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Kaiser woke with the sunlight. The streets of Madrid already coming alive beneath him, blossoming with movement as passersby began their days along the stone paved avenues. He often found it amusing to watch the humans below, each walking toward some unknown destination, toward ends he would never know, and did not care to, all of them crossing paths for a brief moment before disappearing again. A low murmur from traffic and chatter climbed through the glass walls of his penthouse, rising slow with the sun.
All of that, courtesy of Re Al his new team. Or more importantly, the two million euro check that came with it.
He stretched, cool sheets slipping from his arms. A powdery smell of blue roses floated over from the nightstand. Up he got, walking barefoot to the espresso maker across the big penthouse. The place, the agent had assured him, was in one of Madrid’s most sought-after districts.
He poured himself a small coffee. Black, of course.
He didn’t bother buying milk anymore. Ness wasn’t here to drink it.
Unfortunately, Ness had to stay back in Germany. Their last night together had ended in a fight he still could not fully explain. He had told him he did not need him anymore, told him terrible things, that he should quit soccer, that he was holding him back. Words that, even to him, sounded harsh. Sure, he had said worse to rivals, but to someone whose purpose had once aligned with his… what was the point of that? Looking back, the sudden burst of anger had surprised him.
He took a sip of coffee, it tasted somewhat bitter, though he blamed the beans rather than the memory.
And Ness had just stood there, taking it, eyes full of tears.
It had almost moved him.
Almost. But he had crushed it down. He reminded himself he was built differently. He did not have the weak constitution of lesser men. Ness had helped him get to where he was, but had been merely a means to an end.
And Kaiser now stood in the middle of that end, wrapped in his plush velvet robe and surrounded by everything he had clawed toward, everything Ness had helped him reach.
Truth was, he could not afford to be chained down by fleeting human affections. Not now, when he was so close to his goals. So close he could almost taste them. In his mind he was already free, finally stepping into the life he had been destined for.
Sure, he had cared about Ness in his own twisted way, though not in the way humans cared for someone. After all, he was a king. Romance was for lustful peasants, not for monarchs meant for great things. Monarchs who had everything, owned everything, and yet the one thing they did not own was themselves. The crown was their real master.
And was this not the very crown he had inked into his skin, locked onto his own hand to remind himself he had no need for softness? Not when glory waited. Not when he was ascending.
As he silently sipped his coffee, letting the taste of triumph sit on his tongue, he scrolled through Twitter. Then he saw it. Tabloid photos.
Ness.
Partying the night before with celebrities in one of the hottest clubs in Berlin.
Then his eyes landed on Ness’s face. He was laughing. There was something unguarded there, a look Kaiser had never seen before.
Something in him jolted. A tremor ran through his hand and up his arm. He didn’t understand why. Annoyed, he tightened his grip and swiped up the app harder than necessary, switching to his messages.
"You are out there partying with a LV bag that does not even match your fit."
He typed furiously and immediately sent it without looking at it.
After a pause he added another.
"You look like a whore in that."
"Thought I taught you better than this."
But the screen stayed blank. Odd. His pup usually answered immediately. And it wasn’t even a timezone issue.
Irritated, he typed another:
“So this is what you are doing now? Partying it up with C-list celebrities?”
Then another.
“You really need attention that badly.”
Tch. Surely this’d finally get some response from him.
Kaiser began cycling through his apps out of habit. Twitter check. Instagram, (same botoxed faces as always, boring). Emails check. A note from his agent. His team schedule. Then, without meaning to — he swore he hadn’t — he circled back to Ness. His own five short messages sat there, unanswered.
He paused briefly, an odd hint of regret creeping in then pushed it aside. Alright. Just one last try.
"I’m only saying this because you could do so much better than them."
He sat there, phone in hand, and for the first time since he arrived in this foreign place, the silence of his penthouse felt enormous.
A slow dread settled over him.
Oh. He had a bad feeling about this.
This did not bode well.
Almost immediately, and as if his body were moving on its own, he opened Ness’s profile. He told himself it was only to “check something,” though even he did not know what that something was supposed to be. He scrolled through Ness’s feed with the same precision he used to analyze rival defenders, every detail scrutinized, picked apart, and stored in the back of his mind.
Then he saw it.
A story.
Ness training with someone.
Kaiser blinked, then frowned.
He had always said he hated that guy.
Now he was… bonding with him?
No.
No, surely this was something mandated by Bastard München’s PR team. It had to be.
But then he zoomed in on Ness’s face.
A real smile lighting up his features.
He almost looked beautiful. Free…and available.
Kaiser’s fist clenched around his phone.
He never smiled like that with me.
A hot rush of anger went through him; he closed the app and slammed his phone onto the counter with more force than necessary, considering the marble alone had cost five figures and had done nothing to deserve this. He swore under his breath, telling himself he should not look any further into this.
And yet the phone had barely touched the counter before it was already back in his hand, the app reopened, his thoughts narrowing into a new obsessive goal: find more clues.
Though he was no longer sure whether he wanted to prove or disprove what his mind was already whispering.
His thoughts circled back to that story, to that smile, to the terrible realization blooming in his chest.
Had Ness finally moved on without him?
No.
He was the one who left Ness. This was fine. This was all part of his plan. His grand design. Ness had needed him, and Kaiser had needed Ness for a while.
He just hadn’t expected Ness to replace him that quickly.
And then a cruel intrusive thought surfaced, slow and venomous:
What if he never needed me at all.
He kept scrolling, almost in a trance, eyes glued to the screen. When Ness’s page gave him nothing new, he moved to the mutuals list.
That was when his stomach dropped.
A photo on Lorenzo’s page.
And Ness was tagged in it.
Ness with that gold toothed idiot. Seriously?
The mere sight of Lorenzo made his skin crawl. He was so disgusting. Why would Ness ever choose to spend time with him willingly? Lorenzo was the slums incarnate, and worse, a living reminder of the childhood Kaiser had spent his life trying to escape, burying the ugliness under wealth and glamour.
And Ness had never said a single word about meeting him.
Not once.
They usually spoke every day. It was not in Ness’s habits to hide things, at least not from him. The other boy normally told him everything… or so Kaiser had always believed.
His eyes narrowed on the screen. A tight ache settled under his sternum. He hesitated, thumb hovering above the comments section, begging himself not to look.
He already sensed he would not like what waited there. It felt like walking willingly toward the gallows. But leaving the truth buried felt somehow more terrifying than facing it.
Not knowing would be worse.
So he tapped the comments anyway, dragged forward by a need he could neither fight nor justify.
And there it was.
Ness had replied to Lorenzo.
“good to see you again :)”
Kaiser stared at the words until they blurred.
Again.
Again?
Again???
The word slammed against his skull like a bell. A tight pressure formed between his eyes.
What the hell did he mean by again?
Had they been keeping in touch behind his back?
Bonding?
Laughing?
Getting closer?
Spending time together in ways Kaiser had never allowed himself to. Though he would never phrase it that way, not even in his own mind.
It suddenly felt difficult to swallow.
He had never doubted Ness before. Why would he? His lackey had always been an open book, simple and predictable, soft in all the ways Kaiser needed him to be.
Or so he thought.
But now it felt as if his world had tilted off its axis. Everything once fixed and certain slipped into a new unstable place. Every memory, every moment, every detail he had once dismissed crawled back in as a possible lie.
He forced the lump in his throat down.
Was Ness not as innocent as he seemed?
Was his puppy more cunning than he thought?
Had Ness ever meant those late-night messages, or had he only typed what Kaiser wanted to hear?
Or was Kaiser actually the one being played all this time?
Had this all been a ploy to let Kaiser walk away with his ego untouched while Ness slipped off to hook up with Lorenzo behind his back?
What a little brat. The audacity.
So he wanted to play tricks on him.
Fine.
He would remind him exactly who he belonged to.
Who did he think he was anyway?
Did Ness suddenly think he mattered now?
He should have been grateful to orbit him, his emperor, for so long.
Ignoring the sharp pang in his chest, Kaiser furiously typed out another message.
“Maybe you should be practicing more instead of partying. Bastard München’s stats are not looking too hot ever since I left.”
Stupid mutt. Sure, it was harsh. But he was only telling him the truth. Someone had to.
He kept scrolling, jumping from profile to profile without really seeing anything. At some point his thumb slipped and tapped something. He didn't think anything of it.
Until, minutes later, his phone buzzed.
His heart lurched. For one stupid, hopeful second he thought it was Ness.
It wasn’t.
“@igorplaysball_ followed you back.”
Kaiser froze.
Followed him back?
He hadn’t followed anyone…
He checked the screen again, dread pooling in his stomach. Oh. He had followed him. That idiot teammate Ness had been smiling at. His name now sat there, neatly listed under Kaiser’s following.
His pulse kicked up hard.
No. No. No.
Stupid.
He hadn’t meant to. He hadn’t even realized he’d pressed anything. He’d only been trying to zoom in on his expression, to understand why Ness—
It didn’t matter. This was a disaster.
And now the guy was in his mutuals list.
Which meant Ness could see it.
Which meant Ness could think Kaiser had been stalking him. Which he absolutely had not been doing. He had simply been… investigating. Strategizing. Gathering necessary intel. Obviously.
Still, the implication wouldn’t let go.
He could unfollow. Pretend it never happened.
Shit. But the guy had already followed back. Unfollowing now would look intentional. Suspicious. Calculated even. The idiot might even mention it to Ness. Laugh about it. Then Kaiser would look like—
He clenched his jaw until his teeth ached.
No. No, he wouldn’t touch it. Better to leave it. Let it rot there without anyone noticing.
He locked the phone with a sharp click.
As if he needed another thing to worry about now.
He squeezed his eyes shut. Hard. He kept repeating to himself that he was not jealous, that none of this mattered.
But even as he said it, he could feel the lie settle heavy in his chest.
Because a single thought of Ness with another man shot a searing pain through him.
It left him tense and jittery, briskly pacing the length of the apartment before he even realized he’d started.
At times he let the phone drop to his side, losing his train of thought for a moment before snapping back into the same restless loop.
He told himself he had always left a door open for him. He never imagined Ness would actually walk through it. Kaiser had pulled away ninety percent of the way, sure, but how hard would it be for Ness to cross the last ten percent on his own?
There was no way.
Ness never took decisions on his own. He always relied on Kaiser to tell him what to do, those doe-eyed glances fixed on him, that seemed to ask, “What do you want to do next, Kaiser?"
God, he had looked so sweet back then. When Kaiser had been his whole world. He felt a sudden fondness for those moments. Only now did they feel precious.
And it was unbearable.
He rubbed his eyes harshly and straightened.
No. He was overthinking this.
Ness was probably asleep. Or hadn’t checked his phone yet.
There had to be a reasonable explanation.
Right. He had resolved one equation, but even as that certainty settled, another had already taken its place, another piece of the puzzle demanded to be solved.
And the puzzle kept on demanding more and more pieces.
He started by going through Ness’s mentions. But he didn’t stop at one thread. Or two. He combed through every reply, every mention, every stray exchange that carried his name. There was no thread he left untouched.
Threads of Ness replying to other people. Ness wishing others good luck on their games. Thanks sent to fans. Even those lingered and refused to remain incidental, something to return to, to worry at later. Words that had once been said offhand suddenly took on an excessive importance. Swiping from photo to photo, his analytical mind did not give him a single moment of rest, as he strained to guess what his smile meant in one picture or what the absence of that smile meant in another. He now questioned things he had never questioned before.
He retraced steps of previous conversations they had had, wondering if he had been too cold or too dismissive.
Had he pushed him too far?
He leaned closer to the screen, the blue light flickering unevenly across his face. It stung his eyes, but he ignored it. Ness had always been the one to shove the blue light glasses into his hands with gentle concern: “you are going to ruin your eyes.”
But Ness was not here now.
And Kaiser could not look away.
Then something new surfaced.
A practice clip.
Ness dribbling past defenders with a confidence Kaiser had never seen.
He even looked sharper.
He seemed to fly with controlled passes, spun with precise turns, and fluid footwork.
Why was he…Better?
Kaiser felt something twist under his ribs.
Why did he look like that now?
Why did he suddenly move with such certainty?
Who was he performing for?
And why was it not him.
Kaiser leaving Ness was supposed to be his victory.
Watching Ness thrive without him was his punishment.
And the more Ness’s lot seemed to shine, the gloomier Kaiser’s own lot became.
It was in that moment that something in him shifted, sickening and unavoidable, and he understood before he could stop himself what Ness meant to him. Until now he had appreciated his presence, sure, but he had always believed he could go on without him.
But now, watching Ness move with that newfound brilliance, that bright confidence, the ache settled deep enough that he could not ignore it.
The truth struck him with humiliating force: he needed him. That realization made his stomach churn.
And with it came a cold certainty. This would be the beginning of his downfall.
The silence was the first thing that hurt.
Then came the anger, both born from the same place as his longing.
Goddamnit, why had Ness done this to him?
Why did you have to love me like that, he thought. Why were you always so kind? So patient? So much that now I cannot live without it. So much that letting go feels impossible.
If only Ness had been better at cruelty. If only he had pushed back, snapped, fought. Anything would have made this easier. But instead he had been unbearably gentle. And that was the real cruelty for someone like Kaiser. He was not built for softness. He never changed. He had never known how.
Had Ness finally ran out of patience for him?
Ness still had not replied to his last text, and every hour without an answer added something to his suffering.
He tried to imagine reasons to explain this silence, but each one only sent him spiraling further. He told himself that perhaps Ness was hungover, or sick, or simply asleep, but the moment he thought these excuses, they stopped soothing anything. They dissolved instantly, replaced by darker possibilities.
What if Ness had grown tired of him? What if he no longer cared?
With trembling fingers Kaiser reopened their recent messages. Ness had seemed a little hurt at first when Kaiser said he did not need him anymore, but he had not dared protest for long. Soon they had fallen back into their usual rhythm, as if nothing had happened: Ness reminding him to take his vitamins. Ness gossiping about teammates. Them complaining about the idiots on his own team (okay it was mostly Kaiser who did the complaining). He had assumed Ness had simply accepted his new, downgraded place in his life.
But now he wondered if he had misunderstood everything. Had Ness stayed quiet all this time not out of devotion, but out of resignation?
So he scanned their messages again, line by line, searching for hidden meanings, questioning whether he had been too cold, too sharp, too indifferent.
Had he offended him?
And now the worry gripped him completely. Gnawing at him from the inside, festering.
While his world felt frozen, stalled around a single, obsessive thought, everything else kept moving, demanding things of him as if nothing were wrong.
Practice still waited for him.
He dragged his feet the whole way there, jaw tight, irritation simmering without a clear target.
By the time he reached the locker rooms, he had worked himself up into a mood his teammates had rarely seen before.
He glanced at his phone. Still no answer from Ness.
He exhaled sharply through his nose.
And despite everything he told himself, every instinct screaming this was a mistake—his fingers were already typing before he realized it.
“You act like I am playing. It is not funny.”
He stared at it, chest tight, mouth dry.
Then another message followed, unbidden:
“I miss you.”
The moment he sent it, panic punched through him.
He scrambled to shut it down, to claw back whatever dignity he had left.
A third message:
“Nvm. That was a moment of weakness. Fuck you.”
No. No, that never happened. He refused to let it have happened.
He told himself he would not check his phone again. Ness could come crawling back for all he cared.
He even spoke the lie with confidence, almost believing it, though some part of him still expected that by the time warmup was over, Ness’s silence would break, that a reply would be waiting.
That was how their rhythm always worked.
Plus… he deserved at least that. Right?
He slammed the locker door shut and held it there for a second, palm flat against the cool surface, as if sealing something dangerous inside.
Then he exhaled sharply.
He straightened.
Here Kaiser was, on the cusp of everything. Everything he ever wanted. He was so close now, the world opening up to him. Sponsors, women, men, all courting him. All he had to do was reach out and take it. After all, he was adored by all of them, the golden star, the crowned prodigy.
And yet all he could think about was him.
He occupied his every waking thought, until everything else felt dull and grey. The world itself seemed washed out, muted around him. His body felt unfocused and sluggish, as if he were carrying a terrible weight.
Still, he could not escape the truth that even a single sign from Ness would make all of it vanish.
There was no dignity in it. Depending on someone like this. He felt like an addict, reaching for Ness, the next hit that would soothe him. And yet he was simultaneously the source of his suffering.
Ness had become both the poison and the remedy.
One moment he lamented his own misery, the next he was seized by a cold fear that this might become permanent. Was this how he would remain unless Ness came back to him?
Would his days become nothing but waiting, his nights nothing but a suffocating war with his own thoughts? He felt possessed, dragged by thoughts he could no longer master.
He wished he could rip his heart out, end it in one brutal motion, and be done with it. Wouldn’t it be easier that way? If he could simply shut it all off, turn the feeling to nothing, and return to the version of himself that he knew worked. The Kaiser who did not bend, who did not break, who did not want.
But he could not.
And God, he felt himself losing control, losing his grip on everything he had built.
At practice he performed badly. He went through high-level motions, but with no real enthusiasm. His passes were off, his timing was worse, and he snapped at teammates for mistakes he was making himself, or for things they could not have helped. He knew he was being unfair, but he needed an outlet for the mess in his head. At one point he even crashed straight into a teammate, sending both of them off-balance and earning himself a cold, irritated “...are you even paying attention?”
He spun around, ready to bark back.
“Mind your—”
But the rest froze in his throat the moment he saw who it was.
Sae.
Of course it was Sae.
Those half-lidded eyes, uncomfortably attentive, fixed on him. His skin prickled, the sting of being seen playing below his standard, and by him of all people.
That humiliation curdled into defensiveness.
“Tch. Mind your own business,” he muttered, the bravado falling flat even to his own ears.
Sae didn’t bother answering. He just looked at him for a second, then turned away.
Then the coach’s whistle tore through the field.
Drill break.
Kaiser stomped back toward the locker room, cleats biting into the turf. Each step felt heavier, angrier, like the weight in his chest was spreading. And under all of it, the same alarm pulsed.
He felt bare.
As he stood in the locker room, the urge to check his phone crept over him again.
He told himself it was harmless. Just one glance. Ness might have replied.
He unlocked it.
Nothing.
The silence on the screen felt louder than the one in the room. The familiar ache folding him inward for a split second.
Oh.
He knew this feeling.
It had the distinct shape of an old wound, carved by someone who had walked away and never looked back.
He had buried it under victories, under motion, under anything loud enough to drown it out.
He hated how easily it resurfaced.
Had Ness finally turned away from him?
Had he seen him for the fraud he was?
His breath left him.
The act was over. There was no applause, no curtain call. Kaiser stood alone wiping away the last traces of stage paint, staring at a face he barely recognized without its varnish.
Why had he not answered yet?
Ness was not supposed to turn his back on him.
He had told him he meant everything to him.
Had all of it meant nothing?
Every moment they had shared. Every word Ness had ever offered him with that trembling devotion.
Kaiser had been Ness’s sun, his king, and for so long Ness had orbited him so faithfully it had seemed like a law of nature. But now the orbit felt broken, the pull gone, the light fading.
How could an astray star decide to part from its orbit?
Would he not be dim and lost, floating in the dark without his emperor to anchor him?
So why, then, was Kaiser the one left in darkness?
Enough. He needed to stop this.
His thumb hovered over the block button. He pressed it quickly, before he could think better of it.
The relief lasted less than a second.
What if Ness needed to reach him?
His pulse skidded. He unblocked him again and shoved the phone into his bag, as if burned.
He straightened, then jogged back onto the field, pretending the whole phone incident hadn’t just happened. The coach had already gathered the team, launching into a rundown for their upcoming friendly against Ubers.
Kaiser tried to listen, tried to let the words anchor him like they used to, but his attention kept drifting to the phone-shaped weight in his bag. The coach kept talking. Formations. Transitions. Numbers and movements that were meant to matter. All of it sounded strangely distant, as if it were happening through a pane of glass.
Sometimes a teammate would ask a question, earnest in a way Kaiser found baffling. He couldn’t understand how anyone could care that much about something so inconsequential.
How could anyone stand here and think about this? Why were they all speaking as if this were any other day? As if something irreversible had not already happened. As if his world had not already ended.
He swallowed, jaw tightening. They spoke so easily, so casually, unaware. He envied their lightness.
Then a name cut through it.
“…their midfield press is stronger this season, especially with Lorenzo—”
The name hit him like a fist under the ribs.
Lorenzo.
Of course. As if the universe itself were mocking him. Something ugly twisted inside of him. He fixed his eyes on the grass, teeth grinding, his mind replaying that stupid Instagram comment like it was carved into bone.
When he finally looked up, he caught Sae watching him.
The look lingered, bored and sharp enough to flay him open. Long enough to make it clear Sae had seen everything.
A flush of shame and fury crept over him.
Kaiser felt something rise in him, a snarl threatening to break loose. He wanted to bare his teeth at him, snap, tell him to mind his own business — anything to wipe that impassive judgment from his face.
But Sae only held his gaze for a heartbeat longer, unbothered, unreadable… and then looked away as if Kaiser were already irrelevant.
That stung more than anything.
After practice he stumbled through the cold stadium corridors like a specter, head pounding, vision blurring at the edges. His hand kept finding the wall for balance. It felt like something inside him had come loose.
He knew something was wrong, but couldn’t afford to look at it.
Silence was nothing.
He had endured worse than nothing. Worse than being unanswered. He had been shaped in places where waiting was useless, where need was punished, where hesitation cost more than it spared. A single boy could not unsettle him like this. This was not how he had survived.
There was only one thing that had ever held. One thing that had never wavered.
Power.
The word steadied him.
It had been enough before. He had built himself on it, pared himself down until only that remained. A sovereign did not beg. Did not linger. Did not tilt toward absence and call it longing. A sovereign ruled, and the world aligned itself around him. That was how it had always worked. That was how it was supposed to work now.
He did not need Ness.
The thought arrived cleanly, rehearsed. He let it settle, then repeated it, firmer this time. He did not need him. Ness had been useful. Loyal. Convenient. But usefulness was not a necessity, and loyalty did not beget power. If anything, it had been an indulgence on his part, keeping someone close simply because they stayed.
Affection dulled the edge. Dependence corrupted authority.
He had learned that young.
He reminded himself he was a tyrant. Tyrants did not break. Tyrants did not ache. And tyrants did not wake in the night craving the sound of someone asking softly, Did you have a good sleep?
Did they.
He stopped there.
The apartment was very quiet. Not heavy. Just vast. Too much space holding nothing. The air felt untouched, as if no one else had breathed it all day.
He swallowed and pressed on.
He had always known how to take what he wanted. To bend others into shape, to break them down until they fit. Young players, desperate players, players who thought their futures belonged to them—he had stolen that certainty and replaced it with himself. He had gorged himself on their dreams and their fears. That was power. That was proof. Control made the world legible.
It had always been enough.
He pictured it the way he always had: his name rising, stadiums chanting it, faces turning toward him with hunger, admiration, fear. A crown forged from attention alone. Kaiser had never been loved by anybody, so now he needed to be loved by everybody. He needed a win so overwhelming it would cancel out all of his other losses.
He would eclipse everything. He would be unavoidable.
Even Ness.
Especially Ness.
He would see it eventually. He would understand what he had walked away from. What he had failed to appreciate. Everyone did, in the end.
The fantasy swelled, then stalled.
Still, it was comforting. The old story of himself. The one where nothing could touch him. The one where fear never entered the throne room. The one where he was master of every kingdom but the one inside his heart.
But now it did not land the way it used to. The image felt distant yet familiar, like passing a house he had once lived in. He recognized it but no longer belonged there.
Yet he had always functioned best in conflict. In pressure. Battlefields were the terrain he understood. They were cruel, but the rules were simple. You stayed upright or you didn’t.
And he had learned to live with the aftermath. With what was left behind. With scorched grounds and smoke.
So why, then, did the taste of triumph sit strangely on his tongue, more like ash than velvet tonight? He had fashioned himself a tyrant, but standing in the emptiness of his kingdom, he felt like what he truly was.
A tyrant who could not rule himself.
Kaiser sat alone in his overly large penthouse, and for the first time the sheer size of it felt unbearable. Everything he had gathered stood useless now. He felt pathetic, worn out by thoughts that had chased him all day in circles. And then, at last, it struck him.
He hadn’t wanted freedom. He wanted him.
His phone lay in his hand, the screen filled with a message he kept typing and deleting, one that would never leave the draft. He had opened their last conversation at least ten times tonight, thinking of an apology, yet not a single word had survived his hesitation.
He had always been afraid of reaching for Ness’s love, afraid of how much it would burn, afraid, too, of surrendering that kind of power to anyone. And wasn’t he supposed to be the monarch? So why had he let someone else become the regent of his heart?
It frightened him, how easily Ness’s slightest word could dictate his mood, whether he’d feel terrible or ecstatic. To love was to submit to the one you love. And wasn’t that a terrifying thought?
But the longer the silence stretched, the more a certainty crept in. Ness’s absence on the screen settled over him like a final verdict, sharp and cutting, a guillotine blade coming down on him.
He had lost. He had always believed power meant leverage. But leverage depended on being able to walk away. He no longer could.
He checked the phone again anyway. Nothing. Of course.
He had finally succeeded in pushing him away, hadn’t he?
This was his doing.
He had left Ness, tossed him aside for his own vain glory.
He was not unlike his mother in that moment, and the thought made him let out a dry, humorless laugh.
No. He had not simply left him. He had lost him.
There was something dangerous about never speaking his mind. About letting his mouth betray his thoughts, and worse, his heart. About wanting things he never dared act on because fear held him still. He had carried so many truths in silence it was no wonder they had turned on him. He had no one to blame but himself.
So much had slipped between what he wanted to say and what he never did. Between what was left unsaid and what he did instead. Between what he said and what he never meant. Most of their love had vanished in those spaces.
And perhaps this was how love was lost.
Odd how he had felt Ness’s presence stronger in his absence than in all their time together.
He understood with a strange clarity that he would never know the life he might have had. Instead he would spend years haunted by the untouched possibility, the version of himself who had been braver, who had spoken, who had acted. That was loneliness too, the longing for the life he never dared to claim. And now he was doomed to cling to a fantasy long past its death, staying at a table that had long been cleared, unable to let go.
And worse still, his loneliness had never come from the absence of people but from his own inability to name the things that mattered. From never allowing himself to be seen by the one person he had hoped would look at him.
And now he had ruined it all, had he not? Pushed away the only person who had remained by him for so long. And there was no second chance left, no second lives, no restart from the last saved slot. If he could do it all over again he would do it differently. Yes, this time he would admit the things he had never dared to. He would reach out for one of those soft, bouncy curls, not in the rough, possessive way he had done before, but gently, for once, or let his fingers rest against the warm skin of Ness’s cheek, the one that flushed so easily whenever he stood too close, brown lashes dipping to brush his face as he tried to hide it.
Oh, if he could do it again he would do it differently.
And then it occurred to him.
Why couldn’t he do it again? Why couldn’t he attempt the impossible? Had he not built his entire life on defying what others believed he could not do? If he decided right now that he could fix this, then he could. Why should fate deny him, when he had never once accepted its limits?
Rules be damned.
His reign. His rules.
***
On the other side of Europe Ness woke with a raging hangover, still facedown in yesterday’s clothes, confetti clinging to him from the night before. His phone was dead.
When it finally charged, he saw 46 messages from Kaiser. The last one read:
“I’m coming to Germany.”