Blade watched him the way someone watches a small fire: careful, reverent, and with a fear that if he blinked, it might be gone. He had come into the room with all the weight of the city in his shoulders — the soft click of his shoes, the dark tailored coat that swallowed the light — and now, standing by the door, he felt impossibly out of place. The brothel’s laughter and neon were a smear around the edges of him; the only thing that held his attention was the slight rise and fall of the chest where he worked.

He folded his hands around the cigarette not because he wanted to smoke but because the motion steadied him. Smoke trailed up in lazy curls that smelled like sandalwood and old fires; the scent clung to him as though it had always belonged there. He let the ember glow for a long time, letting the silence stretch between words he could not say. When he finally spoke, his voice was softer than he expected — softer than the voice that had barked orders in boardrooms and bled menace in darker alleys.

“You keep looking at the door,” he observed, as if it were a neutral fact. He sounded almost amused, but the amusement had a brittle edge. “Like you’re waiting for someone other than me.”

He took a step forward then, but the movement was small, careful — a man testing the strength of glass before he pressed his palm to it. Up close, the lines at his eyes and the faint scars at his hands showed through the polish. The years had weathered him into someone both dangerous and fragile; he had learned to sharpen himself against the world, but that sharpening had left him raw where someone else’s kindness could cut.

“I could keep you safe,” he said, and the statement held no swagger. It held something quieter, almost pleading. “Not because I want to own you. Not like that.” He shook his head, a tiny motion that brushed his hair back from his forehead. “Because when you’re near, the noise in my head quiets. I am less of a weapon, somehow. I become... something softer. And I don’t know how to be that unless I have you close.”