items arrive like tools set on a table.

Mesh nodes the size of a matchbox, hopping signals past jammers, invisible to the simple scanners Gojo’s men favor on a budget.

Two ambulances that won’t embarrass you when a real EMT shows up, staffed by people who can put a shoulder back where it belongs and hold a man still without breaking his story.

A magistrate with a reliable signature.

A clerk whose drawer swallows citations without a trace.

Three apartments upstairs, each with two exits and a stair that doesn’t advertise itself.

Paper that tells city servers your parents’ address is a construction site until further notice.

He extends a hand and she gives him a ledger, creamy pages, clean columns. He flips to the last leaf without asking for a pen.

She watches his mouth the way people watch clocks when they don’t want to be caught checking.

Her price reads spare and unashamed.

Ninety days of exclusivity on your Willow slice of the Ring Road.

One favor called later — non-lethal, within twenty-four hours, not you, not your parents.

Three nights — she doesn’t blush, she doesn’t smirk.

She says it like ink, unashamed, unhurried, unseen.

Not affection, not romance, study and trophy, a habit, a hobby whose currency is men.

“Two,” he says, because the ritual demands resistance.

“Three,” she answers, because the outcome was written before tea.

He doesn’t nod.

He doesn’t move.

Agreement writes itself in the part of the air where power lives.

“One conversation with the girl — once only, daylight, windows, tea. I look, I don’t touch. I’m not greedy.”

Your spine tries to lift, his fingers find the base of your skull and set you back down.

It isn’t comfort, it’s a level.

You stay where he put you because moving would be worse.

Her eyes finally climb to your face, skim you, categorize you, file you. It isn’t cruel, and it feels worse than that because it’s efficient.

She slides a velvet box across the low table.

Inside, fireflies, neat in foam, little black squares with their tiny screws.

Beside them, a key on a bone-white fob — one of the safe flats above this room.

You imagine your mother pulling a curtain to look at a city that won’t stare back, your father pretending the stair out the rear is a piece of design rather than an exit rehearsed under stress.

Gratitude pricks at humiliation until both become the same sensation, a heat that doesn’t help.

“You don’t buy mercy,” Yorozu says, topping off tea she knows you won’t drink. “You rent it. I have the lease.”

“Bring your fireflies,” he says. “And your clean ambulances.”

“Exactly three nights, Ryomen,” she says, smiling. “No fourth, no rollover. They’ll happen when I’m bored, not when you’re strong.”

His eyelid gives the smallest tell, the one you’ve learned to see while pretending you aren’t looking.

The steam hisses. Water moves behind glass. The room waits.

He still doesn’t sit.

Doesn’t touch the cup.

He closes the velvet case and pockets the fob.

He doesn’t tell you this is for you.

He doesn’t insult you by pretending it’s anything else.

His hand returns to your neck for a single beat, not a question, not a promise, just weight, and you accept it because you still want the floor to stop feeling like a suggestion.

The offer holds in the quiet between them like a bridge no one crosses until someone pays.

You stand in clean air and good light, breathing exactly where he set you, counting seconds you can’t spend, listening to water find stone over and over like a lesson the city keeps trying to learn.

-

The mesh goes up in quiet pieces, slipped into the yard the way dusk slips into windows. Palm-sized squares that look like nothing — little black scars tucked under lip of fence, behind the downspout, under the mezzanine rail where you’ve never stuck your hand because splinters live there.

Masha maps them in pencil like constellations, Nina names them fireflies and hums as she works, Sukuna tests latency with a stopwatch and the kind of stillness he wears when he wants the room to obey.

You clip your receiver to your belt and feel ridiculous until you don’t.

Your phone gets heavier with its new rules — four words live in it like tools you’re not allowed to misuse.

Lower for breath. Blue for them. Guest for you. Stop for now.

Clean if nothing is on fire and you need to tell him that your hands are fine.

You practice alone, whispering to the bathroom fan, feeling more like a radio than a person, and then the whispering becomes less shameful and more like drilling your muscles to do the correct thing without diving into panic’s empty pool.

Your parents move again — out of their own story and into a borrowed one above the bathhouse. Yorozu calls it a vertical, your father calls it a proper walk-up, your mother calls it a miracle and then bakes until the kitchen decides this is home.

Two exits, deadbolt policy, a coded phrase taped inside the door where her tired eyes will find it without asking, concrete curing.

If anyone says curing concrete, she doesn’t open.

She makes a joke about alliterative lies and rehearses it twice until the fear goes out of the words.

You sit on the couch with them and listen to the stairwell breathe and pretend not to think about how rented safety counts as safety anyway.

The yard learns new choreography.

Radios hop frequencies like stones across water, your mouth learns to speak inside those small boxes.

“Blue guest,” you say once, sounding it out to yourself.

Nina salutes you with her antenna and threatens to put glitter on the receivers. 

Masha says she’ll staple glitter to Nina’s mouth if glitter appears anywhere near ledgers.

Sukuna pretends annoyance and places two fingertips at the base of your skull just long enough to make your breath drop like a metronome finding tempo.

You want him to tell you the plan like a kindness, and obviously he doesn’t.

Plans are a resource, he hoards them.

He gives you edges, what you say, how you say it, where to put your body when a door opens wrong.

Everything else is inference.

It’s late when it happens — closing-hour late, the kind of tired where you stack receipts too neatly because mess will snap you in half.

The yard has that empty sound it gets after the last truck leaves, like the night is a bowl and you’re speaking into it.

Masha locks the office and kills the overheads to legal strips, the fence lights blink alive one after the other, tiny obedience.

Nina lingers to smoke and count her knuckles, she never goes straight home on a day that smells like test.

You catch it first as a sheen on the glass, a boxy nose in the reflection, too clean, the logo you’ve seen twice in an hour on a night that’s supposed to be nothing. 

The ambulance rolls past with its siren asleep and its driver too careful.

Your skin prickles in the ridiculous way it does right before it’s proven right.

“Blue guest,” you say, forgetting to be polite to your own mouth.

The hopper pings a confirmation that doesn’t feel like a sound, it feels like a thought that landed.

Copy, Masha replies, voice a low wire.

On it, Nina says, already moving.

Your belt buzzes again before the second heartbeat finishes, Lower, from him, clean, unpunctuated.

The instruction slides into your body like a key.

You obey.

The world stops trying to run itself.

The street outside is between lights.

The ambulance slows where your block bends around the chain-link like it’s curious.

You lock the booth, throw the ledger in the bottom drawer like gravity, and step outside into air that tastes like wet metal.

A second engine arrives in your periphery — another ambulance, logo nearly the same if you didn’t know the exact blue.

This one turns down the side street two blocks off and idles the way Nina idles when she’s pretending patience.

Clean company. Yorozu’s people.

You feel gratitude like embarrassment, it is too much and you need it and both are true.

The first one shadows you, it’s almost flattering.

You cut left at the corner to keep from ever falling in love with straight lines, the ambulance mirrors the angle.

Your belt pops again.

Blue guest, Masha sends, not to you this time — to everyone.

You turn the next corner and the mirror turns its mouth to meet you.

The door slides open with polite force — two men in clean polo shirts and brand-new boots, one holding a jump bag like innocence, the other carrying nothing but posture.

“Ma’am? Late shift — we got a call about a fainting— can we—”

“Nope,” you say. You try for bored highway authority and overshoot into brittle theater. It doesn’t matter. Their expressions are already not real.

“Just a quick eval,” the bag-holder says, genuinely gentle.

It’s professional and disgusting in equal measure.

“Lower,” your belt whispers, not him — Masha, clipped calm.

Your mouth obeys.

Your feet obey.

Your stomach doesn’t have a vote.

They step to close your options — the polite thing men do when they intend to teach your body that the room belongs to them.

You keep moving because stopping is a religion you don’t practice.

The bag brushes your arm on purpose. There’s the smallest tug on your sleeve — an invitation disguised as physics.

Your hands itch to be helpful.

That’s how they always get girls like you.

A horn laughs once from the side street.

The second ambulance — the clean one — pops out and kisses the curb behind theirs.

Doors burst.

Two EMTs in flouro step down with the focused irritation of people who actually have patches on purpose, and the world’s choreography stumbles.

One of them smacks the back door window with a flat palm, hard enough to make the glass talk.

“You can’t stage there,” she says to the driver. “You’re blocking a fire line.”

Her partner lifts the jump bag like it has weight and starts barking questions at the bag-holder right in front of you.

What’s your unit? Who dispatched you? Where’s your rig’s AED log?

It’s stupid and brilliant.

Even criminals want to pretend to be polite to a uniform that knows the difference between performative safety and skin.

A hand touches your elbow from behind — gentle again, the worst kind — and your body makes a noise you don’t broadcast.

You pivot like he taught you — elbow tight, shoulder down — break the angle, slide away from reach.

The man follows because following is what he knows how to do.

The clean EMT steps between you and him, raises her voice another notch, and in the chaos you feel fingers catch the back of your belt.

“Blue guest,” you say with your mouth open and your fear under control.

Copy, your belt says.

The door comes at your shoulder like it wants to help.

You feel vinyl, cold, antiseptic that isn’t real antiseptic, the weight of someone else’s breath.

Ten seconds of wrong.

Nina’s hand closes on the back of your waistband and refuses physics.

She swears in a way that would make your mother put soap out if this were the living room and not the street.

She hauls you out and spins you behind her like you’re a piece of equipment she cares about more than herself.

“Borrowing this,” she tells the polite medics, and then grins with all her teeth at the driver. “You’re in my fucking lane.”

The driver swallows his script.

You breathe where you were told.

The clean EMT shoves a clipboard into the man’s chest and asks again for unit numbers.

The mesh keeps your channel alive despite the little brass jammer that just came alive in the false rig — you can hear it hiss in the bandwidth, a mean bee, the fireflies keep talking anyway.

You love the ugly little boxes like they’re saints.

Across town, your parents’ door becomes a different theater.

You don’t see it, but the call lives down your belt in single syllables.

Blue.

Masha.

Guest.

You shouldn’t have said it, it’s not your place, not your scene, but you can’t help it.

Your mother’s face is in your brain where it lives the most.

Stop, Masha answers.

Two minutes.

Two minutes is forever.

Two minutes is fine.

You stand behind Nina and count tile cracks in the curb to stop from running to a stairwell you couldn’t reach if you burned your feet off trying.

The polite medics fail to locate their unit log.

The clean EMT begins the part of the performance where she turns to their driver and says she’ll be calling dispatch to verify.

The driver’s mouth says don’t. His eyes say we’re not dying for this.

Your heart bangs against your collarbone and then obeys itself again like a clock that just got tapped right.

In your parents’ hall, the first knock is gentle.

Your mother is a quiet pair of feet on old wood.

The peephole shows two men in paramedic polos, neat.

They smell like new laundry and mint gum even through the hole.

“Ma’am?” one asks, voice pitched to emergency and prayer.

“We’re here for an elderly check. We got a call—”

“What phrase,” your mother says, because Sukuna wrote the test for her and she likes tests.

She is, suddenly, the kind of woman who will happily fail a liar out of a class.

“Curing concrete,” the man says, and can’t help his smile because the lie is so confident. Their clipboards have real stickers. Their lanyards have real lamination.

The words are wrong.

The door stays shut. The second man raises a hand to knock again, and finds instead a palm against his wrist, owning the hinge of his body.

You don’t see that. You hear the answer in your belt when Masha exhales.

Lower.

Sukuna hasn’t had time to run the stairs. He doesn’t need it. He makes time. 

Your belt hums once when the jammer tries to take a bite and the fireflies hop sideways.

Nina mutters good bugs and scratches her nose with her middle finger in the direction of the fake unit.

Later, you’ll learn how it looked when he arrived in the stairwell with a clipboard smile and a knife.

How he stood in the hall exactly where the camera couldn’t bother to see, thanked the men for coming, and asked them — quietly — who called and why both their knuckles looked like gym memberships, not work.

How one reached for polite posture and found pain where his elbow used to be.

How the other went to speak and discovered that words are hobbies, not rights, when the man across from you has decided your mouth will only hold blood.

How your father closed the bathroom door and turned on the tap because the sound of water covers a multitude of indecencies.

Here, on your street, the mirror play reaches its best moment.

The clean ambulance pulls forward and blocks the fake one with all the pettiness of someone who could quote the city ordinance if pressed.

The EMT stows her clipboard and flips her posture from administrative to physical.

She takes your arm — professionally, like an old friend — and snaps a wristband on you that says observed.

The fake crew does the math and decides not worth it.

The driver clears his throat as if anyone cares what it sounds like, pulls their door closed, and edges out of the angle. You see the little black dish under their seat that tried to drown your channel.

You look at your belt and wish you could kiss the plastic.

“Blue clear,” Masha says, careful and not relieved. Relief is not a resource you spend in public.

“Guest clear,” Nina echoes, tone bright with adrenaline and satisfaction.

“Lower,” your belt says, private, from him.

You already are.

You are so low your ribs are doors you forgot you could open.

The fake rig goes.

The real one stays long enough to fill out no paperwork at all.

The driver of the good unit winks at your reflection in the window of the shuttered grocery and says,

“Watch the curb, sweetheart,” like a prayer.

Nina tells her she’ll buy a coffee she won’t drink.

The EMT says next time and slams the doors shut with the kind of finality man-made things earn only when those things have saved someone in a way the city can’t know how to count.

You want to call your parents. You don’t.

You don’t learn how it went until he’s in front of you, which is two minutes after your belt says lower and exactly long enough for your knees to discover that shaking isn’t always a negative.

He arrives without hurry, he never hurries, people who hurry admit they almost lost.

He checks you with his eyes first and then with one hand — palm to the back of your neck, thumb along your jaw, the small tilt he uses to make your breath pass inspection. You pass. You hate that you need to.

“I didn’t get in,” you say, hating how proud that sounds when all you did was be lighter than Nina and a little less polite.

“You almost did,” he says. It isn’t scolding. It’s math. “You’ll practice again.”

You nod.

You’d like to be small.

The part of you that proved it could elbow and not apologize hates the part that wants his name to be a wall.

He tips your face once more, then lets go.

“Water,” he says, because he’s cruel and kind in the same sentence when he wants to be, and you drink from a bottle that appears like everything you have ever needed to be told to do. The plastic crackles under your hand, your mouth tastes like pennies and newness.

Sirens do the distant thing they do when the city wants to feel like it runs itself. Yorozu’s clean ambulance is already a rumor.

The mesh hums, the yard sits one block away, pretending night is a blanket and not a story, Nina fidgets herself back into her own bones, grinning at you and then shaking once like a dog in rain.

“Ten seconds,” she says. “World record.”

“Shut up,” you say, because you want to cry and you don’t know if it’s from terror or being alive.

She obliges you by lighting a cigarette and not looking at your face for the exact right amount of time.

Later that night — after he walks you back through the gate like you’re a shipment that needs a chain of custody and checks the latch twice because rage makes him meticulous, after Masha folds up the last of the day with neat corners and you stand in the office pretending not to memorize her hands — you find out what price looks like.

It isn’t drama.

It’s your belt buzzing on the desk.

A text from a number that isn’t in your phone, couldn’t be, because you don’t get given those, tonight.

No punctuation.

You don’t need any, you hear the smile in it.

Yorozu doesn’t need to say her name for the room to smell like bergamot and power.

You haven’t been asked.

You won’t be, and you understand that this is both the cost of still having skin and the kind of thing your body will file under facts I don’t know what to do with.

Sukuna reads it. His jaw changes shape by a degree no one else would clock.

He pockets the receiver you put down and says,

“Home,” like the city invented the word to make you behave.

You think about asking him to stay because you are terrified in a new way.

You think about telling him not to go because you are foolish in an old way.

You do neither.

You hand him your fear like a cup and he doesn’t drink it because it’s not his job.

He walks you to the vertical, checks the stair, checks the door, corrects your mother’s delight into obedience with a smile that isn’t, and tells your father not to open the bathroom window because someone can climb a pipe if they care enough to earn a broken hand.

He angles your face in the hall and presses his mouth under your ear in the place it knows too well and says,

“Lower,” too soft for your parents to hear.

You obey — you melt — and hate yourself and love not dying more.

When you sleep, it is for short stretches and then not at all, because your skull knows where he took his body in exchange for a network that saved you.

You are jealous in a way that has nothing to do with romance and everything to do with the fact that your life is an invoice paid in flesh.

You are humiliated that you can’t be bigger than the envy.

You are grateful that he bought a night you didn’t understand the price of until she put it on paper.

You ache.

You live with it.

It turns into a knot under your sternum that you rub with your palm the way other people rub a bruise to make sure it still belongs to them.

In the morning he is back, and he’s the same, which is worse than any other option because it makes you want to imagine tenderness where there is none.

He stands in the doorway with the daylight behind him, scar quiet, eyes brighter than they should be, and tells you to get your boots, there’s work.

You go.

The yard is waiting with the dumb faith of machinery. Masha lifts an eyebrow and doesn’t ask. Nina tells you she dreamed of sirens that weren’t hers and that she woke herself laughing.

The clean-up after looks less like triumph than muscle memory.

Mesh nodes get checked and tucked deeper.

The east gutter gets a second eye that blinks on a different heartbeat.

The ghost SIM rotates its number like a snake shedding skin, you update exactly one contact and practice your four words until they feel like chewing.

Your parents learn the morning route through their new hall and how to pour coffee without touching the glass.

Your mother replaces the tape inside the door with the wrong phrase again and smiles like she outsmarted a trick.

Your father says the new stair handrail is good work even if no one sees it.

Lasha tells a story to two men who ask about ice that makes them regret having tongues.

The Clinic’s “Risa” stops watching your chain and starts watching the floor after she meets Yorozu’s eyes for three seconds in a hallway and recognizes a food chain.

The blog that thought it spoke the city’s language produces a new post about fire safety outreach in underserved neighborhoods, and the photo has a clean ambulance in it with faces blurred and the caption mentions neither your street nor anyone’s money.

You hear how it turned out at your parents’ door when Sukuna lets you.

He doesn’t narrate, he gives you nouns. Wrist. Knuckle. Hall. Tap. Silence.

He says it like a grocery list because gore isn’t a thing he enjoys sharing unless it teaches a rule. The lesson is simple enough to fit under your bruised sternum, if someone knocks with the wrong word, he removes the part of them that assumed your mother would open.

You say,

“Thank you,” and hate that gratitude and terror sound the same coming out of your mouth.

He puts his thumb over your tongue for a second, a correction you’ve earned for a different misbehavior, and then taps your jaw.

“Lower,” he says, not as kindness, as calibration.

You do. You always do.

By afternoon, the yard hums exactly as if nothing happened.

Drivers lie about other kinds of danger, pallets go where they’re told, the city pretends to have learned a lesson.

You bring your water bottle like a superstition. You watch the reflection of the fence instead of the fence because that’s where real things happen. You pretend you don’t feel the place under your ear smolder where his mouth branded you into remaining. You pretend you don’t imagine her hands on the same map, just because imagination is a habit that doesn’t help you.

You work anyway.

When the day ends, you sit on the bottom step of the vertical and tie your boot a second time it doesn’t need and tell yourself you’re a person, not a project.

The mesh hums, small and faithful. The ghost SIM pings one new rotator number. You practice saying clean and do not send it.

Sukuna passes in the hall and pauses long enough to put his palm at the back of your neck — downward pressure, a touch he’d call a policy and you call a fact — and says, “Good,” like the word was waiting for permission to mean something.

The outcome is simple and blasphemous because it denies drama its due, you’re still here.

Your parents are still upstairs, making coffee that smells like morning because morning is allowed.

The yard runs, Yorozu gets her three nights on a calendar you cannot see, and the city learns that if it wants to pull you out of a van it will need a better trick and a longer timeline.

Gojo will try again.

Of course he will.

Men like him don’t lose interest, they recalibrate their appetites.

You breathe where you were told.

You inventory what you can touch.

Mesh.

Door.

Words.

His hand.

The second exit.

The way Nina’s laugh makes the fence feel less like a limit and more like a promise.

The way Masha’s pencil keeps time.

The weight of the bone-white fob on your father’s key hook.

The echo of water over tile in a room you didn’t sit down in.

The fact that nothing in your chest has exploded.

Temporary is still true.

But temporary is the only thing that ever stays.

Chapter Text

You notice the change first in how your mind edits the room when he is in it.

Weeks stretch after the raid and the ambulance mirror and the quiet move to the vertical.

The yard returns to its habits — pallets skittering into place, chains clanking a rhythm the city pretends not to understand — and you try to return to yours, headset angled just right, ledger neat, mouth closed unless it needs to work.

But there’s a new tide under everything, and it comes from the fact that Yorozu can look at a calendar and move him with one message.

That knowledge lives in your chest like a small animal you can’t kill and can’t keep.

On a Wednesday that behaves like a good day, he decides the crew earned a diner booth. He takes the window seat he favors because it lets him keep the lot in his eye without looking like a man staring at a door.

You sit beside him because he patted the vinyl once and here means here, because Masha has a ledger and a half-smile and Nina has jokes, because you can pretend for a moment that food is not logistics.

His thigh presses your knee into the cushion, not a trap, exactly — more a bracket, reminding your body which way the room should point.

“You’re not eating,” he says, catching your fork hand after your second fake bite. “What is it this time — hunger strike to protest my leadership, or did the cook insult you in a dream again?”

“Rye tastes like apology,” you say, and immediately wish you hadn’t, because petty is safer when it’s private.

He doesn’t take offense, he takes the glass.

“The trick is to stop expecting it to be gentle,” he says, sliding it back. “Like me. You swallow, and we keep moving.”

Something almost like humor moves through the table.

Nina groans at the phrasing, Masha writes a number that looks suspiciously like a laugh on the edge of a placemat.

You sip because obedience is disguised as drinking, and the heat sits in your chest like a light someone forgot to turn off.

His phone vibrates once against the wood.

He looks. You’ve learned the millimeter his jaw travels when he reads her, you feel the absence in your knee before he stands.

You want to put your hand on his sleeve, you want to ask him to stay once again, you want to be someone who doesn’t want either thing.

He doesn’t give you a command this time, he gives you a paragraph that doesn’t help.

“Don’t play statue because I stand up,” he says, almost conversational. “You and Masha will finish eating like adults. Nina will walk you to the door of the vertical, and you will not spend the entire hallway trying to figure out if I’m coming back before the check clears. This is maintenance. Boring. Necessary. I pay the rent on our safety, occasionally it asks for me in person.”

Nina whistles, low.

“Translation, Daddy’s got a meeting.”

“Translation,” he says without looking at her, “I’m not asking for permission to leave.”

You hear yourself say,

“Are you coming back tonight?” and hate your voice for reaching across a line he never promised you he’d walk.

He tips your chin with two knuckles — a gesture that could be tenderness if he were someone else — and leans in so the others don’t get the performance for free.

“You want a bedtime story now?” he murmurs. “Do you want me to text tucked in with a heart when I turn off her light? I told you from the start what you are to me. Useful. Mine. That doesn’t require pretending this is romance.”

Heat rushes up your neck so fast you feel lightheaded.

You are not shocked, you are humiliated by your own hope.

“I know what you said,” you manage.

It comes out steady, which feels like theft.

“I’m not asking for flowers.”

“No,” he says, a small smile that isn’t kind. “You’re asking for exclusivity. Which I also didn’t sell you.” He presses his mouth to your pulse — a seal, not a kiss — then straightens. “Eat. Laugh. Breathe. I’ll collect you later or tomorrow. Either way, the earth rotates.”

When he goes, the rest of the booth pretends they don’t hear the door move.

Masha stacks the bill under her glass, lays her pencil across it like a barb.

Nina waits, properly, until your shoulders drop half an inch, then bumps you with hers.

“Want to spit in his whiskey while he’s gone?” she says. “We can call it staff development.”

“I want to stop wanting anything,” you say, too honest. “It keeps being inconvenient.”

Masha doesn’t glance up, but the corner of her mouth curves.

“Inconvenient is better than dead,” she says. “Just don’t confuse the two because it makes my job harder.”

You talk, badly, every few minutes, about things that don’t matter. The wall clock eats a circle. Your brain chews its own tail. The pettiness starts as a flicker — he gets to touch anyone he wants, I get told to keep my breath low — and swells until you have to hang onto the table so it doesn’t carry you out of the booth.

You inventory small freedoms to keep from screaming, salt your own fries, say no to the last bite, wipe your mouth with the edge of a napkin and not your hand.

You tell yourself you are allowed to want what ordinary people want.

You are allowed to be loved.

You are allowed to flirt with someone who will ask may I instead of obey.

You are allowed to leave.

The thought of leaving tries to stand up in the middle of the diner.

You make it sit by pressing your knees together until your knuckles protest.

Nina doesn’t make you talk on the walk back, she tells you a story about a driver who nearly married a forklift before realizing he was bad at commitment.

You snort laughing on the second step, and that helps, because laughter is proof you still have a throat for something besides orders.

At the door, she squeezes the back of your neck — not possessive like him, not instructive, just friendly because that’s Nina — and says,

“You’re not crazy. You’re just in it.”

“Sometimes I think he wants me to be both.”

“He wants you useful,” she says. “The rest is gravy.”

You lie on the couch and resent everything that breathes within fifty feet of you, including yourself.

You resent your chest for missing the weight of his arm, your skin for remembering where his mouth went last, your mouth for shaping itself to the pressure of his thumb.

You resent Yorozu for being the kind of woman who doesn’t have to explain her wanting.

You resent the version of yourself that thought leaving your ex would cure you of craving love like a drug.

It doesn’t.

It only taught you how to hide the need more neatly.

A message lands at 01:10.

Lower.

Not a check-in. Calibration.

You obey because you like waking up more than you like winning.

After that, the weeks develop their own unkind rhythm.

He doesn’t pretend to be discreet when she calls, and he doesn’t apologize when he returns.

Every time, he is a shade colder in a way that sharpens him. Precision replaces warmth, and you hate how often precision has kept you alive. He talks more in those stretches, though, as if words are the thing he spends to keep himself from spending the other, weaker currency.

On a Monday, he finds you in the scale house counting forms twice and says,

“It amuses me how you think of ownership like it’s a moral category. I own the forklift because I service it, it answers me because if it doesn’t it dies. You are not a machine, but you’re in my system. That’s why you live.”

“That sentence should make me throw something.” you say.

“It should make you drink water,” he counters, tapping the bottle with one finger. “Then, if you still want to throw something, throw it at me, and we’ll find out if you like consequences more than you like living.”

“Every time you talk I remember why affection is expensive.” you say.

“Affection is cheap,” he says, dismissive. “Maintenance is expensive. Lucky for you, I’m a miser.”

You swallow the water so you don’t say unlucky for me, I want affection anyway.

You loathe your mouth for wanting to round that sentence into I want it from you.

You keep your tongue behind your teeth.

It isn’t courage, it’s survival.

He steps in close enough that you feel the heat of him along your shoulder.

“You know the difference between what you want and what you can have,” he says, quieter. “It’s why I can keep you.”

“And you never promised me love,” you answer, a little shrug comes to disobey your shoulders, feeling the words like pebble grit on your gums. “You have been clear.”

He studies your face like a mirror he doesn’t trust.

“Clarity is not cruelty. But it feels like it when you’ve been lied to for long enough.”

You take the blow because it’s earned.

“Don’t talk about him.”

“Then don’t bring me ghosts and ask me to house them,” he says, and leaves you with your pulse in your mouth.

You try to disobey him in small, deniable ways.

You try ear-rings because you haven’t worn any for months.

The very simple fact of a silver hoop makes you stand differently, and you hate that you like the stranger you see in the window.

He notices in three seconds flat.

“New?” he says, and it would be harmless if it came from anyone else.

“Borrowed,” you lie, because if you’re going to be petty you might as well be shameless.

“Take them off,” he says, not biting, only opening his palm by your cheek as if you have the self-respect to hand them over.

“I can wear jewelry without it being a rebellion.”

“I can take it without it being a punishment,” he says mildly. “Hand them to me before I forget which it is.”

You want to talk about fairness;, you want to talk about double standards, you want to say what you are allowed.

Instead, you drop the hoops into his hand and put your fingers on the counter so you don’t slap him.

He looks at the silver and then at you.

“You can wear whatever you want when I’m not on your schedule,” he says. “But I need to read you at a glance. If I have to adjust for sparkle, I will misread something else, and then maybe you’re dead. You want me to prove my point by letting you bleed?”

You stare at him because it’s the only weapon you can use that doesn’t escalate. 

“You could have started with that sentence,” you say.

“I shouldn’t have to,” he answers. “But I see you needed me to dress the rule up in care.” He pockets the hoops. “You’re not wrong to want it. You’re just not going to get it from me.”

The honesty is worse than cruelty, it outlines a future you don’t get to edit.

You nod because nodding is the only way to keep the heat in your neck from spilling out your eyes.

He softens his mouth by a degree he’d delete if he knew he was doing it.

“Don’t look at me like I killed something,” he says. “Want love. I’ll even keep you alive long enough to find it somewhere I don’t have to kill the man who gives it to you.”

“You could practice not acting like you’d enjoy that,” you say.

“I wouldn’t enjoy it,” he says, tone dry. “I’d do it because I’m territorial and efficient. A rare combination. Don’t pout at me because the world built me for a job and I’m good at it.”

Nina wanders past and claps you on the shoulder like she’s solving everything with a pat.

“You two done inventing romance?” she says cheerfully. “Masha says if anyone stands in her office doorway to sigh a single sigh she’s going to staple that sigh to the wall.”

“Tell Masha,” he says without looking at Nina, “I’ll bring her better staples.”

“I will,” Nina chirps, delighted, and leaves you to the cold geometry he thinks is mercy.

Yorozu calls again on a night that had no business being special.

He is standing behind you in the booth, reviewing a route he already knows, speaking quietly enough that his breath warms the back of your neck. Every part of your body behaves like a well-trained animal, it doesn’t ask for anything, it just exists inside his orbit.

The quiver in your stomach is old fear repurposed into a new need you won’t name.

His phone hums.

He stills, then finishes the sentence he was on with irritating calm.

“—and if Lasha’s courier is late by more than four minutes, you tell him we’re teaching him to tell time.”

He watches your face for the flinch, when it doesn’t come, he nods.

“There we go. Look at you — competent. I should leave you like this more often.”

“I’m not a dog you tire out.” you say.

You want him to argue with the metaphor, you want him to tell you you’re something else entirely.

He doesn’t.

“No,” he agrees. “You’re a blade I keep sharp. It isn’t the same thing.”

“Where are you going?”

He considers you.

“You want the truth or the version that makes you drink your water nicely?”

“The version that doesn’t make me throw the bottle.”

“Then it’s a meeting I can’t move and a debt I agreed to pay because it buys you time next week,” he says. “You can be angry in advance if it helps. It won’t change anything.”

You inhale to say I hate you and exhale I know instead.

He leans in and kisses you, finally — a real kiss, not a signature, not a stamp — nothing gentle in it, nothing apologetic, just mouth and intention and the deeply unhelpful fact that your knees want to turn into a religion under it.

When he breaks it, his voice is rougher.

“There. Take that with you. It should keep your hands from inventing mischief while I’m gone.”

“I don’t invent,” you say, dizzy and furious. “I improvise.”

“Don’t.” he says, and it should be a command, it comes out almost like a request, which you will chew on for days without success.

He doesn’t add lower, he doesn’t need to.

Your breath is exactly where he left it when the door lets him out.

That night you lie awake and tally what you are allowed.

You are allowed to want.

You are allowed to love.

You are allowed to try with someone who is not him.

You say it like a mantra.

It keeps failing the second half of every sentence, you are allowed — but not here. You are allowed — but not now. You are allowed — but not under his eyes.

You imagine a man without a ledger, a man who says you first and means it, a man who makes a bed feel like a room and not a checkpoint.

You imagine, and then you turn your face into the pillow and bite the fabric until the need becomes something smaller and more private.

You attempt another tiny mutiny.

There’s a barista on the corner who smiles like the weather is good even when it isn’t.

You let him remember your order.

You let him remember your name.

You let him ask,

“Do you work at the yard?” with curiosity that isn’t prying.

You leave a tip in cash like you have pockets that aren’t spoken for.

You step outside with your cup and feel like you did something illegal and delicious.

Sukuna is waiting for you at the end of the block, one shoulder against the wall, unhurried, the expression on his face so mildly amused that it makes you more nervous than rage would.

“We’re drinking artisan coffee now?” he says. “Should I be worried about gentrification in your bloodstream?”

“It’s two blocks from the lot,” you say. “I’m allowed to have caffeine without your supervision.”

“You’re allowed to have anything that doesn’t get you dead,” he says. “I’m wondering if you’re about to develop a habit that gets you dead by a more circuitous route.”

“His name is just hello,” you say, too quickly.

“I didn’t ask his name,” he says, coming close enough that the coffeeshop window reflects you as a couple and you want to smash it for the lie. “I asked whether you want to bleed because you need to prove something to yourself in front of a man who wouldn’t recognize a war even if it gave him government benefits.”

The cup shakes.

You put it in his hand because it’s either that or wear it.

“I want to prove,” you say, trying to keep your voice level, “that I haven’t forfeited every right to be a person.”

He studies you a long second.

“You haven’t,” he says finally. “You’ve traded some of them for breathing. You can renegotiate when I run out of enemies with uniforms.”

“That sounds like never,” you say.

“It sounds like not this week,” he says.

He sips your coffee like it belongs to him now and grimaces.

“Tastes like optimism.”

“Maybe that’s why I wanted it,” you say.

It feels like pulling a splinter when you admit it.

He turns your wrist over and looks at your pulse as if he expects to see the coffee traveling.

“You’re not wrong to want more,” he says, surprisingly even. “You are wrong to pretend you can have it while I’m busy keeping your roof attached to your house.”

He gives the cup back.

“You can chase love later. I’m not forbidding it. I’m telling you the sequence that doesn’t end with your mother at a sink wondering whether water drowns grief.”

The sentence lands with the weight of a man who has practiced it on corpses.

It doesn’t warm you, it cools you down to a place where you think better.

He tips your face with his knuckles.

“Now,” he says, voice a hair softer, “if you really need the experience of being admired by a harmless boy with a good jaw, I can grit my teeth and let you collect it. But you don’t want admiration. You want devotion, and that’s a dangerous desire to bring into a neighborhood like this.”

“You’re the one who taught me to name what I want.” you mutter.

“I taught you to breathe,” he says. “The naming you did yourself.”

You should walk away. You should go back to the lot and refuse to give him the satisfaction of seeing the relief that spreads through your chest every time he proves he’s still looking.

Instead, you stand there and say, very quietly,

“It would be easier if you were cruel all the time.”

He smiles like a knife.

“I am,” he says. “This is the expensive kind.”

The next time Yorozu calls him mid-sentence, he doesn’t pretend to soften it.

He’s in the office with Masha and you, discussing an audit window that shouldn’t exist and a clerk who will develop butterfingers next Tuesday at precisely eleven-fifteen.

The phone buzzes, he doesn’t look down, he finishes telling Masha which truck will go around the block three times because the city enjoys pretending it’s smart.

Then he glances, and the millimeter appears at his jaw.

Masha flips her pencil.

“Go,” she says, not a permission, a logistics decision.

He nods and turns to you.

“Walk with me,” he says, not asking.

Outside, the air smells like two different kinds of rain.

He stops by the booth and puts both hands on the sill like he wants to leave fingerprints you can keep.

“You don’t have to like this,” he says. “You only have to not make it worse.”

“I know,” you say, exhausted by the part of yourself that keeps trying to reframe necessity as betrayal. “I’m trying to be a person about it.”

“You’re doing fine,” he says, which feels like sacrilege because he doesn’t give that word without charging interest. “If you need to hate me, put it on a shelf and take it down when the building stops looking at you funny.”

“I already hate you,” you say, and the honesty makes both of you grin, stupidly, like it’s a secret you told each other at the same time by accident.

He leans in and kisses you with intent — to mark, to quiet, to spend the part of himself that gets him into trouble.

“Keep your phone on you,” he says against your mouth. “If you are going to spiral, do it where I can read the pattern.”

“I don’t spiral.” you lie.

“You spin like a goddamn Catherine wheel,” he says, affectionate as a snarl can be. “Go be petty about my absence to Nina until it gets boring. She’ll make you laugh, which I hate, but it works.”

You say,

“I want more,” and regret it as soon as it clears your teeth.

He sighs, not dramatic, more like he is adjusting for an expected crosswind.

“Of course you do,” he says. “You should. You’re young and you weren’t built to live in a ledger. I’m not built to give it to you. That isn’t cruelty. It’s geometry.”

His hand finds your neck again, his thumb worrying the place under your ear.

“Don’t look for love in a man who can’t afford it.”

The thumb presses once — a period.

“But don’t let a man who can afford it treat you like an invoice either.”

“Does that man exist?” you ask, half mockery, half begging.

“He’s out there,” he says, to your surprise. “He’ll bore you to start. Try not to punish him for that.”

You stare at him because this is the kind of kindness you didn’t think he could operate without breaking something he needs.

“Why tell me that?”

“Because you’re going to leave eventually, and I’d rather it be for something that doesn’t make me burn down a block.”

He kisses your mouth once, quick.

“Be angry at me this week. I deserve it. Don’t be stupid, I won’t forgive that.”

He leaves, and your lungs decide to work only after he’s gone.

Time, in the weeks that follow, becomes a math problem you can’t solve.

How many nights can he spend belonging to a deal and still act like the man who puts his hand on your throat to keep your body on the right side of fear?

How many times can you tell yourself you’re allowed to be loved before the lack of it starts to warp your bones?

You know he meets with Yorozu for business transactions, negotiation, logistics, permits, mesh timing.

You know he also meets with her to pay the debt he made for your safety in flesh.

He doesn’t let you know which meets lead to which outcomes.

You don’t know if knowing which is which would be any better than not knowing.

You work because work is the only activity that tapes your brain back together.

You handle calls, you learn Masha’s way of flattening a question into a statement someone will agree to just to be done, you learn the difference between a driver with a story and a driver with an alibi.

You smoke once with Nina even though you don’t like it, just to have a new bad habit that doesn’t involve your phone.

You wash the taste out in the break sink and feel weirdly better for having chosen something ugly on purpose.

At night you lie in the vertical and rehearse a list you don’t show anyone:

• You want his mouth on your pulse because it makes your limbs remember gravity.
  
• You want a hand on your face that doesn’t ask you to change.
  
• You want to laugh during dinner without checking the door.
  
• You want to sleep with both boots off.
  
• You want to step into a room and not calculate exits before you greet the people in it.
  
• You want to be told I love you without thinking at what cost in the next breath.
  
• You want the right to be boring without it feeling like sacrilege.
  

The list makes you cry once, silently, furious with yourself, because crying feels like you forgot how to be the kind of woman who survives.

You clean your face and swear you’re done with tears like they’re a vice you can give up cold.

He returns from one of Yorozu’s nights and finds you on the stair with a cup you don’t remember making.

He sits two steps down so you have to look at the scar from above, it makes him look less dangerous and more human, which is unhelpful and exactly why he does it.

“I know you hate me,” he says matter-of-factly. “And I know it’s not because I lied.”

“I don’t hate you for telling the truth,” you say. “I hate you for being the man who can say it like that.”

He nods, accepting the hit.

“Fair.”

He leans back on his palms and watches the vertical’s dim bulb flicker.

“I don’t sleep well when she calls me. Summer school for my sins. I come back… sharpened.” He grimaces. “It looks like cruelty. It’s me trying not to dull on you.”

“You don’t dull,” you say, an admission that feels like praise you didn’t intend to give.

“I will someday,” he says, with a shrug you can’t read. “Before that, I’d like to hand you off to a life that doesn’t require me.”

The sentence lands between you like a possibility you can’t afford to want.

“Hand me off?” you repeat, a little feral.

“Don’t bite the phrasing,” he says, amused. “You know what I mean.”

“I know I hate that you get to imagine the exit,” you say. “As if I need an usher.”

He laughs, and it’s almost nice.

“You don’t need an usher,” he says. “You need a door that isn’t a trap. I can build those. It’s one of the few decent things I do.”

“You build doors,” you say, thinking of mesh and codes and bone-white fobs. “And then you stand in them.”

“To keep the wolves out,” he says, not pretending to be one thing when he’s also another. “Not to keep you in. You stay because you’re not done. When you are, I’ll know.”

“You think you know everything,” you say, because if you don’t insult him you might thank him, and that’s worse.

“I don’t know everything,” he says. “I know you. That’s enough.”

You sit there breathing like a metronome until your hands stop wanting to break something.

He doesn’t touch you.

He lets you come back into your body without pulling you by the chain he installed.

“I’m allowed to fall in love,” you say finally, very quietly, because you need to hear yourself say it out loud without flinching.

“You are,” he says. “And you’re allowed to do it with someone else. I’m not going to pretend otherwise because I like my lies expensive and rare.”

He turns his head, looks at you direct.

“If you do it while I’m still responsible for keeping your heart beating, you’ll make us both miserable.”

“I’m already miserable.” you say, and you’re proud of how calm you sound.

“You’re not,” he says. “You’re impatient.”

You want to throw the cup at him.

You drink instead.

The water tastes like a truce.

He stands and offers you a hand up like a gentleman, which infuriates you more than orders ever could.

You take it, which infuriates you more than his gallantry.

“Back to work,” he says, not unkindly. “If you’re going to burn me in effigy tonight, do it after you balance the books. I don’t like my martyrs messy.”

You laugh despite yourself.

“You’re unbearable.”

“I’m alive,” he says with a grin that makes you want to kiss him and claw at his face. “And so are you. That’s the part the city keeps track of.”

He leaves you on the step with your list and your cup and a heartbeat that refuses to slow when you tell it to.

You watch the stairwell for a long minute after he goes and then you do the most rebellious thing you can imagine, you go brush your teeth, put on soft socks, text clean, and sleep through to dawn without waking to count the seconds between the gutter camera’s blinks.

You do not dream of Yorozu’s rooms.

You do not dream of the barista.

You do not dream of your ex.

You don’t dream at all.

It isn’t love.

It isn’t freedom.

It’s not even peace.

But it’s proof you can do something gentle to your own body without asking him first.

That will have to be enough, tonight.

Tomorrow you can decide whether you want more than enough and what you’re willing to break to get it.

Chapter Text

He feels your eyes before he sees your face.

It’s not mystical, it’s basic fieldcraft.

People announce themselves with posture long before they make a sound, you hold tension high when you pretend you’re fine and low when you’re obeying, and tonight you’re half and half at the diner, knee tight against his thigh and breath where he left it, trying not to need anything from him in front of his people.

The rye arrives. He watches you hate the first sip and swallow anyway because that’s who you’ve trained into, a creature who does the necessary, then cleans it up on the inside.

His phone vibrates once, the kind of buzz that doesn’t ask.

Yorozu’s nights don’t knock.

They present invoices.

He doesn’t get to be dramatic about leaving.

Drama is for men who don’t control their rooms.

He lays cash, tells Masha to keep you fed, tells Nina to walk your spine home so he doesn’t have to peel you off a stairwell later, and leans to your pulse because that’s the switch he installed — mouth, pressure, the instruction burned into one place you listen faster than you can argue.

“Don’t turn to salt because I stand up,” he says quietly so the table doesn’t spend charity on your face. “Maintenance. Boring. I’ll collect you later or tomorrow. either way the world keeps rotating.”

You ask if he’s coming back tonight.

You do it like someone daring themselves to be brave.

He could lie and make the next hour easier.

He doesn’t.

“You want a bedtime text with a heart? I told you from the start what you are to me — useful, mine. That doesn’t require pretending this is romance.”

He sees the heat rise in your throat and hates himself a little for choosing the clean cut over the kind one. Clean keeps you alive, kind makes messes that get people shot.

He leaves to pay.

He doesn’t like the word owe in his mouth, but this is that shape. Yorozu was very clear, exclusivity at Willow for ninety days, a clerk with butterfingers, lost citation photos, two clean ambulances with actual medics, a magistrate who enjoys his signature, and the mesh that kept your belt alive when Gojo’s little dish tried to jam it.

All of that was the price of three nights and a chit.

He agreed because three nights weigh less than your mother’s funeral.

That’s the arithmetic he’s built to do.

Her bathhouse smells like money burned into steam.

She meets him barefoot, silk neat, eyes sharp enough to shave with.

He gives her nothing she doesn’t need, no jokes, no compliments.

He stands because chairs imply parity and parity is not today’s topic.

She tries conversation as if this is dinner, because the game is easier to play when you make it look like something civilized.

“You looked good in the foam,” she says, pouring tea she knows he won’t touch. “Gojo hates getting damp.”

“Everyone hates getting damp,” he says. “Even fish.”

He takes the room’s measure, exits, glass thickness, sightlines to the private stair. He lets her stand close enough to prove to herself she isn’t afraid — fear’s a tool he rents, he doesn’t have to hoard it.

The first night is exactly what it should be, transactional, controlled, devoid of anything he would be ashamed to tell himself later.

He doesn’t perform tenderness because he doesn’t owe her the lie, he spends the body, not the heat.

He keeps his eyes open because closing them would give her a picture she didn’t buy.

She’s not offended, she’s an adult, she likes rare things and control, she gets her nights and her data and her power scented like bergamot.

He gets the structural reinforcement he asked for.

The ledger balances.

On the drive back he puts the window down and lets the night remove her perfume from his skin.

He thinks about Gojo’s neat revenge and the ambulance mirror and how close your body came to being leverage on a curb.

He thinks about how you say I’m allowed to want love in your head like a pledge and then don’t speak it because you think saying the word curses the room.

He thinks about how you hate him for being accurate.

He turns the car into your street and decides to pay you in the coin you’ve learned to accept, stability, possession, and filthy honesty.

He doesn’t own the soft currency that would fix your face, he won’t counterfeit it.

He finds you at the vertical, asleep on the couch in a position that says I didn’t mean to let go.

He tilts your chin, checks your breath like a man checking a gauge, brushes his mouth under your ear, and says, “Lower.”

Your lungs obey.

His chest stops feeling like a dropped tool.

He tells himself it’s good management.

Weeks stack.

Gojo probes, the mesh sings, the yard behaves, the Clinic quits being ambitious when Yorozu looks through the glass, and you try to pretend you don’t count nights he leaves.

He sees the math in your eyes and decides which columns to carry for you and which to let you hold until your wrists learn something about strain.

He doesn’t like Yorozu.

He respects the function she performs.

She’s a pressure valve and a ledger with legs, she names her price without flinching and demands him without apology and that combination makes everyone’s load-bearing walls more honest.

He can live with honest debt.

Night two, he’s mid-sentence in the booth, correcting your route notes because you still abbreviate too cleverly, when the buzz lands.

He finishes the thought.

“if Lasha’s courier is more than four minutes late, you tell him we’re teaching him to tell time” and waits to see if you flinch at the implied cruelty.

You don’t.

He files that under progress and hates the word for a second because it sounds like he’s civilizing you.

He doesn’t want to civilize you, he wants you alive and sharp.

“Where are you going?” you ask, because you’re braver than you were two months ago, which is dangerous and good.

“You want the truth or the version that makes you drink your water nicely?” he says. When you don’t blink, he gives you the truth you can carry. “A meeting I can’t move and a debt that buys you time next week.”

He steps in and kisses you properly because he’s learned what happens to your hands when he leaves you with only instruction — your fingers invent mischief. 

The kiss is rough and steady and entirely about your nerves.

“There,” he says against your mouth. “Take that and don’t improvise.”

“I don’t improvise,” you lie.

“You spin like a fucking Catherine wheel,” he says, but he’s smiling, and he hates that he lets you see it.

He goes where he said he’d go.

Yorozu opens another room that smells like obedience in expensive materials and watches him like a zoologist.

She’s smart enough not to posture, he’s careful enough not to give her a narrative for free.

“You don’t close your eyes,” she observes, amused. “Your secrets live in there?”

“Nothing lives in there.” he says, and the flatness satisfies them both.

She says,

“You won’t rot like Gojo. He deserves to. You’ll choose not to.”

He says,

“I’ll choose to win.”

She laughs.

He gives her nothing to laugh at.

When it’s done, she slides a velvet box with spare nodes across the table, and he almost likes her for treating the future like a machine you can improve with parts.

On his way back he reroutes past that coffeeshop the city tries so hard to pretend is a neighborhood amenity.

He sees you there later that week with a cup and a smile you give to the boy with good posture.

He feels the stupid animal surge — territory snarling at sunlight — and he kills it with policy.

Anger is a waste unless it buys something.

“We’re drinking artisan coffee now?” he says when you reach the corner.

He takes your wrist, turns it over, watches your pulse the way he watches a gauge, and says the thing that keeps you safe and hates that it sounds like cruelty.

“You can have anything that doesn’t get you dead. But devotion is a dangerous desire to bring into this neighborhood. Don’t practice it on boys who won’t survive being near you.”

You glare because you want permission to be ordinary.

He doesn’t grant it.

He grants sequence.

“Chase love later,” he says. “I’ll keep you alive long enough for that if you don’t play stupid in the meantime.”

He hears himself and knows you’ll sit with those words like hot metal and touch them anyway.

He can’t fix that without lying, and he’s not going to lie to you.

He saves the lying for men who need to sleep around their mistakes.

He pockets your earrings one morning because you need to see how rules dress themselves in care only after they keep you upright.

“Take them off,” he says, opens his palm, watches you decide whether this is a fight worth the bruises it would print on the day.

You hand them over and don’t cry.

He tells you the real reason — I need to read you at a glance; adjust for sparkle and I misread something else — and watches your face hate him less for thirty seconds.

He savors the thirty.

It’s one of the few kinds of relief he can afford.

He talks more than he used to, not because he wants to, because you need calibration in words as well as hands if he’s going to keep you where living happens.

He finds the line and stays on it, simple, precise, not soft.

“You know the difference between what you want and what you can have,” he tells you in the scale house one morning when you’re counting forms like penance. “It’s why I can keep you.”

“And you never promised me love,” you say. “You’ve been clear.”

“Clarity isn’t cruelty,” he says. “But it feels like it when you’ve been lied to long enough.”

He keeps your ex out of his mouth because ghosts don’t pay their rent unless you feed them, and he will not feed yours.

There are nights he’d like to say something else.

He doesn’t.

He can’t afford the man who speaks past utility.

He keeps his care on a leash, calls it policy, and feeds you the stability you pretend not to crave, routine, orders, successful days stacked like brick.

He sees you turn petty because there’s nowhere for affection to burn, and he takes it like weather. He won’t punish you for wanting in a way he can’t service yet.

Yorozu calls mid-meeting another week and he finishes his sentence to Masha before he looks at the phone. He refuses to be the man who startles for a woman who rents mercy.

Outside, he stops by your booth and sets both hands on the sill like he’s anchoring something that would otherwise float.

“You don’t have to like this,” he tells you, and he means the price, the nights, the way the city makes you pay with flesh and patience for the right to get up tomorrow. “You only have to not make it worse.”

“I know,” you say.

You look exhausted and proud about being exhausted.

He hates that you’ve learned pride as an anesthetic.

“You’re doing fine,” he says, and it costs him to say it because fine is currency. “Be angry at me this week, I deserve it. Don’t be stupid, I won’t forgive that.”

You breathe the way he taught you.

He leaves because not leaving would invite a conversation he can’t let you have yet.

He doesn’t give Yorozu anything different from the last time or the next.

He won’t give her hate, either, hate is intimacy disguised as teeth.

He gives her a body performing a function and collects the parts and paper he bought her for, she tries once to talk about you — as a specimen, as a rumor. 

“She’s interesting,” Yorozu says, lazy, like a collector discussing another collector’s favorite. “You  breathe with her.”

He says,

“She breathes with me because I told her where to put it,” and smiles without humor until she laughs and lets the subject die.

He goes home by your street even when he doesn’t need to.

He looks at the vertical’s dark window and tells himself he’s checking for vans and men who pretend to be paramedics.

He isn’t checking the light like a fool, he’s cataloguing conditions.

He finds you on the stair one night with a cup you aren’t drinking, eyes set. He chooses to sit two steps down so you have leverage in the angle.

He learned, somewhere ugly, that power has to be placed carefully if you want a conversation instead of a fight.

“I know you hate me,” he says because you do and because he won’t let you feel crazy for it. “And I know it’s not because I lied.”

“I don’t hate you for telling the truth,” you answer. “I hate you for being the man who can say it like that.”

“Fair,” he says.

He looks at the bad bulb and thinks about knives and rust.

“I don’t sleep well when she calls me. I come back sharpened. It looks like cruelty, it’s me trying not to dull on you.”

He keeps looking at the bulb because if he looks at your mouth he’ll say something he can’t afford.

“You don’t dull,” you say.

He files away the warmth that tries to rise in his chest when you say it and kills it by naming it counterproductive.

“I will someday,” he says. “Before that, I’d like to hand you off to a life that doesn’t require me.”

You bristle at hand you off like you should.

He lets you

“Don’t bite the phrasing,” he says, amused, and it’s almost a nice moment, so he ruins it on purpose because he refuses to let you turn him into something you can fall asleep inside.

“You need doors that aren’t traps. I can build those. I’ll stand in them to keep wolves out, not to keep you in. You’ll leave when you’re done. I’ll know.”

“You think you know everything.”

“I don’t,” he says. “I know you. That’s enough.”

Silence, then the sentence you needed to say since the first night you put your boots by the door.

“I’m allowed to fall in love,” you tell him, voice low, more oath than question.

“You are,” he says. “You’re allowed to do it with someone else, too. If you try while I’m still responsible for keeping your heart beating, you’ll make us both miserable.”

He doesn’t soften it.

He won’t unbuild the fence he just put around your future, even if a part of him wants to climb it and see what the other side smells like.

He stands, offers you a hand because he’ll always play the gentleman as camouflage for the bastard.

You take it, furious.

He files the fury under safe.

“Back to work,” he says. “If you’re burning me in effigy tonight, do it after books balance. I don’t like my martyrs messy.”

You laugh in spite of yourself, and he lets himself enjoy the sound for half a second before returning it to the shelf labeled weaknesses to be rationed.

He keeps your world boring where he can, he lets you be petty where it doesn’t cost blood.

He takes your mouth when he needs your nerve quiet.

He uses his worst self in your best interest and hates that this is what passes for virtue in this zip code.

He pays Yorozu when the calendar says pay, collects what he bought, and pretends it doesn’t scrape something raw in him to hand over the body he prefers to spend elsewhere.

He does it because that rawness is cheaper than what Gojo would charge if he ever got you in a van for ten minutes.

He sees you test small rebellions — earrings, lip tint, a coffeeshop smile — and reads them for what they are, proof you’re still a person under the system he built around you.

He permits where he can, denies where he must, and explains only when denial would teach the wrong lesson.

He doesn’t hug, he calibrates.

He doesn’t praise, he labels good in the exact amount that keeps your hands from shaking.

He doesn’t say love, he says mine because it keeps other men from growing brave.

There are hours — driving back through the part of night that tastes like iron and rain — when he thinks about allowing himself the thing you want him to be.

He can feel it, under the armor, the part of him that would like to sit at a stupid kitchen table and watch your eyes relax because you forgot to be prey for five minutes.

He can feel the sentence that starts with you’re more than useful and ends with a word he doesn’t permit in his day.

He kills it where it starts because love is an expensive habit, and he doesn’t subsidize habits he can’t sustain in a gunfight.

He’ll give you what he can, a yard that runs, a route that doesn’t get you lifted, parents who sleep behind the wrong phrase, a mesh that laughs at jammers, a belt that says lower when your lungs forget where to live, a hand at your throat when your courage gets ideas, a mouth under your ear when the door needs you calm, a system of consequences that keeps your blood in.

He’ll give you the filthy, unashamed part too, because you take that better than pity and it puts color back in your face without pretending he’s gentle.

He’ll keep the rest caged until the day the math changes.

For now, he pays when Yorozu calls and he owns it by not pretending it’s more. 

He returns cold and precise and puts you back where the room makes sense.

He keeps his sentences accurate so you don’t mistake his discipline for contempt.

He chooses clean cuts over kind ones and watches you hate him for it without pulling the knife back.

He keeps you breathing.

He lets you want love out loud in a stairwell and tells you you’re right to want it and wrong to try for it here.

He listens to the part of his chest that takes that speech like shrapnel and doesn’t dig it out, because pain is a better reminder than guilt.

He watches you sleep the first full night you manage after one of Yorozu’s calls and lets himself admit — only in the place where the mirror lives — that he wants to be the man you’re allowed to love.

Not yet.

Maybe not soon.

Maybe not ever.

Wanting is free, spending is where men like him go broke.

He shuts off the light, leaves you with the kind of dark that doesn’t threaten, and goes back to the yard to make sure the morning arrives with the same boring reliability you’re learning to trust.

He doesn’t call it care, he calls it policy.

The city calls it crime.

Yorozu calls it a lease paid on time.

Gojo will call it a problem again, soon enough.

You’ll call it what you like when you’re ready.

He calls it enough — for now.

Chapter Text

The yard is in that after-hours posture he likes — lights low to legal, fence humming, forklifts asleep like animals that can wake mean.

Paperwork is done enough to count, you’re still in the booth finishing your run-down, one ear on the radio, one eye on the mezz reflection because you’ve learned where the world sneaks in.

He’s in the office with Masha and Nina, door half-open so he can hear you turn pages.

Nina smokes out the window and pretends not to, Masha has her ledger open and her pencil in its war position.

“Amenities,” Nina says, flipping her lighter shut. “We’re adding a real heater to the booth before winter eats her fingers. And a stool she can actually stand on without breaking an ankle. The step we’ve got is a lawsuit with paint.”

“Add a mat too,” Masha says. “Non-slip. And a light inside the booth that doesn’t make her look like a suspect. If people see their own faces in the glass they get less brave.”

“Fine,” he says. “What else.”

“Mini-fridge,” Nina says. “So she stops living off room-temp water and whatever tragedy passes for dinner.”

“Buy one,” he says. He doesn’t have to add now, she’s already pocketing the card.

Masha turns a page.

“Coffee,” she says. “Not the sludge from Lasha’s mercy pot. A machine that makes choices. She’ll still choose wrong, but at least she’ll think she can pick.”

He doesn’t argue.

“Done.”

Nina drops the friendly tone and swaps it for the one that means she’s about to get on the wrong side of him on purpose.

“And then there’s the other amenities,” she says, flicking ash neatly into a jar. “The human kind.”

He doesn’t look up from the ledger copy he’s reading.

“Careful.”

A warning.

“We are,” Masha says. “That’s the whole point.”

He glances past them at the glass.

You turn a page with that neat, careful motion that means you’re policing your hands so they don’t show your head. Your mouth moves — counting without sound. Your pulse — he can read it in your neck now without needing fingers — sits steady.

Good girl.

He hates the phrase and uses it anyway in his skull because it tells him what he needs to know.

“Say what you’re going to say,” he tells them. “I want to go home before the city invents a new ordinance.”

Nina leans against the file cabinet like she owns the angle.

“She’ll burn out if you keep doing Yorozu in her line of sight.”

“I don’t do Yorozu,” he says. “I pay an invoice. The word choice matters.”

“Not to her,” Nina says. “To her it reads like you own her and every woman you want, and she can’t even flirt with a barista without you reading the block the riot act.”

She lifts her chin toward the booth.

“She’s trying very hard to be a good employee about a thing that isn’t an employment problem. It’s a human problem. You want to keep her? You can’t make it look like she’s a tool while you’re a man. That imbalance breeds stupid.”

He sets the ledger down.

“I’m already not a man,” he says. “I’m a solution. That’s the job. She stays alive because I don’t pretend the tools and the hands are the same.”

“Don’t get poetic, boss,” Nina says. “It makes you sound guilty.”

Masha taps her pencil.

“She said she wants to pursue love,” she says, calm as weather. “You heard it. You didn’t hear the rest because you don’t hear the half she doesn’t want you to see. She doesn’t mean some nice boy with a decent jaw and a latte habit. She means you. She’s talking around it because she still thinks she’s got shame left to spend.”

He’s quiet because the first flare in his chest is the wrong one — something ugly, possessive, a fist at the thought of another man saying your name like it belongs in his mouth.

He kills the flare.

He doesn’t need the heat to know the fact.

He knew the fact when you stood in the stair and said I’m allowed to fall in love and hated yourself for telling the truth out loud.

He says, flat,

“And what would you like me to do with that.”

Not a question.

A dare wrapped in polite.

“Treat it like a real variable,” Masha says. “Not a leak to seal. Assign rules to it. Respect it by not humiliating it. And figure out where your lines are before she has to guess, because guessing makes people bleed. Especially women who’ve already bled for men who said sorry as punctuation.”

He watches your silhouette move in the glass and thinks about your ex like a stain he hasn’t bleached out yet.

He thinks about the bruise map he saw and how his mouth said, without his permission, who and you refused to answer because shame is the language abusers make people speak.

He thinks about cutting the man’s hands off and dropping them on his porch in a bag with a bow.

He thinks about your throat under his thumb and the way it answers when he says lower.

“You’re asking me for tenderness, Masha.” he says. “It’s not on my shelf. The inventory here is policy and violence. And rent paid on time.”

“I’m not asking you for tenderness,” she says. “I’m asking for not-cruelty when you already know the wound. And I’m asking you to decide if you want to keep her as an asset or a person. If it’s an asset, run it like one — predictable moves, no surprises, no public losses of face. If it’s a person, you’ll have to decide which parts of being a person you can offer without lying.”

He hates what she’s right about.

“I don’t lie to her,” he says. “Not about the parts that matter.”

“Good,” Nina says. “Then be honest about Yorozu in a way that doesn’t make her feel like furniture you drag out of the room when you need to redecorate.”

“You think she doesn’t understand why I pay?” he says, finally irritated enough to let it into his voice. “You think she wants the city back the way it was before the mesh? Before the vertical? Before the ambulance mirror? That price was three nights. I paid because funerals cost more.”

“Of course she understands,” Nina says. “She also feels. Those can happen at the same time. And right now her feeling looks like this, she belongs to you, but you belong to anyone with a ledger and silk. Try reading it from her angle for once.”

He sets his elbows on the desk, steeples fingers, and stares at the ledger copy like it’s Gojo’s face.

“You want me to announce a moratorium on Yorozu in public,” he says. “Call before I stand up. Not leave mid-sentence. Put my back to the wall and handle logistics like a gentleman so your girl doesn’t sit there tasting salt.”

Masha tilts her head.

“Something like that. Also stop wiping her mouth with your thumb in front of other people. You think it’s calibration. To anyone not living inside your skull it reads like humiliation.”

He almost laughs.

“You two met me after I stopped being a worse thing,” he says. “If you want humiliation, I can stage a seminar. What you’re seeing is restraint.”

“What we’re seeing is a man who knows how to read angles but refuses to read a face he cares about because it scares him,” Nina says, cheerful like a blade hidden in a bouquet. “Be brave, boss. Scary new skill. Empathy with boundaries. Revolutionary.”

He gives her a look that usually shuts men down for a week.

Nina grins at it and ashes into the jar again like she won a bet.

He sighs, long, not for show, because he knows when they’re right and hates the feeling like gravel under teeth.

“She can’t flirt,” he says, more honest than he meant to be. “Not on my time. Not while I’m responsible for breath staying in her body. You want me to let her collect admiration from a boy with ridiculous coffee? Is that the ask?”

“The ask is this,” Masha says. “You stop punishing her for wanting things you made impossible. If you don’t want her to flirt because it creates angles you can’t control, say that, not I own you. And make sure she hears that the prohibition is temporary, not theological.”

“Temporary,” he repeats with contempt. “Everything is temporary. That’s why it works.”

“Then use it,” Nina says. “Give her a clock. You’re good at those. Not now reads different when you put a date on it.”

He looks at her like she grew a second head.

“You want me to schedule her love life between raids.”

“We want you to stop leaving the door labeled NEVER on a hinge,” Masha says. “She’s pragmatic. If you tell her not now and mean it, she’ll fold the want and keep working. It’s the never that makes people rash.”

He stares at the window.

You’re putting the last slips in order, left hand checking right hand, your mouth moves a fraction when you count.

Even your neatness is obedience.

He hates how proud it makes him.

He hates how close that feeling sits to a different one he won’t spend.

“And Yorozu,” Nina adds, air light, eyes not. “Do your nights like a man not auditioning for a myth. Don’t take the call in front of her if you can help it. Don’t kiss her in front of him and then walk to silk. That combo makes even stoic girls invent dumb experiments.”

He doesn’t ask what experiments, he saw the earrings, he saw the lip tint, he saw the coffeeshop and the boy with posture.

He read your face and let himself be merciful by framing the prohibition as an ops rule instead of a personal insult.

“You’re both very brave,” he says finally. “It’s almost charming.”

“Not brave,” Masha says. “Invested. If she bolts, I have to replace either a checkpoint or a person, and I’d rather keep the person.”

Nina leans in.

“Also? We like her. You can be a tyrant and we will tolerate it. You being an idiot will cost you loyalty you can’t buy back.”

He considers telling them to go to hell.

He considers telling them he’ll run the yard the way he wants and if the girl wants love she can buy it by the hour in a different district.

He considers telling them he is not built to hold anyone’s softness and never pretended.

He considers all the words that keep him from doing the thing that matters, and then he shuts his mouth and sits with the heat.

He thinks about you saying you’re allowed to fall in love and the way you looked at him after — hope burning, rage tamped down, shame chewing its tail.

He thinks about the night he brought you back from the curb, Nina’s hand on your belt, your mouth open with that small horrible sound that meant the world was wrong and then fixable.

He thinks about how he wants to keep you where the world is fixable.

He thinks about you on the stair with a cup you weren’t drinking and the list he saw behind your eyes even if you never read it to him.

Hand on your face that doesn’t order anything, laughing at dinner without checking a door, sleeping with both boots off, being boring without it feeling like sacrilege.

He thinks about Yorozu’s rooms, how he never closes his eyes there because he refuses to give her that data, and how he leaves smelling like nothing so you don’t have to smell it when he tells you to lower.

He thinks about how from your angle it looks like he owns you and any woman he wants, and then tells you not to want anything where he can see it.

He knows hypocrisy when he tastes it.

He’s just used to washing it down with policy.

He rubs his thumb along the ledger edge. Old habit — sanding down splinters so the page doesn’t cut the next idiot who touches it.

“What do you want me to do tonight.” he asks Masha.

Not angry, this is him being cooperative in his own language, questions phrased like orders he will edit.

“Tonight?” she says. “She’s on her last half-hour of the shift. Tell her — in plain — in your voice — that you’re not leaving. Then don’t. Tomorrow, you tell her if Yorozu calls in advance you’ll step outside to take the message and you won’t make her a witness. After that, you think about the clock.”

“The clock.”

“Give her a horizon,” Nina says. “You hate promises, I know. Don’t promise. Structure. Last day of ninety, we revisit rules. You’re a bastard about everything else, be consistent about this too.”

He looks at them and sees the line they’re trying to draw, keep her steady until the ninety-day lease runs out, then either renew with terms that don’t eat your own house, or cut different deals.

He hates that it’s clean.

He hates that it’s the only plan that keeps your spine from snapping.

“Fine,” he says.

It comes out like a threat, it’s as close to thanks as he gets.

Nina salutes him with her cigarette.

“Attaboy. We’ll put that on a plaque. He listened once.”

“Don’t make me fire you,” he says. “I hate paperwork.”

“You love paperwork,” she says. “It’s just a knife with a suit on.”

Masha closes her ledger.

“Go,” she says, chin toward the booth. “Before she invents a crisis because you took too long to not leave.”

He leaves the office and crosses the floor.

He doesn’t hurry because hurrying makes the ground think it’s in charge.

He leans into the cutout, you look up, breath at regulation, eyes already reading his mouth.

“Finish what you’re doing,” he says. “After, you’re with me. No calls. No errands. No surprises.”

You blink once like he gave you a receipt for a transaction you didn’t know you were making.

Then you nod.

“Okay.”

He watches the micro-relief travel down your throat and into your hands and hates how much he likes seeing it.

He hates even more that it took Masha and Nina bullying him for him to admit he could do this simple thing, tell you the plan before the door moves.

He stays there while you complete your ritual — numbers, slips, the tidy stack that makes you feel like you can hold a day without dropping it.

He doesn’t touch you, he lets his presence be the hand on your neck without the hand.

When you slide the drawer shut and stand, he says,

“Walk.” Not because you need the order, because not giving it would make both of you feel like the world lost an axis.

You join him, he feels you look for the hitch, for the tell, for the buzz in his pocket that would undo the hour.

It doesn’t come.

Yorozu can wait.

Or she can send a message and meet silence.

He’s allowed to enforce that once, and tonight he will.

The lease doesn’t own his entire body.

He does.

Outside, the air tastes like rain thinking about it.

He angles you on his left, as always, habit, policy, possession.

He thinks about the clock he hates, he thinks about how to phrase it without sounding like a man handing out rations.

“You said something,” he says, evenly, as you fall in step. “About being allowed to pursue love. You said it like you were testing whether I would shoot the word on sight.”

You stiffen, then iron yourself out.

“I was testing whether I would,” you say.

He snorts.

“You won’t. You’re braver than that.”

He doesn’t look at you, he watches the street.

“You are allowed. Not now. Survival eats the first courses. At the end of the ninety, we re-evaluate. If I’m still paying that rent, we revisit rules. If I’m not, you can flirt with baristas until someone writes you a stupid poem. I won’t like it. I won’t stop it unless he’s a risk. That’s the best I can give you without lying.”

You walk silent for a count of seven.

“That helps,” you say finally. “It’s stupid how much.”

“It’s stupid,” he agrees. “But useful. I prefer useful to noble.”

You huff a quiet laugh that he pockets like a good knife.

“What about Yorozu,” you ask, careful. “Do you… could you not—”

“I’ll stop taking her messages in front of you,” he says before you have to finish. “I’ll step outside. I’ll keep the nights off your clock as best I can. I won’t invite you to witness invoices anymore. That’s me being as decent as I get.”

You nod.

“Okay.”

He hears what you don’t say, thank you and I hate that this matters and it matters.

He doesn’t ask for more, he doesn’t give more, he keeps you close enough that your shoulder takes his heat.

Behind you, in the office, Masha writes a line in her ledger that has nothing to do with money.

A thin countdown strip on Masha’s board.

WILLOW — Y (90), ticked down each morning.

Nina leans out the door and watches the block the way dogs watch a yard they’ve already decided to fight for.

The fence hums, the booth light makes the glass a mirror and not a stage.

He walks you to the vertical, checks the stair because religion is a habit, then says,

“Tomorrow, heater. Fridge. Coffee. Don’t act surprised when good things appear, it enrages me.”

You smile despite yourself.

“Yes, sir.”

He almost says good girl and doesn’t because he can learn.

“Get upstairs,” he says. “I’m not leaving. I’ll be in the office until your lights go dark.”

You go.

He stands in the hall for a beat, listening to the small sounds of a family pretending they’re normal.

He lets himself think, once, about a future where he doesn’t have to ration this, and then he kills the picture because it’s not tonight’s work.

He goes back to the office, Masha looks at him without looking, Nina flicks her lighter and doesn’t use it.

“You understand.” Masha says, which isn’t a question.

“I understand enough,” he says, irritated, pensive, and angrier at himself than at them. “Buy the goddamn coffee machine. And the mat. And something stupid for the fridge so she thinks she’s getting away with a crime when she eats it.”

“Popsicles,” Nina says. “Adults love forbidden popsicles.”

He gives her a look that should set her on fire.

She grins wider.

He exhales a laugh he didn’t mean to give them and sits down with the ledger. 

Outside, you turn off the booth light, the glass becomes a mirror.

He keeps his phone facedown.

Yorozu can write her notes on steam tonight.

He has a different invoice to pay, an hour where he does not fuck up something he wants to keep.

Chapter Text

Ninety days teach you what paid-for quiet feels like.

It isn’t silence, it’s the yard settling into one even hum and staying there.

Forks sing chain, Masha’s pencil keeps the ledger honest, Nina swears at plastic and wins.

On the corkboard, WILLOW—Y (90) ticks down in red, (3), (2), (1), then nothing.

No drumroll, no switch thrown — the air just loosens by half a notch, you only notice because you’ve trained yourself to notice.

The booth is kinder now, he never made a speech about it.

The mat under your feet has more give, the stool has a back you can lean into, a little kettle sits bolted to the shelf by the ledger, a small heater hums under the counter without complaining, the privacy switch stops sticking, the interior light doesn’t buzz, someone has screwed a hook inside the door for your bag.

It all appears the way rain appears — there, used, and not mentioned.

Late light on a flat day when the lot looks obedient, he calls you to his office. 

Door open until you step through, it closes without a sound.

His office smells like coffee, his minty soap, and paper that has outlived other people.

He stands by the window with his hands bare, the scar on the right side of his face is quiet, his eyes are that wrong, heated red that makes your stomach remember to behave.

“We’re at zero,” he says. “Revisions.”

You stop in your usual spot — halfway between desk and door, close enough to read his mouth, far enough to pretend you could leave if you wanted.

He slides a small envelope across the desk with two fingers.

“Phones. You keep the ghost — phrases only, always on you. You also get your number back.”

A beat.

“New SIM. Same rules about stupidity.”

“What counts as stupid?” you ask.

Your voice surprises you by being steady, so you let the steadiness sit there.

“Geotags. Live locations. Posting your breath where strangers can buy it.”

The corner of his mouth moves — recognition.

“If you want to lie to yourself, do it where I can correct it.”

“Understood.”

You don’t open the envelope, it’s enough to know the weight of it.

“Movement,” he says, eyes on the street.

He likes watching the world when he sharpens the rules.

“Daylight solo is fine. Check out, check in. Nights are case by case. If I say ride with me or Nina, you don’t debate vocabulary.”

“Curfew?” you ask.

“Soft. No heroics. No surprises. If you want a night, ask. ‘No’ isn’t a referendum.”

You feel a small latch inside your chest lift.

“Okay.”

“Front-of-house,” he goes on. “You can talk to drivers like people again. Not friends. People. You still don’t take gifts. You still don’t let anyone lean on the glass like they own your time.”

His gaze touches your shirt — assessment this time, not hunger.

“Wardrobe can relax. Not a show. You know the difference.”

“I won’t take gifts,” you say.

You think of the driver with the candy bars, you brace to refuse him kindly and firmly, both at once.

“Sleeping,” he says. “Your parents can go home if they want. The vertical stays available. You choose where you sleep.”

His eyes flick to you and away, like he considered another sentence and killed it before it used air.

“You don’t have to be under my eye to keep breathing.”

“Thank you,” you say. “They miss their kitchen.”

“Mhm.”

He plants both palms on the desk, the veins stand, it should look harsh — it looks like a job being done.

“Dating,” he starts.

Neutral, like a form header.

“You asked once. I told you no. Correct then. Not strictly correct now.”

You stiffen, then iron yourself flat.

“I wasn’t asking,” you say. “I was testing whether I would shoot the word on sight, you know.”

“I know you won’t.” he says.

The sentence is a small, bright cut, you let it sting and move on.

“Low-risk is allowed,” he says. “Daylight. People who don’t smell like my problems. I won’t like it. I won’t stop it unless it’s a risk or adjacent to one.”

He meets your eyes and lets the dislike show because truth is one of his tools.

“You won’t bait me with it. You won’t test fences. If you’re going to be stupid, be stupid with your own bones, not mine.”

“I’m not trying to be stupid,” you say. “I want to see what it feels like not to be afraid of being seen.”

“Then you’ll choose someone soft,” he says. “Not a cop. Not a driver. Not a cousin of anyone who owes me money. If I ask you to stop, you stop. If I say nothing, it means I’m deciding whether I have to break his hands.”

You huff once, almost a laugh.

“Clear.”

“Non-negotiables don’t move,” he says. “Emergency words. Immediate compliance. Y-window procedure while it exists. Privacy switch. Interior light discipline. Door codes. No answering inspector questions. No café chats with white shirts. No operational details — routes, times, ledgers, who’s who.”

You recite because reciting locks it in your bones

“Lower, blue, guest, stop. Y-window, open, log on blue slip, no chatter. Switch down, light off when needed. Codes in my fingers, not my mouth. No talking to Gojo’s line. No telling anyone anything.”

“Good.”

He stands straighter, the room changes shape around his spine.

“Questions?”

“Just one.”

He’ll give you one. Not two. Not today.

“Do you still want me to tell you if someone flirts with me, or is that petty?”

“Tell me everything that touches you,” he says, like you’d asked whether breathing is still policy. “I’ll decide what’s petty.”

Heat wakes under your skin, you nod like it’s a checkbox.

He comes around the desk and stops close, his hand lifts, finds your jaw — fingers on the hinge, thumb at the corner of your mouth.

“Softer rules don’t mean softer spine,” he says. “Don’t mistake mercy for permission.”

“I won’t,” you say.

You might.

You don’t want to.

He releases you.

Relief and loss arrive at the same time, you keep your face useful.

“Go to the glass,” he says. “Get used to your amenities. Pretend I do them for everyone.”

“I do,” you lie.

He snorts.

“Out,” he says but he’s not rude.

You step back, the office door opens, back in the yard, the air is oil, dust, a hint of rain. The booth seals you into your small weather, your little kettle exhales, the heater hums, the mat forgives your ankles, you stack a fresh pad of blue “Art Handling” slips under the ledger for Y-windows.

You flip the privacy switch just to feel it slide clean, you touch the tiny jar of almond hand cream Masha left by the stapler and read the label like it could tell you how to be a person in one paragraph.

You don’t use it yet, you are not ready to smell like softness.

The first flirt is small.

The café on the corner — new sign, same beans — sends a boy to run drinks to the lot next door. He’s got a brace under his left cuff that glints and disappears, and a smile that looks learned rather than inherited.

He pauses at your fence and squints up at the booth like he’s deciding whether waving is rude.

You ignore him because the ink on your rules is still wet.

Two days later he shows alone, he doesn’t lean on the glass, he keeps his hands visible and his voice careful.

“Do you take breaks? I could bring you something, if that’s allowed.”

You watch his wrists, not his mouth.

Steady.

Thin.

The sleeves are a little long.

“What would you bring me,” you ask, neutral.

“Whatever you tell me to.”

He hears himself, flushes, corrects.

“Whatever you like. Coffee is coffee but it’s also taste. I’m Kokichi.”

You don’t give your name yet.

Names spend easily.

You glance at the blue slips, at the small kettle, you feel the office door breathe on its hinge and know without looking which way he went.

“I’m working,” you say. “There are times of day when the answer is always no.”

“And times when it might be yes?”

His tone is gentle, he sounds like someone who prefers permission to improvisation.

“Maybe,” you say. “Daylight. If the lane isn’t hungry.”

“Got it.”

He backs away like a man not wanting to startle a bird.

“Nice to meet you.”

When he’s gone you breathe out and feel like you’ve done something brave for a child and mean for an adult.

Your phone stays blank, no lower arrives, you drink water anyway.

Nina clocks him next time, she leans in your window like a cat in a sunpatch. 

“He’s soft,” she says. “Soft is a good starter color.”

“It’s not color,” you say. “It’s chemistry.”

“Science gets you killed slower,” she says. “Let it.”

Masha doesn’t comment beyond a small smile she kills as soon as you catch it.

“If he tries to pay with poems,” she says, eyes on numbers, “don’t encourage meter. It breeds.”

“Noted.”

Three mornings later Kokichi arrives with a paper cup and a practiced, non-hopeful look.

“I asked the man with the scar if I could give this to you,” he says, nodding toward the office. “He said, ‘if she takes it, she drinks it where I can see it.’ Which I think is a yes.”

Of course he asked, of course the condition is visibility.

“What is it?” you ask, a little curious.

“Mocha,” he says. “Because you look like someone who pretends chocolate is childish and then likes it more than anyone.”

“Okay, rude.” you say, and reach through.

He doesn’t touch your fingers.

You drink where Sukuna can see.

He’s at the scale-house door with an opened envelope and a chewed pencil, watching the lot. When you tip the cup like a salute, he doesn’t nod, he simply turns his head a degree. Consent, in your grammar.

Kokichi learns your name the old way — other people say it, he tries it on, you edit.

He uses the full version, you give him the short one. He repeats it under his breath like a test that feels good to pass.

You think he’s nice.

A part of your brain insists that this is a trap. A more rational — bigger — part of your brain understands it’s just a man trying to befriend you while you try not to mess with your job and earn a public punishment your boss would enjoy too much giving you.

He times his visits for quiet moments.

You learn his reflection before he speaks, he has a half-limp that makes your step want to match his, you don’t. You know better than to choreograph affection on someone else’s ground.

Some days he brings nothing and stands back and talks about nothing — beans, a foam-arguer, how one block can smell like rain and the next like hot brake pads. Some days he passes a cup and says nothing at all.

He blushes when you thank him.

You blush when he blushes.

Nina watches like she bought a ticket.

Masha hums ledger music and pretends disinterest.

Sukuna tolerates.

He does not like.

Dislike shows in small ways, the jaw tick when Kokichi misreads distance by a foot, the half-tone drop when he tells you lower even though you already have, the way his hand lands at the back of your neck through the booth opening with pressure that is more brake than flirtation.

He uses words if needed.

“Daylight,” he says. “Soft. No questions. If he asks what time you breathe, I remove his ability to count.”

“He won’t,” you say, and hear pride you didn’t mean to show. You know he won’t even ask at what time you leave, he just shows up and hopes for the best.

“You think you’re a good judge,” he says — flat statement, not insult. “You’re getting there.”

Your parents go back home.

They complain about how the second exit spoiled them, then praise the afternoon light. Your mother says the counters remember her hands,your father fixes a cabinet door and stands back like he rebuilt a bridge.

You split your sleep — some nights at home, some in the vertical, one on top of his sheets, shoes off, mouth shut, because he says he wants to hear your breathing pass midnight.

It means nothing and everything.

You leave at dawn with the warmth of his palm living at your throat, you make coffee and pretend caffeine is the only reason your hands behave.

You install the new SIM with Masha standing over you like a midwife.

Your old number feels too open, like nostalgia could triangulate you.

He sends lower without punctuation, you laugh, then do it.

Kokichi sends, did I overdo the chocolate today? You stare a minute, reply no. exactly enough, put the phone face down like you just did something that needs cooling.

He says nothing next morning, which you hate more than correction.

You slip once and let Kokichi see your face do happy for no tactical reason. He watches like a man who has been the patient and likes being the cause of someone else’s better pulse.

He tries to gift the cup, and you pay with the bill Masha slid under your paper because gifts are leverage.

He adjusts quick, he is learning your language.

One slow hour, he asks if he can sit on the step because his brace is pinching and the street is rude. You scan the yard — daylight, no Y-window, office occupied, ledger covered, Nina testing her patience moving a pallet one inch at a time.

“Five minutes,” you say.

He sits, breath slows, asks about your favorite album instead of your shift. You say Sundowning. He lights up like it’s profound. It’s stupid.

It repairs a millimeter of something you stopped naming.

When Sukuna comes out, Kokichi stands fast, hands visible, expression open.

The scar takes a shadow that isn’t from a cloud, he steps to your booth, sets his hand on the back of your neck through the opening like he’s checking a valve.

To Kokichi,

“She returns your cup empty and clean. You can accept that or stop coming here.”

“I can accept it,” Kokichi says.

He doesn’t shrink.

“I can bring a sleeve so she doesn’t burn her hands.”

Sukuna watches him two seconds longer than polite. Then the smallest nod.

“Daylight,” he says again.

To you,

“If he says the wrong noun, use my words.”

“Lower. Blue. Guest. Stop,”

The knife under your tongue stays sharp.

Kokichi leaves, Nina materializes from nowhere.

“Appropriately terrified,” she says. “Useful in a mate.”

“Stop,” you tell her.

She grins and writes stop on the back of her hand with a marker like she’s selling merch. Masha adds without looking up,

“Don’t get stupid,” which here is tenderness.

You still want it from Sukuna.

Want is a hot, stupid thing you keep in a jar and call useful.

You remember his office sentences and don’t climb over them. He gave you truth that kept you breathing and a shape to put your mouth in.

He told you what he can loosen and what is welded, you take the shape because it fits better than pretending.

Closing sometimes, he comes to the booth and nudges the new hook an inch, like straightening is a way to spend affection without getting caught.

Sometimes he takes your jaw and makes you repeat a non-negotiable because repetition is the discipline that keeps you alive.

Sometimes he says good like a stamp.

Sometimes he says nothing and you hear approval in the quiet.

Kokichi brings a drink not on the menu.

“Try this,” he says, braced for mockery.

It tastes like a piece of a childhood you didn’t catalog — you laugh before you can decide not to.

It’s small. It’s honest.

He looks like a person who just saw the sun do a trick.

You hand the cup back at an angle that keeps the glass from feeling like a punishment

“Thank you,” you say the way Masha taught you to, precise, earned, with a closed ledger at your elbow.

Later Sukuna calls you into the office to sign something and stands close enough to put the rules back in your skin.

“You’re following the new ones,” he says.

“Yes.”

“Tell me a thing that touched you today.”

“Kokichi made a drink that didn’t need to exist,” you say, looking at his mouth instead of his eyes because looking at his eyes does not keep you useful. “It made me laugh. I was embarrassed by how easy it was.”

He nods like he’s approving a line item he didn’t want to pay for.

“You’re allowed,” he says. “Not stupid. Not loud. Allowed.”

“Are you—” you start, and stop.

He waits.

He is generous with time when he’s turned it into a trap.

“Are you all right with this?”

Quiet. Honest. Dangerous.

“No.” he says.

Then cleaner,

“I won’t stop it unless he’s a risk.”

“That’s the best you can give me without lying.”

“Correct.” His fingers touch your jaw once — inventory, not flirtation.

“Glass.” he says, and you go.

Next morning Kokichi brings a sleeve before the cup. He passes it through, says nothing when the Y-window warms.

He takes one step back when Sukuna looks at him the way a man looks at a problem he knows he can solve and chooses not to because patience pays more in this market.

You drink water when your screen says to, you use the almond cream once when no one is looking and do not cry.

Ninety days gave you rules you could count.

After ninety, you get rules you can live inside and still feel like a person for two minutes a day. It isn’t romance nor a storybook.

It’s a schedule, a boy who brings you something small because it makes your mouth surprise you, and a man who taught your body the words that stop bullets and lets you be seen as long as he can see you seeing.

That night you sleep at your parents’.

The kitchen recognizes your mother’s hands, your father makes a cabinet behave, you lie in your old bed and watch your phone sit face down like a dog waiting for a command.

You type clean and lower without sending and delete them.

You sleep anyway.

Morning again.

The kettle wakes like a small animal, heater hums, Masha hands you a credit roll, Nina hands you a joke that isn’t ready yet.

The lot hums, the city pretends it has always been this kind.

Kokichi tips a cup at you in a salute that feels old-fashioned. Sukuna studies the fence and decides, again, it will hold.

You are allowed.

Not stupid.

Not loud.

Allowed.

You put your palms on the counter and breathe where he wants you, even when he isn’t near the glass.

When the barista’s sleeve appears at the slot, you take the cup, drink where he can see you, and let yourself be happy for the stupid length of time it takes to swallow.

Chapter Text

He keeps the rules because they’re his, not because they’re kind.

Day ninety-one clicks past without a headline.

The lane goes back to him.

Yorozu’s fireflies keep hopping under the fence because redundancy is a religion he pays even after the sermon ends.

Your parents move home, the vertical stays warm and waiting.

You work the booth with your little kettle and the new mat under your ankles and you return soft things empty and clean, because he carved that sentence into the day and you obey it even when he isn’t there to make you.

He tells himself this is what he wanted, a schedule that obeys, a floor that hums, a city that remembers the shape of his hands.

Then he watches you laugh at some shy barista with a brace under his sleeve and discovers a new thing to hate about being accurate.

Kokichi is not a risk.

That is the worst part.

He’s not a cop, not a driver, not a cousin of anyone who owes him money.

He doesn’t ask about routes. He doesn’t look past the glass like a thief. He remembers to take his hands back when they get ahead of his mouth. He has the good manners of prey that has learned not to spook a better animal.

If Sukuna were an honest man, he’d admit he built this exact corridor for you — daylight, low risk, a taste of being seen with none of the cost.

He’s not honest.

Not with himself.

He tells himself what he tells the yard, you’re allowed.

He says it once out loud — in the office, palm on your jaw, voice even — and feels the words catch like gristle going down. After that he says it with the way he doesn’t move when Kokichi appears, with the slow, humiliating practice of leaving space where he wants to stand.

He sees you together the first time by accident, which he won’t forgive himself for.

Quiet weeknight, after hours, no Y-window crankiness, the yard folded down to its bones.

He drives the perimeter because that’s what he does when the world is pretending it isn’t thinking of him.

On the corner diner’s scratched chrome he catches you reflected, you in your jacket with your hair pulled back and your mouth doing that small, unplanned smile that makes his scar feel like a heat source. The boy across from you sits hunched like he knows how to make himself smaller out of respect, not fear.

Your fingers make a circle on the side of a paper cup.

It’s nothing. 

It’s avalanche.

He parks where he can see the window without looking like he came here to do anything but frown at curb paint. He doesn’t go in.

Rules.

His rules.

The kind that keep you breathing and him difficult to kill.

He watches you tilt your head while you listen.

You tilt that way with him, too, only lower.

The difference matters and he hates that he’s proud of it.

Kokichi says something that makes you laugh.

It isn’t a laugh you’ve given him.

It’s softer and more surprised, nothing like the ugly sharp thing you let leak out when he pushes you too far because he enjoys the bad edge on it.

He wants to be the reason you make both sounds.

He wants to own the whole fucking scale.

Jealousy is a stupid word for the feeling, too small, too domestic — what he feels is territorial, a map in his chest trying to redraw a boundary it already knows it’s not allowed to cross tonight.

He can take the diner apart.

He can fold the boy’s limbs into angles that will keep him on decaf the rest of his life.

He can.

He doesn’t.

Not because the kid deserves mercy, because you deserve a promise kept.

He likes owning his mouth, he keeps it shut.

He does inventory instead, because numbers and names are the closest thing to a sedative he’ll tolerate.

Your parents, home, happy, loud. Your mother baked for an imaginary super again because manna tastes like sugar where she comes from. Your father fixed a cabinet and stood back as if he built a bridge. Your brother is back on their couch for a week because the vertical bed fucks with the leg, doing the hard thing of healing like it’s a job.

Masha, ledger balanced, mood cooperative, pencil dangerous. Nina, feral, patient, probably stole something because discipline is boring when the day pretends to be good.

He watches you for exactly long enough to memorize the way you put your hands on the table when you’re telling the truth and the way you tuck your chin when you’re carrying someone else’s silence, then he drives on, because tonight his job is letting the city think it gets to be soft without asking his permission.

He wears the restraint like a shirt under his skin, it itches.

He needs an outlet that won’t have your name on it.

The first outlet goes down in an alley three neighborhoods over where Gojo’s people like to collect signatures on paper they can show to judges later. Not a theatrics crew — no blue scarves, no lenses — just two quiet men with clean boots who tried to snare one of his drivers with the friendly-officer act and a clipboard so legit it made the air taste formal.

They don’t see him until one leans back wrong and hits his shoulder on a shadow that doesn’t move.

He likes privacy for this.

He gives them the courtesy of being accurate.

Wrist, elbow, knee.

He breaks each in ways manual therapy won’t forgive.

He does it quietly, because dead is loud and he likes economy.

One tries to say please and finds out an elbow can sound exactly like the word no when it hits cartilage.

He leaves both of them conscious on their sides in the puddled lights, radios kicked into a drain, names and faces pinned down in his head for later measures.

“Tell your boss this isn’t a sermon.” he says conversationally, and leaves, because this is pest control, not a message.

The second outlet is legal, which he hates more.

He boxes in a gym no one sees him use. Concrete, one clock, a bag that weighs what a body should weigh when it stops arguing with you.

He wraps his hands, gloved in tape and callus and boredom, he punishes the bag until his shoulder reminds him he has a scar he can’t hit with a closed fist.

His mind drifts where it always drifts when his body is busy, inventory, routes, the worst angle of your mouth.

You.

Your breath under his thumb when he tilts your jaw.

The way the word allowed sounded like a lie he wasn’t telling.

The diner.

The soft fucking laugh.

He hits the bag like it owes him hush money and hears the chain complain.

He likes that sound.

It tells him the bag is learning the rules.

After, he doesn’t shower, he pulls a hoodie over salt and anger and goes to your parents’ house because he can’t have the thing he wants and he can still have the ritual that proves he owns the pieces around it.

Your mother opens the door like a prayer and he reminds her not to say his name in the hallway because she lives in a world where names behave and he lives in this one.

Your father shakes his hand with the solemnity old men reserve for the son-in-law they almost got.

He doesn’t qualify for the title.

He wouldn’t take it if it were offered.

He appreciates the posture anyway.

Brother is on the couch, TV low, a brace and a new scar and the kind of eye that still wants to run.

He hands the brother an ice wrap because pain is honest and then drops a small envelope with cash under the remote because the power company isn’t sentimental.

“Working late?” your father asks as if there’s an ending to his work he can plan dinner around.

“Always.” he says, which is not an answer, it’s the only biography you’re ever getting.

Your mother asks if you’re eating well, he says yes because he saw you swallow when he told you to. Brother mentions the kid at the café, your father says seems nice in a tone that makes him want to put a hand through something that doesn’t break.

He thanks them for letting him in like gratitude is contagious and leaves before the conversation can drift to things like future, wedding, grandchildren, the other species of life he doesn’t do.

He stands on the stoop too long, he tells himself he’s checking the sightlines, he’s counting the van patterns, he’s making sure the fireflies catch the street.

He’s lying.

He’s listening to your parents argue in the kitchen about salt and money and love.

He hears your mother say your name in the voice people use when they’re talking about things they think are simple.

He leaves before the feeling under his scar turns into something you don’t have words for.

Masha texts beer because she’s a good employee and a better general. He picks a place that isn’t the usual — no one who knows him will sit at the table behind him and try to measure the distance between his shoulders to figure out whether he’s relaxed.

Nina is there already, back against the wall, two empty shot glasses set in a line like proof of concept. Masha arrives with the ledger in her pocket because she is physically incapable of being unarmed.

They talk about everything except the thing. Which is the only way to talk about the thing.

They count money with their mouths and bad men with their eyes, he pours whiskey and says numbers instead of names, Masha asks whether the clinic’s new desk learned the rule about typos, Nina mutters about grasshoppers and how she wants to paint one on the forklift, he tells them Gojo got clever on Ring Road again and they both pull faces like they smelled something polite.

It’s good to be in a room where no one expects him to be civil.

It’s better to be in a room where both of the people at the table would die for you and charge interest on the next life. He tells them the part he left out for you, the target list.

Inspectors with embossed cards. Clinic cousin who learned to be honest after she learned she liked rent. A man named Sera who thinks a blue scarf is a personality. He doesn’t say Kokichi because there’s nothing to say.

Nina says it for him.

“The boy,” she says. “Cute.”

“Soft,” Masha says, neutral.

He drinks like he’s signing a contract he wrote for someone else.

“Daylight,” he says. “Soft. No questions. If he steps wrong, I re-educate him about nouns.”

Masha laughs, not because it’s funny, because relief is supposed to have a sound.

“You won’t need to,” she says. “He watches like he’s learned to read a leash.”

He hates that the description makes him exhale.

He hates that the exhale feels like surrender.

“He makes her laugh.” he says, to his glass.

“Good,” Nina says. “She has the look of a person who forgot where the sound lives. How big is the problem if you can carry it.”

He stares at the wall over her shoulder and thinks about scale.

“Bigger than the boy.” he says, which is as close as he’ll come to admitting that the problem is the part of him that wants something he can’t have without spending everyone’s blood like confetti.

They talk about work because work is the drug that doesn’t run out.

He orders another round because the math says they deserve it, he lets Masha tease him about being precious with the ledger, he lets Nina tell the story about the driver who tried to flirt with her and almost lost his hand when she laughed wrong.

He collects their jokes the way he collects knives — useful when you remember they’re dangerous. He goes home alone and doesn’t sleep the way humans do, he works the list instead.

Cleaning the street is what he calls it when he puts down people who think they can spend him for parts.

The next week he handles three.

A cameraman whose hobby is “civic interest,” caught on the wrong roof with the wrong lens. A paramedic cosplayer who thought a real rig and a sticker could get him into a stairwell. A man with a badge that said Parking Enforcement who tried to see how the booth code pad felt under his thumb.

He doesn’t make examples, he doesn’t do performative cruelty when the audience is a city that loves theater, he takes tendons, not lives, because limping is a better PSA.

He crushes a hand in a door so the fingers will never again be precise on a trigger.

He twitches a shoulder out of true and leaves a business card in the pocket that says stop in black marker.

He breaks the toe that makes your balance honest and whispers in a man’s ear,

“Don’t walk where you can’t own the ground,” so the man tells the story twice and both times it sounds like a ghost did it.

He boxes again.

He drives the bag backward like he’s moving buildings.

Sweat gets in his eyes and he lets it burn because cheap pain always reminded him he has a body and bodies are better than ideas when it’s time to cut something.

He thinks about what he will have to end before he can stand in a diner at midnight and take the seat across from you without making the room change temperature.

He lists them.

Gojo.

Two men downtown who think the city owes them an escort.

A state inspector who nursed a grudge and a spreadsheet.

A woman who runs a syndicate that calls its network a co-op like branding can undo physics. 

Ten, maybe.

Twelve if the season goes mean.

He tells himself he can do it in six months if no one invents a new way to be stupid.

He tells himself he can give you a thing you asked for if he burns the map you live on first.

He tells himself he is a man who tells the truth to himself.

Then he watches you take a cup from Kokichi’s hand and laugh, and his hands curl like he’s trying to commit a murder without moving.

He sees you and the boy at the diner again because restraint, once performed, becomes a ritual. You’re at the corner booth under the side exit where the window gives you the lot and your reflection.

He taught you that vantage. He hates that you’re using it with someone who isn’t him.

You talk with your hands, the boy mirrors with half-motions like he’s trying not to scare the animal he admires.

You’re happy.