What I want is her.
The admission settles into my bones like poison, or perhaps like medicine. I've been denying it for days, constructing elaborate justifications for my behavior, telling myself that my interest is strategic, protective, professionally appropriate.
It's none of those things.
I want her in ways I haven't wanted anyone in three centuries. I want to know what sounds she makes when she comes undone. I want to trace every scar on her body and learn the story behind each one. I want to wake beside her at sunset and see her face before I see anything else.
I want to tell her about the weight I've carried alone for six hundred years. I want her to know me. The real me, not the vampire lord or the gatekeeper or the mask I wear to survive.
And that wanting is exactly why I should stay away from her.
I've already shown her too much. The way I watched her fight. The way I growled at Julian for touching her. The cracks in my control that everyone in that room saw, even if she didn't understand what they meant.
That makes her dangerous. Not to my network or my position or my strategic interests.
To me.
Celeste
ETA 30 minutes. Going for a walk. Need to clear my head.
She needs to clear her head. After a successful mission, after proving herself capable and competent, she needs time to decompress. To process. To exist as something other than an operative completing an objective.
I understand that need. I've felt it myself, though I stopped indulging it centuries ago.
Be careful.
Celeste
Always am.
Always am. Like safety is a habit she's cultivated. Like danger is something she navigates daily without thinking about it.
She does. She has been. For eight months, alone, surviving a world that wanted to kill her long before I found her dying in that alley.
She doesn't need my protection. She's been protecting herself just fine.
But I want to protect her anyway. Want to stand between her and every threat, want to bare my fangs at anyone who looks at her wrong, want to wrap her in the safety of my power and never let anything touch her.
The intensity of the wanting should alarm me.
Instead, it just feels inevitable. Like something I've been walking toward my entire existence without knowing it. Every battle, every loss, every century of isolation. All of it leading to a woman with dark eyes and a sharp tongue who looks at me like I'm worth seeing.
I close the security feed before I can talk myself out of it.
If I'm going to understand what's happening to me, what she's doing to me, I can't do it from behind a screen. Can't analyze this from a safe distance like it's a tactical problem to be solved.
I need to face her. Talk to her. See if whatever I'm feeling survives actual proximity or if it dissolves into nothing when confronted with reality.
I leave my study and head toward the compound entrance.
The night air is cold against my skin as I step outside. I don't feel temperature the way humans do, but I register it, file it awayas sensory data. The chill of autumn settling into winter. The smell of fallen leaves and distant rain.
The tracker on my phone shows her approaching the gate. Seven minutes out. Six.
I should go back inside. Wait for her report through proper channels. Maintain the professional distance that a commander should maintain with an operative.
I don't move.
