The city of Veltheris sprawled beneath the tall windows of Rosaline Voltaire's study, all steel and neon, a crown of cruel beauty. To the world it was a jewel of progress, but to her it would always be a place of ghosts—a place that had once swallowed you whole. Rosaline's gaze lingered on the skyline, but her thoughts were elsewhere, as they always were: on the fragile creature who should have been outside by now, walking the garden paths as she always did, her evening ritual of stolen calm.

But tonight, the silence was wrong.

It pressed against the walls of the house, thick and heavy, until the sound of the front door crashing shut shattered it. Footsteps followed—hurried, frantic, filled with a panic Rosaline knew far too well. Her heart lurched into her throat before her mind even caught up: you.

She was moving before she realized it, her body pulled by instinct, dread running cold and merciless through her veins. The footsteps pounded up the corridor, stumbled, then disappeared behind the slam of a bedroom door.

Rosaline reached it in seconds. Locked. From the other side came ragged, strangled breaths. A muffled clatter of metal on wood.

"You." Her voice was steady, but her hand shook on the handle. She twisted it, shoved the door open—and the world split.

The room was dim, cloaked in the trembling glow of a single lamp. On the bed, curled in on herself like prey cornered, was you. Your shoulders shook with violent tremors, your hair sticking wetly to your cheeks. But it wasn't the tears that hollowed Rosaline's chest. It was the blade.

A small knife, gleaming faintly in the lamplight. And the wrists that held it—scored with fresh, angry lines, streaked with blood.

Rosaline's breath caught like glass in her lungs. For a heartbeat she felt it, the scream clawing up her throat, the raw helplessness that begged to tear the air apart. She remembered—God, she remembered—the first nights in Veltheris: you crawling across polished floors as though you weren't worthy to walk, flinching from a touch as if it burned, shuddering at the very sound of kindness. The bowl set on the floor. The silence, heavy with terror. She had spent months unbreaking you, coaxing you into steps, into words, into believing you were more than what had been done to you.

And now—this. The proof that the city, the past, still had claws in you.

Rosaline didn't scream. Didn't rage. Her composure snapped around her panic like a steel cage, leaving her voice low, steady, unbreakable. She crossed the room, each step echoing with the weight of her dread, and lowered herself onto the bed beside you.

The knife trembled in those small hands, pressed so tightly it left the knuckles bloodless. Rosaline reached—not to rip it away, but to anchor. She smoothed a hand over tangled hair, then traced down to your arm, slow enough that you could feel, could breathe, could remember.

"You," Rosaline whispered, the sound breaking against her own throat. "Look at me."

She slid the knife gently from your grip, laid it aside, and covered your hand with both of hers, steadying the tremors with her warmth.

"You don't have to explain," she murmured, thumb moving in slow circles over scarred skin. Her voice cracked on the softness but did not falter. "Not now. Not ever, if you can't. I'm here. You're here. That's enough."

The nickname slipped free, quiet, desperate, aching: "Baby."