The digital clock glowed 2:00 AM when the burner phone screamed on the nightstand. Alistair fumbled for the receiver, his heart hammering against his ribs as Damien's voice arrived—hollow, clinical, and sounding like a funeral rite.

"Get to the estate," the Sovereign murmured. "Look at Mia. Now."

Alistair didn't ask questions. He disentangled himself from his sleeping fiancée, grabbed his trauma bag, and pushed the Spyker to its redline until the tires smoked in the Lancaster driveway.

The living room was a tomb of unlit shadows. Damien sat deep in the leather armchair, a single cigarette cherry pulsing in the dark like a predatory eye.

"She's upstairs," Damien said without looking up. He lit a second cigarette from the first, his hands steady, his expression masked by a veil of menthol smoke.

Alistair's gut twisted. He had seen the fallout when Julian lost his temper with Kitten—a sharp reprimand, a brief flare of heat, and then a swift, clumsy reconciliation.

But Damien was a different breed of monster. When Damien Lancaster lost control, he didn't aim for the "safe" parts; he systematically dismantled the spirit until the body followed.

Alistair charged up the stairs, his breath catching in his throat. Five minutes later, he descended like a kinetic projectile.

"Are you out of your mind?!" Alistair roared, pointing a trembling finger at the man in the shadows. "You called me at two in the morning for a scratched earlobe?"

Damien shifted his gaze, his pale gray eyes unreadable. "This time of night... it's important to you?"

"I—it's—" Alistair faltered, the atmospheric pressure in the room dropping to sub-zero. He forced a stiff, hollow laugh. "I mean, sleep is... sleep is a biological necessity."

Damien didn't move. "Zen teaches that the extinction caused by attachment to the void is far more lethal than the desire caused by attachment to existence."

Alistair went bone-dry. He stared at the beautiful psychopath, realizing with a jolt of dread that Damien was beginning to sound exactly like his wife.

"I'm going back upstairs," Alistair muttered, retreating toward the staircase. "I'm checking the vitals again."

Alistair pushed the bedroom door open. Mia sat against the headboard, her posture rigid, her eyes vast and hollow in the moonlight.

"Alistair," she whispered, her voice a thin wire. "Sorry for the trouble."

"It's fine, Mia," Alistair said, pulling a chair to the bedside. He studied the neat dressing on her ear. "Damien's being... Damien. Talk to me."

Mia gripped the silk duvet until her knuckles turned white. "He said... if I don't obey, he'll destroy my friends. He'll liquidate Timothy."

Alistair offered a small, weary smile. "Do you believe him?"

"I don't want to," Mia whispered, her pupils dilating. "But the way he looked at me... the way he said it..."

"Mia, listen to me," Alistair leaned in, his voice dropping to a clinical murmur. "In business, Damien is a ghost. If he wants someone gone, he deploys the order in secret, and the target is erased before they even see the shadow."

He watched her face. "The fact that he's shouting it from the rooftops—the fact that he's theater-threatening you—means he has zero intention of doing it."

Mia's breath hitched. "I don't understand."

"He loves you," Alistair said flatly. "Liquidating your friends would kill your heart, and he knows he can't own a dead woman. He's just a man who grew up on a throne, and he doesn't know how to ask for your attention without brandishing a weapon."

Mia's face flushed a feverish pink. She looked at the door, her fingers tracing the patterns in the fabric.

"You need to learn how to handle him," Alistair suggested, his eyes dancing with a brief, professional amusement. "Look at Kitten. She eats Julian alive because she knows exactly when to scream and when to act like a spoiled brat. You're too polite, Mia. You're making him work too hard for a reaction."

Mia bowed her head, a soft, genuine smile finally breaking her stoic mask. "Thank you, Alistair."

"Don't thank me," Alistair said, standing up and closing his bag. He leaned down, his expression turning deadly serious. "And for the love of God, don't tell him I said any of this."

Mia looked up, confused. "Why?"

Alistair's mouth twisted into a jagged grin. "Cause he's only 'traditional' with you. For the rest of us... the monster still kills without blinking."

----

Alistair descended the stairs. The heavy roar of a Spyker engine cut through the silence outside and then faded into the San Francisco fog.

Mia sat against the headboard, her hands folded over the silk duvet. The house was a tomb of expensive shadows.

She pulled the covers back. Her feet hit the cold floor, and she stepped into her slippers, moving toward the door with the rhythmic caution of a survivor.

She pulled the door open and froze.

Damien was leaning against the mahogany banister, his silhouette carved out by the low amber light of the corridor. He didn't look up; he was staring at the grain of her closed bedroom door as if it were a coded message.

On the console table beside him, a crystal ashtray was a graveyard of crushed menthol filters.

He extinguished his final cigarette and glanced at the silver face of his watch.

"Sixty-seven minutes." A razor-thin smile cut through his clinical mask. "I gave myself until sunrise before I had to come in and get you."

Mia didn't answer. She crossed the hallway and buried her face in the expensive wool of his blazer.

Damien's arms snapped around her, his fingers digging into the fabric of her sweater.

"Don't," he whispered against her hair. "You don't have to say a word. I know."

He pulled her closer, his grip tightening until their heartbeats merged into a single, jagged rhythm.

"I know I'm not Cambridge," he rasped, his voice a jagged fracture of its usual silk. "I know that was the only time you were ever truly happy. You have zero immunity against that ghost."

He tilted her head back, his thumb tracing the swollen curve of her lower lip.

"I want you here, Mia. Not just for this winter. Forever."

The cold air from the open balcony swirled around them, but his breath was scalding against her skin.

"You didn't love me when you signed the certificate three years ago," he murmured, his eyes two pinpricks of dark gray obsession. "I can live with that. But I can't live with Cambridge taking you back."

Mia stared into the abyss of his gaze, paralyzed by the sudden, lethal weight of his tenderness.