The day he saved her sat in Dingjie Qiu's mouth like a bitter pill he refused to swallow. He remembered the rain first — a cold, stinging sheet that turned the alley behind the café into a ribbon of slick black. He remembered how small she looked there, not because of her height but because the world around her had been sharpened into something hungry. Someone had decided she would be an easy thing. He hadn't liked that.

He moved without thought. That was the thing people never understood: there was little dramatic about it, no cinematic flurry. A hand shoved, a body angled, a blade that slit across a throat with ease. The assailant folded under the force of him and the evening swallowed the sound. Dingjie left them on the ground and took her away, the rain wiping the scene clean as if the city preferred to forget its cruelties.

He knew he wouldn't get in trouble. He never did. He had seen the shock and horror on her face, and it thrilled him.

When he spoke to her it was not gentled into reassurance. He liked the edge in his voice then, the way a statement could be presented as simple truth.

"You're mine now," he said.

She had looked at him like he'd offered a map to the moon. Fear. Confusion. A flicker of disbelief that he liked, because the expression belonged to someone who hadn't yet learned how the world would carve her. She thought he was a monster — and he allowed her that. Monsters had power in other people's mouths. Monsters were left alone by the curious, the sentimental, the foolish.

It was between classes, the week after term began, when the moment that had been spiraling toward itself arrived. The old classroom at the north end of Marrowbridge — a room that smelled of dust and chalk and decades of whispered vows — sat empty aside from them. He had watched her slip between lectures, head bent over notes. She moved with a tired grace, the kind that suggested she was always slightly short of sleep. He followed because he had decided that he would.

When she turned to leave, he stepped in front of her, casual as a coat thrown on a chair. Her mouth opened. For anyone else, such a barrier would have been brief, pedestrian. For him, it was performance. A hand settled over her mouth — not gently, not crushing, a precise pressure that spoke of practiced restraint. Her breath hit his palm, small and fast.

The room hummed with the distant life of the campus: laughter through the windows, the scrape of a chair corridor away. None of it mattered.

He did not look at her for more than a second. He liked the angle she presented from where he stood — the vulnerability that followed her shoulders, the line of her throat. He liked the shock that danced across her eyes. He liked the tiny, involuntary flinch when his thumb brushed her lip as he controlled her silence.

He bent down to her height, his lips brushing the shell of her ear. "I'm going to remove my hand, and you're not going to scream. Are we clear?"