The heavy iron gate of the state penitentiary groaned open, the harsh metallic slam echoing across the gravel courtyard like a gunshot.
Kassian walked out into the cold morning air carrying a single canvas duffel bag slung over his broad, tattooed shoulder. He was twenty-seven now — a towering 6'5
", heavily muscled, his thick neck traced with jagged scar tissue where his vocal cords had been crushed years before.
The raw, visible hostility that used to burn beneath his skin when he was twenty was entirely gone, replaced by a quiet, suffocating stillness that made even the armed guards step back. He was a man who had learned to nurse lethal intent in absolute silence.
He knew his mother wouldn't come to pick him up. Not after she had found the hidden notebooks beneath his floorboards — hundreds of pages filled cover-to-cover with your name and his sick, possessive thoughts. And certainly not after she understood the brutal, systematic torture he had inflicted on the man who had dared to put his hands on you six years ago.
The raw terror in her eyes during her last prison visit had told him everything he needed to know —
everyone in his life was mortally afraid of him.
But then his icy gaze drifted over the parking lot — and stopped cold.
Standing beside a quiet sedan, waiting by the chain-link fence, was you.
Kassian froze. Six years of absolute, ruthless prison discipline vanished behind his eyes in one second, though not a muscle in his jaw shifted. His chest tightened so hard it felt as if his crushed larynx was collapsing all over again.
You were right there. Not in a faded letter, not in a memory, but standing in the flesh just twenty feet away.
You don't belong here in the dirt and gravel
, his mind growled, a bitter, violent wave of self-loathing crashing over him.
You belong in the sun. Away from me.
Yet beneath the disgust at his own broken mind, a primal instinct came roaring back to life — a possessive hunger that six years of concrete walls hadn't managed to starve out.
His hand came up slowly. His fingers, broad and calloused from years of heavy iron weights, began to move through the crisp autumn air with fluid, precise speed. He used the language the two of you had learnt together in his bedroom years ago — the sign language you were the only one patient enough to learn when everyone else in the house just ignored his silence or recoiled from it.
'Why are you here?'
he signed, his eyes locked on yours, desperately searching your face for the familiar flinch he saw in everyone else after what he'd done.
He didn't need to ask about his mother. He already knew the truth. She couldn't even stand looking at his scarred hands during visiting hours, let alone sit in an enclosed car next to the creature who had dismantled a man with pliers and an iron pipe.
She's terrified. They all are.
A faint, bitter flicker crossed his stoic features before his face smoothed back into cold marble. He took three long, heavy strides toward you until he stood right in your space, close enough for you to smell the cheap prison soap clinging to his jacket. He towered over you, his physical presence imposing, heavy, and suffocating.
Standing this close, the agonizing weight of how much he still wanted you — how badly he craved to reach out and anchor you to his chest — threatened to shatter whatever fragile self-control remained after years without seeing you.
Don't touch her,
he warned himself, his jaw tightening into a hard, rigid line.
Don't ruin her like you ruin everything else.
Slowly, deliberately, Kassian raised his hands between you, his long, scarred fingers signing a final sequence.
'You're the only one who came,'
his hands spelled out, pausing for a long, heavy beat before adding the sign that frightened his broken mind the most:
'Are you afraid of me too?'
His gaze burned into yours with a raw, terrifying intensity.