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The message came through at 9:14 PM, and it was exactly the kind of message that meant Sylus was about to do something stupid.
Business. Don't wait up, sweetie.
You'd learned by now that "don't wait up" was code. It meant I'll be late, and I'd rather you not see the state I come home in. It meant he was going to handle something himself instead of delegating, because Sylus trusted exactly three things in this world — his own hands, his own judgment, and the very short list of people he'd decided were worth keeping. And you were on that list, which made his insistence on going it alone all the more infuriating.
You waited up anyway.
The penthouse was quiet in the way expensive things are quiet — thick glass, soft light, the distant smear of Linkon's skyline glowing beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows. You made tea you didn't drink. You scrolled your phone. You watched the clock crawl past midnight and into the small hours, and you told yourself you weren't worried.
You were worried.
The door finally opened at 1:47 AM. Sylus slipped inside with the practiced care of a man who'd spent his whole life learning how to be unnoticed despite being impossible to miss. He toed off his shoes. He didn't turn on the lights. He moved toward the hallway like he fully intended to disappear into the dark before you could get a good look at him.
"Sylus."
He stopped. Just for half a beat — a fractional hesitation that would've slipped past anyone who didn't know him. Then he turned, and there it was: the smirk, easy and unhurried, the one he wore like a second skin.
"You're up." His voice was smooth. Too smooth. "Told you not to wait."
"You did." You rose from the couch, crossing toward him. "And yet, here we both are."
He was standing too still. That was the first tell. Sylus was a creature of lazy motion — hands in pockets, weight shifted, always some coiled ease in his posture. Tonight he was holding himself rigid, his shoulders squared like a man bracing against a wind you couldn't feel. And his shirt — that immaculate charcoal shirt, silver cufflinks still in place — was stained dark down the right side, a wet spread of shadow that the dim light nearly swallowed.
"You're bleeding," you said.
"Am I?" He glanced down at himself with the mild curiosity of a man noticing a bit of dust. "Ah. So I am."
"Sylus—"
"Business ran long." He was already moving again, drifting past you toward the hallway, trailing that too-careful stillness behind him. "Nothing a shower won't fix. Go back to sleep, sweetie. I'll be along."
And then he was gone, swallowed by the dark of the apartment, leaving you standing there with your tea gone cold and a very clear picture forming in your head.
He'd patched himself up before. He always did. It was one of those things about him — that quiet, almost contemptuous self-sufficiency, as though relying on anyone else was a flaw he'd long since corrected.
But this time, he was walking like something was wrong in a way a shower wouldn't fix.
You gave him fifteen minutes. You gave him long enough to shower, to change, to settle into whatever lie he'd prepared about how inconsequential it all was.
Then you went looking.
He wasn't in the bedroom. He wasn't in the bathroom. You found him in the room he used for his own private business — the small study at the end of the hall, the one with the heavy desk and the locked drawers and the good lighting. The door was ajar. A thin wedge of light spilled into the corridor.
You pushed it open.
The scene inside stopped you cold.
His shirt was gone, discarded over the back of a chair. A black case of medical supplies lay open on the desk beside him — gauze, forceps, a curved needle, a spool of surgical thread, a half-crumbled roll of tape. And Sylus was sitting on the edge of the desk, half-turned toward the light, his bare torso a map of muscle and old scars and, right there along his lower ribs on the right side, a wound.
A bullet wound.
It wasn't the clean kind. The edges were ragged, the flesh around it swollen and angry, a sluggish trickle of blood still working its way down his flank despite the wad of red-soaked gauze he was pressing against it. He'd clearly been at this for a while — the trash bin held a small pile of spent dressings, and his own hands were smeared with dried and drying blood.
He was pale. Not his usual cool marble, but something closer to paper, a fine sheen of sweat along his brow and his collarbones, a tremor in the fingers he was trying very hard to keep steady.
He looked up when you entered. The smirk was slower this time. Costing him more.
"Ah." A breath of a laugh. "Busted."
"You got shot." You crossed to him before you'd decided to. "You got shot and you came home and took a shower and you were going to—" You gestured at the open medical case. "You were going to stitch yourself up alone. In the dark. Without telling me."
"Wasn't the dark," he said, as if that were the part that mattered. "And I'm nearly done. Just need to close it."
You looked at the wound again. Looked at his hands. Looked at the way he was holding himself so rigidly upright, the way his breathing had gone shallow and measured, the way he was gripping the edge of the desk with his free hand like the room might tip if he let go.
"You're not nearly done," you said. "You're barely started."
He tilted his head, that infuriating, theatrical tilt, and gave you the line that would live in your head rent-free for weeks:
"Didn't realize I needed permission to take care of myself, sweetie."
And for a moment — just a moment — you almost let it go. Almost.
Then the pain caught up with him.
It happened between one breath and the next. His smirk flickered. His grip on the desk tightened, knuckles going white, and his other hand — the one holding the gauze to his ribs — slipped. Just a small slide, the gauze shifting, a fresh well of blood beading up along the wound's edge. He sucked in a breath through his teeth and didn't quite manage to hide the way it hitched.
"Sylus*.*"
"I'm fine."
"You're shaking."
"I'm fine*.*" But the words came out thinner now, the polish worn through, and when he lifted his eyes to yours they were a shade too bright, a fraction too unguarded — the look of a man who'd been quietly losing a fight with his own body for the better part of an hour and had finally run out of ways to pretend he wasn't.
You took the gauze from his hand. He let you.
That, more than anything, told you how bad it was.
"Sit back," you said. "Properly. Against the desk. And don't move."
He arched a brow, some faint spark of his usual mischief returning. "Bossing me around in my own home. Bold."
"You're bleeding in your own home. Sit."
He sat.
You washed your hands, pulled the lamp closer, and knelt in front of him, and for a while there was only the small, careful work of it — cleaning the wound's edges, flushing it, pressing fresh gauze, watching the slow seep of blood and the slow return of color to the torn skin. He'd been right that it needed closing. He'd been wrong that he could do it himself, not with the way his hands were trembling, not with the wound sitting where he'd have to twist to reach it, working half-blind over his own ribs.
"This needs more than thread," you said quietly. "You need a real doctor. Stitches, yes, but it's deep, and it's been open too long. You could've been out for hours."
"Two, three." He said it like it was nothing. "The business ran long."
"The business being?"
"A difference of opinion." A ghost of the smirk. "I won."
"You always win." You looked up at him. "And you always come home bleeding."
He said nothing to that. He was looking at the top of your head, you realized — at the way you were bent over him, focused, careful, hands sure. There was something almost baffled in his expression, and it took you a moment to recognize it for what it was.
Confusion.
Like he genuinely didn't understand what you were doing down here.
You sat back on your heels and looked at him — really looked. Pale. Sweating. A bullet wound in his side and a whole lifetime of practice at pretending nothing could touch him. And you felt the anger rise up in you, sharp and clean, and you decided you were done tiptoeing around it.
"Why didn't you call me?"
"I told you. Didn't need—"
"That's not an answer." You didn't raise your voice. You didn't have to. "Why didn't you call me, Sylus."
He opened his mouth. Closed it. The cleverness was there, right behind his teeth, ready to deflect — and then, for once, it failed him. He looked away, toward the dark window and the city lights beyond it, and something in his face went very still.
"You were asleep," he said finally. "Didn't seem worth waking you."
"It's always worth waking me."
"It's a hole in my side, not a—"
"It's you," you said, and that stopped him. "It's you, and you'd rather bleed alone in a locked room than let me see it. You'd rather stitch yourself shut with shaking hands than admit you need somebody. And I keep thinking about all the nights you came home like this before we—" you gestured between the two of you, "—before this, and there was no one here at all, and you just... dealt with it. Alone. Every time."
Sylus was quiet.
And that was the thing. Sylus was never quiet. He always had a line, a joke, a wink and a smooth deflection to hand. The silence from him was louder than anything he'd ever said.
"You think I'm angry because you got hurt," you went on, softer now. "I'm not. Getting hurt is the job. I know the job." You swallowed. "I'm angry because you decided I wasn't someone you could turn to. Like being here for you was optional. Like I was something you chose to spare instead of something that belongs to you."
He looked back at you then. Slowly. And for the first time all night, there was nothing at all between his face and you — no smirk, no armor, no smooth and practiced nothing.
"No one's ever..." He stopped. Started again. "When you spend long enough handling everything yourself, you stop noticing there's another option. It isn't that I didn't want you." A pause, quieter. "It's that it didn't occur to me you'd want to be woken up for a hole in my side."
"Then let me be the one who reminds you."
He huffed a breath — almost a laugh, mostly a wince — and let his head fall back against the wall, and the fight finally drained out of him. Just like that. The stubbornness that had been holding him upright for hours gave way all at once, and suddenly he was just a man, tired and pale and bleeding, sitting on a desk in the dark.
"Alright," he said. "Alright. Call the doctor."
You did.